Editor’s Note: This is the fourteenth part of a planned sixteen
part series about the German and American master director Douglas Sirk (Detlef
Sierck). The previous parts were published on
18 June 2017 (Post
Sirk:Mass Camp; Genre and the Women's
Film)
Click on the dates to access the earlier posts.
To come shortly: Sources (15), An Afterword: The American Family
on Screen (16).
Bruce is a long time cinephile,
scholar and writer on cinema across a broad range of subjects. The study being
posted in parts is among the longest and most detailed ever devoted to the work
of Douglas Sirk. In the following text films in Italics are regarded as key
films in the director’s career. References to authors of other critical studies
will be listed in a bibliography which will conclude the essay.
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| Douglas Sirk |
The central part of
the Sirk story in Hollywood near the end of the studio era, is set in relief by
an extraordinary personal history of self-exile and discovery, of experiment
and adaptation also marked by personal tragedy (1). Sirk was not
discarded by the system but knew when he was done with Hollywood (apparently
there were also health problems) and quietly withdrew at the
height of his success in the industry. He could not then have foreseen his
critical transformation, via cinephilia, from industry journeyman to master of
mise en scène.
In addition to Sirk
on Sirk and the ever increasing number of journal articles and academic
papers, there are four books on Sirk's films in English. A path breaking,
auteurist study of Sirk's American films published in 1979 by Michael Stern, gives emphasis to continuity
of theme and consistency of style. Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning
(1994) is an histographical study of Sirk's place in the development of film
studies expanded into a history of the critical reception of his films, both
academic and popular, with chapters on the marketing of Written on the Wind,
star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the
“institutionalised” camp response (“mass camp”) to Sirk's films. In light of
this contextualising Klinger qualifies her endorsement of academic claims
“about the ipso facto subversiveness of the 'sophisticated' family melodramas
of Sirk, Minnelli and Ray” while not denying that they served certain
ideological functions. The other two books, by Lucy Fischer and Sam Staggs,
concentrate their focus on Imitation of Life, Staggs claiming new
revelations for his book. James Harvey (who like Stern and Fischer also
interviewed Sirk) has several chapters on Sirk's films in his book Love in the Fifties (2001). (2)
Of his major films
at Universal, Sirk at 70, other than for matters of style, initially
claimed to Halliday that he could not recall too much about All That Heaven
Allows, and similarly for the now highly regarded (after early neglect) All
I Desire and There's Always Tomorrow. By 1977, when Michael Stern
interviewed him, Sirk had been able to re-view these films. Unsurprisingly his most positive unprompted
memories with Halliday were of Summer Storm, Scandal in Paris,
Lured, Take Me to Town, Written on the Wind, A Time to
Love and a Time to Die and Imitation of Life with The First Legion
and The Tarnished Angels as his key American films, 'if only'
disappointments being Hitler's Madman and Shockproof. What he did
remember without prompting were the fundamentals he brought to what was
assigned to him. He spoke of two key elements in his picture making. First, what he called 'social awareness' in preference to 'social
criticism'... just showing things... the criticism is in the audience.” (in essence Sirk's much analysed distancing
which does not equate to realism). Second, the type of character that he was
interested in retaining in melodrama: “the doubtful, the ambiguous, the
uncertain...the vagueness of men's aims ...in-between characters...an interest
in circularity... tragic rondos, people going in circles.” This commitment to
split characters pushes his family melodramas to the edge of tragedy.
It is nevertheless
Sirk's melodramatic imagination, in its formal exploration of excess, that tested
the critical strategies of containment of narrative by means of the
happy ending, for example, and also forms of resistance to Hollywood's
narrative conventions that could be rendered ambivalently through formal
achievement. To put it simply Sirk knowingly tested assumptions about the
boundaries of popular screen entertainment. His status as an outsider bringing
with him a depth of knowledge and experience, allowed him crucial insights into
Hollywood's idiom consciously, a concern of few if any native born and educated
Americans working as directors in Hollywood. Central to the initial vindication
of Sirk was the claim made for him as a subversive filmmaker in a politically
focused Marxist sense. The subsequent counter claim was that he was, above all,
an opportunist. I am inclined to think Michael Stern was right to question such
interpretations which run the risk of making Sirk into either a politically
committed didactic director, or a cynical pragmatist bent on survival “when in
actuality he is provocative, poetic and critical.” (Velvet Light Trap, #16,
1976). Compared with the identification of Sirk's strategy at Ufa which, as
indicated here, Koepnick refers to as the
identification of a syncretic strategy (his attempt, particularly in his first
'independent' phase in America, to syncretise opposing schools of thought)
would seem to strengthen Elsaesser's view, also supported by Klinger, of Sirk
as more of a cultural pragmatist than has generally been acknowledged.
