Editor’s Note: This is the ninth part
of a planned thirteen part series about the German and American master director
Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck). The previous parts were published on
16 May 2017 (Sirk at
Universal, The Last Films, 1958-59)
Click on the dates to access the
earlier posts.
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.
Sirk's history as
an auteur is centrally located in the last full decade of the studio system,
producing films for consumption in a society still more or less complacently
oblivious to the growing crisis at its core. In this climate of flux the on
screen strategies of Minnelli and Ray and especially Sirk seem in retrospect
prescient of the challenge to the conventions of classicism as the
dominant story telling mode in Hollywood films (unrecognised at the time) and
the end of the studio system marked by films like Bonnie and Clyde,
Easy Rider, Chinatown, The Graduate, Nashville and Taxi
Driver in the transition to the “New Hollywood” of Penn, Nichols, Altman, Pakula,
Pollack, Rafelson, Ashby, Scorsese, Coppola et al.
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| All That Heaven Allows |
Irony. The commercial success of Sirk's films
masked the challenges to classical narrative they contained, a challenge that
nevertheless was subsequently somewhat overstated. Thomas Schatz, for example,
goes so far as to claim that in resolving a love story Sirk “left unresolved
the contradictory social conditions in which the story was 'embedded' and had
prevented the lovers' embrace until some arbitrary event near the film's
end...(the) resolution is ultimately emotionally unsatisfactory, challenging
the viewer's expectations on virtually every level of engagement” (my
italics). Illustrative of such a claim are the love stories in All That
Heaven Allows and There's Always Tomorrow. None more so than in the couple's
'reconciliation' in the final scene of Heaven. The pronounced positive/negative
asymmetry in the naïve pastoral spontaneity of the gathering at the Anderson's
house contrasts with Stoningham's 'fossilised' bourgeois society, suggesting a
covert ambiguity in the film's portrayal of the 'excesses' of both extremes in
middle America. The barriers to Cary's crossover lie more embedded in social
difference - the move from Cary's milieu to Ron's - rather than age difference.
Is Cary's great ambivalence about their future really resolved by the deus
ex machina of the accident? The
reversal of roles – Ron bedridden and
Cary nursing him – at least postpones the equalisation of their prospective
lives as a couple in the alternative culture.
In the idyllic framing of the end scene the ironic 're-sexualistion' of
the older woman is achieved by the object of her desire's sudden dependence on
her but this, Mulvey suggests, may well be only temporary given the
doctor's prognosis. In contrast, the pathos in the parting of MacMurray
and Stanwyck at the end of There's Always Tomorrow is overt, the “noble”
sacrifices are, Molly Haskell concludes, “absolutely wrong choices made
according to notions of duty and happiness that go against not only self-interest,
but the interests of everyone else involved.” In The Tarnished Angels
and Imitation of Life the sense is not so much of conflict being resolved
as of being at least temporarily, ambivalently suspended. Intensification comes
close to parody in Magnificent Obsession which, at crucial moments, is
saved from absurdity by the affective aspect of Sirk's mise èn scene which is
informed by his serious interest in and feeling for the emotional resonances of
the Wyman character's blindness (one of Sirk's cherished projects was to set a
film in a blind persons' home) and a certain fascination with the spiritual
dimension, a kind of 'craziness' drawn from the novel.
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| Barbara Stanwyck, There's Always Tomorrow |
Variations on
Sirk's ironic 'happy unhappy' endings leaving the viewer to reflect further
after the end titles, can be found in all of Sirk's Universal family melodramas
with the exception of All I Desire (see note on the film above). One
wonders how many of the audience actually mined below the affective
emotionality of the surface in response to felt ambivalence which is perhaps
most strongly ironic in Imitation of Life (see information about its
reception in the note). Irony of a somewhat different order is given full rein
in the endings of the early films in America on which Sirk had a free hand in
both the making and choice of project and shaping of the script - Summer
Storm, Scandal in Paris, The First Legion – later given a
tragic dimension in the long dark night and the grey light of morning
following Roger Schumann's death in The Tarnished Angels and the cruel
yet tender end to Sirk's penultimate and most personal film, A Time to Love
and a Time to Die. “Only things that are doomed,” reflected Sirk,” can be
so painfully tender.” (144)
Mise en
scène. Drawing on
Thomas Elsaesser's melodrama essay (Motion 4), the Hollywood aesthetic
maintains a priority of “invisible storytelling” through direct emotional
involvement of the viewer, “a global strategy of the ideology of the spectacle
that is essentially dramatic (as opposed to lyrical or dealing with mood or the
inner self) and not conceptual (dealing centrally with ideas, perception and
cognition),” requiring the creation or re-enactment of situations the viewer
can identify with and recognise. Such a cinema depends on the way 'melos' is
given to 'drama' by means of music orchestrated with lighting, montage, visual
rhythm, décor and style of acting. This
is encapsulated in the notion of mise en
scène - the way character is
translated into action - a strategy rarely more fully realised and generic
limits tested than in the fifties by the visual rhetoric defined then by
auteurs such as Sirk, Minnelli, Ray, Cukor and Preminger which links to the mise
en scène of Renoir, Lang and Ophuls, for example. This involves
what Elsaesser terms “the intensification of everyday actions, the heightening
of the ordinary gesture and a use of setting and décor so as to reflect the
characters' frustrations. Violent feelings are given vent on 'overdetermined'
objects'.”
