13 Edward Hopper Paintings Are Recreated As Sets For Indie Film 'Shirley - Visions of Reality.'

above left: original paintings by Edward Hopper and above right, the set designs for Shirley - Visions of Reality.

Director Gustav Deutsch brings 13 Hopper paintings to life in his film, Shirley - Visions of Reality, the story of a woman whose thoughts, emotions and contemplations lets us observe an era in American history.



The set designs by Hanna Schimek are a fabulous reproduction of Hopper's palette and light.


above: an example of Hanna's diligent research for the set designs

I have found 12 stills from the film and compared them Hopper's original paintings for you below. The comparisons are followed by information about the film.

Comparisons of the Sets to the Actual Paintings:














SHIRLEY - VISIONS OF REALITY - About the film



The film synopsis:
Shirley is a woman in America in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s. A woman who would like to influence the course of history with her professional and socio-political involvement. A woman who does not accept the reality of the Depression years, WWII, the McCarthy era, race conflicts and civil rights campaigns as given but rather as generated and adjustable. A woman whose work as an actress has familiarised her with the staging of reality, the questioning and shaping of it; an actress who doesn’t identify her purpose and future with that of solo success or stardom but who strives to give social potency to theatre as part of a collective. A woman who cannot identify with the traditional role model of a wife yet longs to have a life partner. A woman who does not compromise in moments of professional crisis and is not afraid to take on menial jobs to secure her livelihood. A woman who in a moment of private crisis decides to stick with her partner and puts her own professional interest on the back burner. A woman who is infuriated by political repression yet not driven to despair, and who has nothing but disdain for betrayal.

Shirley, an attractive, charismatic, committed, emancipated woman.

Directors statement:
As the starting point for this film, which has at its heart the staging of reality and the dialogue of painting and film, I selected Edward Hopper’s picturesque oeuvre, which on the one hand was influenced by film noir – in his choice of lighting, subject and framing as seen in paintings such as Night Windows (1938), Office at Night (1940), Room in New York (1932) and his direct references to cinema such as in New York Movie (1939) and Intermission (1963) – and on the other hand influenced filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders.


above: Edward Hopper, Night Windows, 1938

Based on my conviction that history is made up of personal stories and influenced by my reading of John Dos Pasos’ USA novel trilogy[1] in which the life stories and destinies of a few are representative of the wider public and social and cultural history of America, I have chosen an actress as the film’s protagonist – Shirley – through whose reflective and contemplative inner monologues we experience America from the beginning of the 1930’s through to the mid-1960’s.


above: still from the set, photo by Michaela C Theurl

Here we have three decades, which have seen great upheavals at all levels – political, social and cultural – that have changed the country and its people forever: Pearl Harbour and WWII, the atomic bomb and the “conquest of space”, McCarthy and the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the start of the Vietnam War, Duke Ellington and the big band swing, Billie Holiday and the Southern blues, Elvis Presley and the rock n’ roll, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the protest song, The Group Theatre, The Living Theatre, Method Acting, The Actor’s Studio and its affiliated movie stars such as Anne Bancroft, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, the Stock Market Crash, the Depression, Fordism and Interstate Highways, race riots and the Ku-Klux-Klan, the March on Washington and Martin Luther King. These events, names and legends, which are inscribed into our collective memory, evoke images and moods. Shirley experiences and reflects all this as a committed and emancipated actress with left-leaning politics. She enjoys jazz, listening to the radio and going out and loves film. She is a woman with strong opinions and both feet on the ground, even during times of personal or professional crisis. She is attractive, charismatic and likes to play outsider roles such as that of the prostitute Francie in Sydney Kingsley’s play Dead End. Besides art, she is also interested in socio-political issues. As an ensemble member of the Group Theatre and Living Theatre she combines art with her socio-political involvement.


above: still from the set, photo by Jerzy Palacz

While Shirley and her partner Stephen, a photojournalist for the New York Post, share an apartment on only two occasions during these three decades, their private and professional lives are deeply connected: unemployment as a result of the Depression, disappointment after the betrayal of Group Theatre members in front of the McCarthy committee, repressions as a result of the politically-minded theatre, career retirement as a result of an ill partner, loss of the partner, retirement to the countryside and questioning of the effectiveness of art, emigration to Europe – personal destinies that are pursued in front of and influenced by world-changing events, cultural revolutions and socio-political upheavals.

