Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013)

 

Director: Gustav Deutsch

Screenplay: Gustav Deutsch

Cast: Stephanie Cumming as Shirley; Christoph Bach as Stephen

An Abstract List Candidate

 

And if the grasshoppers don't eat up all our garden...we will see better days.

Beginning on August 28th 1931, Shirley... exists in a world recreating the paintings of Edward Hopper, framed around Hopper’s 1965 Chair Car two years before his death. The resulting work, directed, written, edited and with production design by Austrian architect graduate and multidisciplinary artist Gustav Deutsch is set in a world all of primary and secondary colours. This is the brightest reds on frames, green textile chairs, and yellow curtains in the initial French hotel room setting which begins the film proper beyond its train car bookends. Not quite an avant-garde production in the sense of extreme manipulation of form and content, yet whilst there is a narrative it is neither conventional structurally either. The look of the film trying to replicate Hooper's paintings has an extreme artificiality which, depicted like doll's houses on the screen, is striking to watch.

Radio reports are broadcast before each segments over the time setting text, building the world where Shirley (Canadian-born dancer and choreographer Stephanie Cumming), a theatre actress, travels the world in a period between the thirties to the sixties where World War II, the Korean War, communist witch hunts and racial divide are among the subjects transpiring in the United States. The film expressly admits its artificiality - her life that of someone working in theatre, to be undercut by members trying (and failing) in Hollywood to communism red scares cutting into the American theatre in general, but still a representative of these figures in the paintings. Hooper's paintings from the mid-1920s used only his wife and fellow artist, Josephine Nivison, as his model, so aptly Cumming's Shirley plays numerous roles including that of the blonde usherette in a theatre as much as she is dating a journalist Stephen (Christoph Bach).

Shirley is a chameleonic figure, one who represents the female figures of the Edward Hopper paintings, as distinct in costumes like her red dress, demanding in itself from Stephanie Cumming as, barring one or two lines, other actors in the film are playing cameos, even with Stephen. That is even before Cummings is willing to be part of a camera's/painting's gaze with a full nude scene later on, depicted matter-of-factly within the painting's form; the stark reality of an actress on an artificial stage, smoking in this heightened world yet herself tangitable real in the body, staged a few times before but not this explicit, feels less voyeuristic than in itself a sudden starkness forcing the viewer to think of Shirley, Stephanie Cumming herself in the position onscreen, and the figure of the painting being represented, especially with the figure of Shirley fleshed out in dialogue throughout before. Even before that, the character is both fleshed out as a figure by Deutsch's script but as much a chimera of Hopper's work and the figures of this era in American art, one that is a challenge for Cummings to have successfully drawn.

Shirley's cinematic form, as an abstract film, is more subtly difficult to think of. It is more outwardly conventional as it progresses as vignettes, but in itself, it is a bending of what cinema is both as a literal portrait in movement as well as, the director-creator's interest in very artificial sets, in artificial colours, still being tangible onscreen to the point you could walk through them. This was literal, as following on from the film's theatrical release, an exhibition of the same name at  further explored in an exhibition of the same name at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in that city exhibited artefacts from the sets of the film¹.

Literally moving paintings, they do show their hand with the artificiality, even to the point the world is exposed when pillars in the background are pulled upwards off screen at one point. The film's attempt to paint this in context of the world is the one aspect Gustav Deutsch's film does feel two dimensional however in a detracting way, one for what is far more compelling as this spectrum of emotions surrounding the world Hopper existed within. Alongside the songs by English singer-songwriter David Sylvian, which feel at odds with the material, this does show its hand frankly with the problem of trying to paint a picture of the period but reducing it down to a less complex and awkward reality.

Shirley at one point is reading with interest an adaptation of a Thornton Wilder play, whilst in New Haven, to be directed by controversial and acclaimed American filmmaker Elia Kazan. The Elia Kazan references, when Shirley starts in one monologue damning Kazan for the aspect which makes him a controversial American filmmaker, naming names during the Hollywood blacklisting of the fifties against American communists, does show that the film, if it has one huge flaw, simplifies history. In contrast to making two dimensional paintings on canvas, already fully in three dimensions are lingered on even in JPEGs online, moments like this, trying to show the history context do undercut the admirable work on the film; even if you the reader believe Elia Kazan is still undefendable for what he did in that era to his fellow collaborators in cinema, if you read the history of the Hollywood blacklist it was far less black and white than is painted in that monologue.

Aside from this, I admired Shirley: Visions of Reality as a fascinating production. I will admit that work which is art installation filmmaking is also a compelling art form for me, but Shirley... to its credit feels cinematic to a virtue. Whilst with flaws, as a narrative and a mood piece, this succeeded.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Eerie

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Additional context can be found with Yatzer's Film Director Gustav Deutsch Brings the World of Edward Hopper to Life, published on 15th May 2016 and written by Eric David.