Shirley - Visions of Reality

Shirley – Visions of Reality is an invitation inside some of the paintings of Edward Hopper. It is an entryway into a world brought to life by a virtuoso director with respect for a visual genius that is well suited to the medium of film. A lifeless space, a piercing silence, an overwhelming emptiness, wherein there is a woman, an actress deftly passing from role to role. In fact, the film itself works in a similar fashion, flowing between different decades and different realities. Shirley is none other than main protagonist in Sally Potter’s Orlando, travelling through different eras but not belonging to any of them. She is always somewhere in the background, perceiving more than the others around her. It occurs to her to rise up in rebellion, to undermine conventions, to contest the roles assigned to women throughout the eras in which she has lived.

Gustav Deutsch

Director, artist, architect, musician, photographer. In the 1980s he began making films, mainly found footage. In his projects, Deutsch focuses on the essence of cinema and basic narratives which define human identity. Since 1996 he has been working on the series Film ist, a homage and a critical analysis of cinema art, its archetypes and mechanism. His FILM IS. a girl & a gun was screened at 9^th New Horizons.

Selected filmography

1996 Film ist mehr als Film / Film Is More Than a Film (short)

1998 Film ist. 1-6 (co-dir.)

1999 Film ist. 7-12 (co-dir.)

2005 Welt Spiegel Kino / Word Mirror Cinema (doc.)

2009 FILM TO. dziewczyna i pistolet / FILM IST. A girl & a gun / FILM IS. a girl & a gun (doc.)

2013 Shirley – wizje rzeczywistości / Shirley – Visions of Reality