History is made up of personal stories.

-Gustav Deutsch, January 2013

The Hollywood Reporter reviews the 95 minute film here.

Credits:
Writer / Director / Production Designer / Editor: Gustav Deutsch
Key Scenic Artist / Head Painter: Hanna Schimek
Director of Photography: Jerzy Palacz
Assistant Director / Script Continuity: Bernadette Weigel
Key Grip / Gaffer: Dominik Danner
Costume Designer: Julia Cepp - mija t.rosa
Key Make-up Artist / Hairdresser / Costume Standby: Michaela Haag
Composer Original Music: Christian Fennesz / David Silvian
Sound: Christoph Amann
Script Consultant / Creative Producer: Tom Schlesinger
Production Manager / Line Producer: Marie Tappero
Produced by: Gabriele Kranzelbinder
Production: KGP Kranzelbinder Gabriele Production

Cast:
Shirley: Stephanie Cumming
Stephen: Christoph Bach
Mr Antrobus / Cinema Goer: Florentin Groll
Mrs Antrobus / Cinema Goer / First Train Passenger: Elfriede Irrall
Chief Clerk: Tom Hanslmaier
and Yarina Gurtner Vargas, Peter Zech, Alfred Schibor, Jeff Burrell, Jim Libby, Dennis Kozeluh, Anne Weiner, Julien Avedikian

About the installation (Images after the text):

The point of departure of VISIONS OF REALITY is the world of visual arts.
The idea to explore the depiction of reality not only by means of film, but also with the aid of the exhibition medium, seems obvious.

The settings of VISIONS OF REALITY are created in co-operation with representatives from the fields of painting, architecture and music. The artist Hanna Schimek, for example, visualises the landscapes outside the windows in Hopper’s works and the pictures shown on the walls in the form of paintings corresponding to the real size. This once again focuses on the theme of the exhibition – staging reality, imagining reality – with the devices of painting.

Because the film sets were built for a specific camera position only – the camera always retains the angle of viewing of the paintings, i.e. with a skewed perspective and only true to detail from the viewing side – visitors will be able to move around in anamorphic three-dimensional reconstructions of Hopper’s paintings. Only then does it become clear that – contrary to the ostensible fidelity to reality – they actually often display false perspectives, unreal direction of light and shadows. The visitors perceive the barely noticeable distortions of perspective in the film and thus experience the tension between film reality and actual reality. On the one hand, the exhibition permits visitors to look “behind the scenes” of the cinema illusion machine while, on the other hand, giving them the opportunity to enter the film sets and thus putting them in the role of the actors in the film and the figures in Hopper’s paintings.

Images of the sets and installation from the exhibitions:






A live video camera that is set up to record exactly the same detail of Hopper’s painting, also records the movements and activities of the public. The recordings are projected live in the rear part of the installation.

Team Installation Kunsthalle Wien:
Concept und Realisation: Gustav Deutsch
Illusionary painting and colour concept: Hanna Schimek
Assistence painting: Peter Niedermair
Object design: Richard Pirker
Architectural Advice: Arch DI Franz Berzl
Support: Filmfonds Wien, BMUKK Innovative Film, Kunsthalle Wien

Team Palazzo Reale:
Concept und Realisation: Gustav Deutsch
Illusionary painting and colour concept: Hanna Schimek
Object Design: Richard Pirker
Architectural Advice: Arch DI Franz Berzl
Management Milano: Arthemisia
Support: Palazzo Reale

Shirley stills and info courtesy of KGP production and Gustav Deutsch

Light & Loneliness: Edward Hopper's Work

Personally, I have always respected Edward Hopper. His masterful handling of light as well as his poignant subject matter and capturing of intimate moments has made me a lifetime fan.

