Shirley: Visions of Reality

Edward Hopper's paintings conjure up stories: we've all tried to imagine what's going on in the scene, what his characters will do next, we wanted to know what was happening to the two figures in the painting Room in New York (1932) or what that mysterious girl in New York Movie (1939) was doing hiding there. Of course, we can learn many of these details from the diary Edward Hopper kept with his wife Josephine Nivision, in which they noted down details of the artworks along with sketches of them, but even so there's always room for interpretation, and there can be as many interpretations as there are viewers. With his film Shirley: Visions of Reality, Gustav Deutsch brings us one of them, and the Austrian director doesn't just bring Hopper's artworks to life, he connects them in a magical way to create the story of Shirley, an independent woman ahead of her time who fights, unhappily, against the era she has been given to live in.

Room in New York, Edward Hopper (1932)New York Movie, Edward Hopper (1939)

The film is based on thirteen paintings by Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) and through these scenes we live thirteen moments in Shirley's life in the America of the 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s. The film doesn't just portray Shirley's life, it uses her critical, revolutionary gaze to show her discontent with several decades of very hard times for American society, from the Great Depression to the civil rights movements, taking in Pearl Harbour, the Second World War, the assassination of J.F. Kennedy, McCarthyism and the Cold War.

The light, the framing, the editing… everything in this film takes us into Hopper's work, which we can now step inside and which at last tells a story. They're artworks within an artwork and an appointment we can't miss.