Symptomatic for
cinephiles was the critical neglect of the importance of style in favour of the
novelties of a 'new' realism that surfaced in American cinema in the fifties in
b&w and the narrower screen aspects, a counter-programmed response, it
would seem, to the widescreen in colour (1.85 -2.55) strategies of Hollywood
'illusionism'. In cinephilic circles the critical establishment was then seen
to be more engaged by the mechanical tele-visuals and variable theatrical
strategies of a Delbert Mann or a Sidney Lumet and the pedestrian mise en scène
of then prestigious directors like J.L.Mankiewicz, Fred Zinnemann, Stanley
Kramer and the impersonal descent into what David Thomson refers to as the
“empty visual grandeur” of David Lean's later films.
As a student Sirk
studied art history with Erwin Panofsky, a pioneer in relating form and content
through iconography in painting and the other visual arts including film. Sirk's special interest was in painting and a
career in theatre under the influence of German Expressionism from which he
“tried to escape.” But he did so with a heightened interest in style and its
relation to internal subjectivity and the importance of tone and mood.
Character motivation was 'placed' through mise en scène - the role of the
mobile camera, unnatural rather than realistic lighting, stylised décor,
architecture, colour and music. Tom Ryan refers to Sirk's “boredom” with
expressionism at that time and “dismay at the gradual shift to more realist
forms.” He subsequently identified two nineteenth century painters, Daumier and
Delacroix, as leaving “their imprint on the visual style of my melodramas.” (Senses of Cinema
Great Directors)
Apparent in Thomas
Elsaesser's exploration of Sirk's mise
en scène, together with that of Minnelli, Ray et al (Monogram 4, essay
on melodrama), is the use of historical analysis and theoretical modes such as
psychoanalysis without giving up expressive accounts of films and while also
maintaining the central focus on melodrama as a genre to illustrate “how
ideological conflicts can be tailored into emotionally loaded family
situations.”
Considered as an expressive
code melodrama might be described as a particular form of dramatic mise en scène,
characterised by a dynamic use of spatial and musical categories as opposed to
intellectual or literary ones...The exaggerated rise and fall in the pattern of human actions and
emotional responses is often referred to as melodramatic in the compression of lived
time in favour of intensity in the form of a ' melo’ graph'...Within the bounds
imposed by coherence, this can swing from one extreme to the other more than is
considered realistic or in conformity with literary standards of verisimilitude...Specific
values of cinema lie in the skilled deployment by the director
of concentrated visual
metaphors and dramatic acceleration rather than the fictional techniques of
dilation.
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| Lauren Bacall, Written on the Wind |
It would be hard to
find better illustrations of the linking of iconography (visual motifs and style)
with structure through the mise en scène than in Sirk's melodramas. “The felt
restlessness in Written on the Wind is connected with frequent rapid
cutting on movement.” Metonymies like a plunging crane shot of the yellow
sports car drawing up the driveway in the front of Doric columns “crystallises
American iconography with decadent affluence and melancholy energy” (Elsaesser,
Motion) particularly when it is not an effect deriving from the
plot as in the final shot of the film involving the wreath blown in the wind
matched with an image of Lauren Bacall behind the curtain in “a desolate
fatalism.” Elsaesser notes Sirk's “peculiarly vivid eye for the contrasting
emotional qualities of textures and materials.” He combines richly rhythmic
figurative patterns of meaning to striking effect which are often not plot
driven, as in the example above.
“Everyday actions can assume symbolic intensity, ordinary gesture and
setting and décor used to reflect the characters' fetishistic fixations.” Sirk
uses a full-circle construction of images in Written on the Wind and The
Tarnished Angels to initially suggest entrapment but in the end also the
possibility of detachment from the circle in the Hudson-Bacall relationship
(the image of Bacall referred to above in Wind and the end shot in Angels
of Malone and her son in the plane plane flying away from the pylons for the
last time). “Finally there are structural and dynamic continuities and
discontinuities where the plot builds up to a collision of clashing sentiments
drawn out to greatest possible effect when it happens, which Sirk called the
'rhythm of the plot'.” These are less easily defined but nevertheless “make the
film hang together and give it aesthetic shape and thematic resonance.” An
example is the Malone dance in Written on the Wind while her father is
collapsing on the stairs from a fatal heart attack. Or John Gavin given the
brush-off by Lana Turner as they walk down the stairs in Imitation of Life.