Below is an art review of his retrospective at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.



Above: Cape Cod Morning by Edward Hopper

ART Review (NY Times)
By HOLLAND COTTER


BOSTON, April 30 — A certain slant of light was Edward Hopper’s thing. And he made it our thing, hard-wired it into our American brains: white late-morning light scraping across a storefront; twilight, plangent with heat and regret, settling over a city; slabs of late-night lamplight chilling the walls of Lonely Hearts Hotels everywhere.


Above: 11am by Edward Hopper


Hopper once said that, as an artist, the only thing he ever aspired to do was to paint “sunlight on the side of a house,” and that, in essence, is all he did. Is this an accomplishment weighty enough to support an “American master” title? Sometimes, yes; often, no, at least on the evidence of “Edward Hopper,” an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here.


above: Hopper's Hotel Window

The show is billed as a retrospective, but it isn’t. Significant pieces of Hopper’s output are missing: the paintings done in Paris from 1906 to 1910; all but a few of his many drawings; and most of what he produced as a commercial illustrator in the long years before he became a star.

To some of us, Hopper was an illustrator from first to last, a just-O.K. brush technician, limited in his themes. His main gift was for narrative paintings with graphic punch and quasi-Modernist additives: Manet touches, de Chirico props. And like any shrewd storyteller, he knew the value of suspense. Reveal just so much of a plot — no more. Mystery keeps an audience hanging on.

Unfortunately, there’s not much suspense or mystery in this show, which travels to Washington and Chicago. Museums are risk-free zones these days, spooning up boilerplates of what audiences are expected to like. On the whole, “Edward Hopper” fills that bill too well. Still, it gets off to a strong start and comes to a striking close.



Above: Hopper's Ryder House


It opens with a single oil painting, “Hodgkin’s House,” done in 1928 when the 40-something Hopper, his career finally on a roll, was summering in Gloucester, Mass. In the picture, late (or very early) sunlight hits one side of a white clapboard house, leaving the rest of it in shadow.

There are no figures; none are needed. Illumination and architecture engage in an expressive exchange. The house, with its two high-arched windows, seems to greet the light with shy consternation, like a prim Victorian Danae startled by a shower of gold.

This is the Hopper Effect: the impression of everyday life touched with secular sanctity. And the show’s first gallery gives a good idea of how he developed it. In a 1908 painting of a locomotive stalled in a field, he suppresses anecdotal detail to make a prosaic scene inscrutably monumental, even a little sinister.

In the coarsely brushed “Summer Interior” (1909), the first of a long series of pictures of women in bedrooms, he introduces narrative ambiguity: is the seminude woman crouched by the bed hurt, embarrassed, at rest? And he turns light into an object: a sourceless rectangle of it sits on the floor like a Donald Judd box.


Above: Summer Interior


Light is inseparable from architecture in a 1913 stage set of a picture called “New York Corner, or Corner Saloon.” The mood they generate is the main character on that stage. All these elements would be combined in famous later paintings like “Nighthawks” (1942) — the show enshrines that one in a room labeled “Icons” — but the mechanics were in place three decades earlier.

After giving the initial impression of a restless artist who resisted settling into a groove, who might have gone this way or that, comes a long interruption in the form of galleries devoted to a lot of Gloucester watercolors and others done in Ogunquit, Me., through the 1920s.


Solitary souls, vacant spaces: Edward Hopper’s “Summertime” (1943).

The show seems to argue that in these pictures of sun-bleached lighthouses and village rooftops Hopper was trying to come to grips with depicting light. In fact, he had already done so a decade earlier in Paris. Anyway, the New England pictures are far from experimental. They’re blandly virtuosic tourist-brochure illustration, Chamber of Commerce Modernism.

