(International Forum)
To the Memory of Jacques Ouellet
(1964-2011)
It is film in 13 scenes. Each scene is
inspired by one famous painting of Edward Hopper. Shirley, the
fictive actress moves through this scenes, she breathes, seems to be
alive.
She will not age through the span of
three decades. This 13 scenes frame as well American history from the
1930s to the 1960s.
Shirley is like us she jumps through
the times without aging.
The film is about both, dwelling in and
with 13 paintings by Edward Hopper but the film is as well thinking
about Cinema and it uses the images of Hopper not just for a
quotation but like a philosophy about images.
All 13 scenes are introduced by a title
of a very concrete day in history and some fragments of broadcast
news. These transitions remind me in Robert Mulligan´s Next Year,
Same Place, another approach to think in images about history and
Cinema. There is always the thin red line between global history and
the history of a human life. And again I have to recall Adrian
Martin´s extraordinary essay “Great Events and ordinary People”,
this laudatio on Terrence Malick´s The Tree of Life on the
FIPRESCI-site but which is also one of the most profound essay on
Cinema in general I read for a very long time.
The sound itself seems to be painted.
Sometimes background noise from streets, trains passing by, the sound
of a curtain in a movie theater which we can hardly see.
But sometimes it is added music, a
song, a piece which is not bound to the concrete time.
The reason I attended a screening of
this film was Edward Hopper, but Gustav Deutsch offers much more than
a cinematic interpretation of this wonderful painter who influenced
and fascinated so much filmmaker. One of his paintings “New York
Movie”, which I adore is a painting you don´t just watch, you feel
like dwell in it for a while. The film does about the same. The
stories, the film spins about Shirley, this woman who jumps through
time have a strange effect. We can follow this stories or imagine our
own. We can follow the over voice monologues of the film or our own
unspoken silent thoughts. Shirley is a missing link between spectator
and filmmaker.
There is another scene, inspired by
another “Movie”-painting of Hopper: An almost empty film theater,
we see Shirley from the side. The screen is almost hidden right
outside the frame. We hear the soundtrack of a french film and we see
her face. An intermission, the sound of the closing curtains. Shirley
is captivated by the film but also by her own thoughts and feelings
about her life which we hear as an over voice monologue. She is
almost crying about the film or about her life, we don´t know
exactly what is going on inside her mind but we get an idea about it
– because we know this very special and hard to describe situation
when we are alone in a film theater. But we feel there is a person
aware of her time and her life but living in the frame of a very
concrete and verifiable period of history.. It is an image of Shirley
but today as well an image of a woman in a certain period of history
in a movie theater, involved in her life and the film which are also
specific elements of a past time.
The film gives her a name. I know it is
a coincidence and not more than an accident that I watched at the
same day this wonderful screening of the eldest Korean film which is
in existence, Crossroads of Youth, combines with a performance
of singer and narrator how it was screened in a Korean film theater
of the 1930s. If I remember this, the most remarkable day of the
Berlin Filmfestival 2013, I have to think of these image of Shirley
and the nameless Korean audience which disappeared as identities in
the darkness of forgotten history.
I am moved in a strange kind by Shirley
like I am moved by the the forgotten Korean audience of the 1930s.
Her individuality will turn into a ghost, but so will mine and this
image Shirley alone in a movie theater means a human being alone
alone watching a film, being captured in the things she sees on the
screen and reflections on her own life will be as well the image
which remains from all my passion for Cinema and all the way I
connected it with my life.
In my mind this film brings together my
admiration for Ozu and Malick at the same time. This image of the
woman in a movie theater has at the same time the melancholy of an
Ozu film but as well the incredible uncanny vision of the earth in
the future burnt by the sun which turned into a Red Giant from
Malick´s The Tree of Life.
Ozu once said he needed the limitations
to be free and this wonderful film called Shirley – Visions of
Reality which is structured in 13 limited frames, inspired by very
specific paintings of Edward Hopper offers eternal freedom of
inspiration. It is a homage to this great painter, it is a reflection
about cinema but also a poetic essay about human individuals born
into very specific (in this case American) history and last but not
least a hymn to Cinema as the “art of seeing”.
(The painting by Hopper (Intermission) I am referring to in my text can be found here.)
Rüdiger Tomczak
Next screenings:
Cubix 9: 17.02, 20.00
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