There is a sadness,
even something akin to melancholic irony in key films at Universal (as in the
endings of The Tarnished Angels and There's Always Tomorrow).
Well before he came to America, Sirk said he found in Hollywood melodrama what
he was looking for while still in the theatre, an artlessness that was for him
“a perfect escape” from the elitism of high art. In Shakespeare there was a
similarity; Sirk saw him as a melodramatist in the Elizabethan theatre, “even
less free than we were in Hollywood.” In Periclean drama in ancient Greece
there was “craziness” comparable to that in Magnificent Obsession which
Sirk attributed to religion. Slowly Sirk said he sneaked melodrama into his
“popular” plays. When he first arrived in America he did not know if he could
continue in melodrama as he had at Ufa because he didn't know American
audiences. Returning to Germany in 1950 Sirk said he “felt like a complete
foreigner” while in Hollywood “there was an industry for a new art.” In Magnificent
Obsession there was the opportunity “to realise my ideal for melodrama.”
Yet ultimately Sirk didn't feel there was “very much to be proud of in his
pictures...except in the craft, the style.” (quotes drawn from the interview in
Bright Lights with Sirk by Stern in 1977) (3).
The multiple
meanings of 'Sierck/Sirk' ensure his continued relevance (4).To go back
to the beginning, Sarris was convinced, as quoted above, that “time would
vindicate Sirk.” It was the perception of a politically aware duality, emerging
in the Halliday interview, that engaged the interest of theorists and some
cinephiles. Following initial cinephiliac recognition, Sirk scholarship has
reflected the main trends in film theory from auteurism to structuralism to the
influence of feminism and cultural studies. The question of ideological continuity/discontinuity
between his melodramas at Ufa and those at Universal has led to repeated calls
for the full historicising of his work, no easy task given the complexity of
knowledge (political and aesthetic) and the access required. But some of this
work has already been undertaken. There is renewed interest in the influence of
modernist art and architecture on Sirk's work. His visual aesthetic arose from
a detailed understanding of the artistic debates in Europe in the 1920s and in
the US in the postwar years. In the preview of a forthcoming study we are
advised that the author is concerned to establish a continuum between Sirk's
German and American films - an issue that has oscillated between controversy
and avoidance - in order “to illuminate the broader cultural context in which
the films were made” (5).
End Notes
1. In addition to the loss of his son in the
war, in later life Sirk suffered the tragedy of blindness, added irony for a
man who had special empathy for the blind as evident in his direction of Jane
Wyman's role in The Magnificent Obsession and an unfulfilled wish to
make a film set in a home for the blind.
2. A biography of Sirk in German by Elisabeth
Laeufer, Skeptiker des Lichts: Douglas Sirk und seine filme (Skeptic of
Lights: Douglas Sirk and his films), was published in 1987 and has not been
translated into English.
3. Sirk's general reference to his pictures
here would, to a greater or lesser degree, have been to the many films assigned
him at Columbia and Universal, special exceptions, based on what he had to say
about them, being The Tarnished Angels, A Time to Love and a
Time to Die and perhaps Written on the Wind and Imitation of
Life.
4. In addition to Fassbinder's tribute, in the
seventies there is the recognition of Sirk's influence by contemporary
filmmakers as diverse as Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes, Tim Hunter, Quentin
Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar, Francois Ozon, Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch, John
Waters, Lars von Trier and Aki Kaurismaki.
5. Victoria Evans, Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic
Modernism and the Culture of Modernity due for publication mid-2017.
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