Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 1, 2020

There was a now rather little remembered musical called Hallelujah, Baby! which opened in the spring of 1967 and made it through almost a year of performances, ultimately winning a handful of Tony Awards, including Best Musical and a shared Best Actress in a Musical prize for star Leslie Uggams, this despite a general lack of enthusiasm among the critical class (and you know how they can be). Hallelujah, Baby!’s conceit was that it traced the history of the African American experience over the course of several decades in the 20th century, though the stars of the show all remained the same age, as if their characters were types or symbols rather than living, breathing humans. Something kind of weirdly similar is at play in Shirley: Visions of Reality, a self proclaimed “experimental” film from the late Austrian director Gustav Deutsch, which “recreates” a baker’s dozen of iconic paintings by Edward Hopper which were originally done from the 1930s to the 1960s, having a character named Shirley (Stephanie Cumming) pass through them in a series of vignettes. The film also features interstitial text cards between the vignettes which announce dates while a supposed radio broadcast further identifies the time with various reports about world happenings. As in the case of Hallelujah, Baby!, Shirley doesn't age or even change much, aside from a few differences in hair styles and clothing fashions, which, again like the long ago musical, tends to suggest she's some kind of type or symbol rather than someone the audience should care about. The result is an often striking visual presentation that nonetheless comes off as a series of pretty lifeless tableaux.

Early in my reviewing tenure here at Blu-ray.com, I did a bunch of releases from the likes of Topics Entertainment that featured what I termed "ambient television", things like a disc full of scenes of mountains or a fish tank (in one of my more daunting review assignments). Shirley: Visions of Reality struck me as being in much the same vein, a kind of trance inducing event that literally has nothing happening for long stretches. What's kind of ironic about it all is how unreal Deutsch has made things look, as can hopefully be seen in the screenshots accompanying this review. Whole environments look like computer renderings with a probably intentional flatness, and unfortunately that flatness also extends to whatever "story" Deutsch thought he was providing. Still, some of the imagery is fascinating, though you may simply want to have it on in the background as a kind of Hopper art installation.

Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Shirley: Visions of Reality is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eureka! Entertainment's Montage Pictures line with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1 (as you can make out, especially if you look at the screenshots in full resolution, the image is just slightly windowboxed). This is a rather striking presentation of a film shot with Arri Alexas and presumably finished at a 2K DI. As mentioned above, a lot of the environments can look computer generated, though they often have practical items like chairs or beds in them. That slightly flat, digital looking appearance is typically sharp if shallow looking. Colors are nicely nuanced and sometimes mimic the kind of deep blues that Hopper utilized in such iconic paintings as Nighthawks. I noticed some very brief and minor banding as the film segued into and out of the interstitial text cards, but saw no other issues.

Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Shirley: Visions of Reality features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that only occasionally gets to really strut its stuff since the sound design on this film is, much like the visual element, often on the static side. Surround activity is achieved sporadically through score and some ambient environmental sounds that creep into the mix. There is some occasional, sometimes kind of discursive, dialogue in the film, and that sounds fine. Optional English subtitles are available.

Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (HD; 1:14)

Shirley: Visions of Reality Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I think Shirley: Visions of Reality might have worked without the supposedly "explanatory" interstitial dates and "radio broadcasts", since the recreations of Hopper's work are often quite striking and frankly kind of coolly opaque. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.