Maybe watercolor was too easy for Hopper — he was good at it — and maybe the 1920s artist-colony summers were too relaxing. He needed resistance, and in the awkwardness of oil painting, the grit of the city, and the Great Depression, he got it. In the 1930s the work toughens up and turns strange.

In the country he tended to paint houses as if they were public monuments, from a respectful distance. In the city no distances are respected. Hopper’s eye is everywhere. He peeps through apartment windows, catches people undressed, depressed, lost in thought, just plain lost. He looks over shoulders, down women’s dresses.


Above: Hopper's House At Dusk

If Hopper’s rural work can be too simple, his city scenes can be fussily overcomplicated, illustrational in a different way. But when the balance is right, they’re great. In “House at Dusk” (1935), a woman silhouetted by light stares from a top-floor apartment window, unaware of the darkening park and glorious afterglow sky behind the building. She sees nothing; we see it all, from a God’s-eye view.

We’re back to light. If art reflects the sensibility of a time and a culture, it also creates that sensibility. Hopper’s light gave Depression-era Americans, and many others thereafter, a glamorous, even heroic image of themselves as solitary and tragic, persevering, deservedly nostalgic. Some people think he invented this, but he didn’t. American landscape painters were there before him.


Above: City Sunlight

Hopper grew up in Nyack, N.Y., just up the Hudson from Manhattan. From the bedroom window of his childhood home he had a panoramic view of the river. And in essential ways he is direct heir to the 19th-century Hudson River School tradition, particularly the elegiac work of Thomas Cole.

As the nation’s first “official” artist, Cole was probably expected to create Romantic images of a brave and optimistic New World at its dawning. What he actually painted was a vision of a golden age of innocence already past. His art is far less about hope than about fear: fear of change, fear of the future, fear of the unknown, fear of the brash, crass, will-do America bumping and screeching around him.

Hopper’s art is not so different. Technically, he is a Modernist, but without a drop of Modernism’s utopian rationality, confidence and breadth. He didn’t make a dystopian art, either, one that stakes out an alternative position, as Warhol would do. He went with anxiety and longing, and made them feel-good entertaining, like Hollywood films, which he both influenced and was influenced by.

Often his most ambitious paintings feel Hollywood-fake, overproduced, overwritten. The renowned “Second Story Sunlight” (1960) does. With its Thelma Ritter mother, sunbathing ingénue and light-touched roof peaks, it is a silly, stagy, symbolic affair. You have a sense that the plot, if there is one, isn’t worth wondering about.


Above: Hopper's Second Story Sunlight


It’s when Hopper lets light take over, assume the leading role, that the late paintings work. It does so again in “Morning Sun” (1952), in which a woman — Hopper’s wife, Jo, his principal model — sits in profile, in a pink slip, on a bed, staring out a window as light hits her pinched cheeks and raw-red hands.


Solitary souls, vacant spaces: Edward Hopper’s “Morning Sun”.

You can take the picture as just another piece of Hopper shtick, with soundstage spots, an actor in place, and a director shouting for silence on the set as a scene called “Sadness” starts. Or you can take all that out and just leave light breaking the world into squares and rectangles, dark and bright, exposing it, hiding it, before moving on.


“Sun in an Empty Room” (1963) is among works by that artist covering a quarter-century, opening Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This is the essence, the only drama, of “Sun in an Empty Room,” the last painting in the show. Done in 1963, four years before Hopper’s death, it is what it says: an image of contained space. There’s a window; the trees outside it look wind-whipped, but you can’t hear the wind. Inside is all blank walls and wheat-and-honey-colored sunlight, the two things Hopper loved best and felt comfortable with. He doesn’t strain for a story here, or a sentiment, or skill, or completion, which all but the best of his art tries too hard for. Maybe that’s why this is the least gimmicky painting in “Edward Hopper,” and the only happy one, and the most lucid.

“Edward Hopper” opens on Sunday and runs through Aug. 19 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue; mfa.org. The exhibition travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington (Sept. 16 through Jan. 21, 2008) and the Art Institute of Chicago (Feb. 16 through May 11, 2008).


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