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Douglas Sirk
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Douglas Sirk |
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Douglas Sirk |
Sirk, Douglas, 1900-87, German-American film director, b. Hamburg as Claus Detlef Sierck. A successful director in German theater and film, he fled the Nazi regime in 1937. Two years later he emigrated to the United States, Americanized his name, moved (1940) to Hollywood, and with fellow émigrés directed several anti-Nazi feature films, the first of which was Hitler's Madmen (1942). The extravagant melodramas for which Sirk is best known were made after he joined Universal studios in 1950. His breakthrough movie, Magnificent Obsession (1954), was followed by such others as All that Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Ternished Angels (1957), and Imitation of Life (1959). Sirk's signature films, which generally portray the trials of upper-middle-class life in lush widescreen technicolor, were sometimes dismissed as conventional tearjerkers, but their exquisite visual quality, stylistic sophistication, psychosocial insights, and ironic undertones have made his films influential favorites among many later filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts.
Bibliography
See J. Halliday, ed, Sirk on Sirk (1972, rev. ed. 1997); studies by L. Fischer, ed. (1991) and B. Klinger (1994).
| Director: Douglas Sirk |
- Born: Apr 26, 1900 in Hamburg, Germany
- Died: Jan 14, 1987 in Lugano, Switzerland
- Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
- Active: '40s-'50s
- Major Genres: Drama, Romance
- Career Highlights: Imitation of Life, Battle Hymn, All That Heaven Allows
- First Major Screen Credit: Hitler's Madman (1943)
Biography
A box office smash and critical bust during his Hollywood career, director Douglas Sirk's artistic stature began to catch up with his popular success in the decades following his early retirement. Championed by auteurist critics and cineaste directors, Sirk's once-reviled melodramas evolved into an inspired blend of bathos and Brechtian distance, with the over the top histrionics of such films as Written on the Wind (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959) becoming deluxe tearjerking material as well as a mordant commentary on American values. Born Claus Detlev Sierck to Danish parents, Sirk headed to Germany in his teens to study drama and art history. Sirk forged a career as a successful theater director in Germany, staging works by such writers as Bertolt Brecht. After the Nazis came to power, Sirk shifted to film in 1934, directing stylishly assured melodramas, musicals, and star vehicles for UFA diva Zarah Leander. The left-wing director and his Jewish wife, however, left Germany in 1937, heading to the U.S. via several countries. Unknown in Hollywood, the newly renamed Sirk kicked around the studios for several years, finally receiving his first directorial assignment with the propaganda potboiler Hitler's Madmen (1943). Working for United Artists and Columbia throughout the 1940s, Sirk became a reliable journeyman, taking on projects from the Chekhov adaptation Summer Storm (1944) to the Lucille Ball crime drama Lured (1947) and a musical comedy Slightly French (1948). Sirk's taste for Baroque visuals served him well with the films noir Sleep, My Love (1948) and Shockproof (1949) (co-written by Sam Fuller).Signing a contract with Universal in 1950, Sirk tried to make the best of the "impossible stories" assigned him. Along with churning out such comedies and musicals as The Lady Pays Off (1951) and Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), Sirk also dealt with new technology, directing a 3-D Western Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), starring contract player Rock Hudson as Taza, and a CinemaScope adventure yarn Sign of the Pagan (1954). Another 1954 release, however, transformed Sirk into a studio moneymaker and future auteur darling. Remaking the 1935 soaper (from a novel he deemed unreadable), Sirk staged Magnificent Obsession's patently absurd story of reformed playboy Rock Hudson's relationship with blind widow Jane Wyman in gaudy Technicolor, matching the tale's fevered emotionalism. A substantial hit, Magnificent Obsession made Hudson a star and began a successful collaboration between Sirk, Hudson, producer Ross Hunter, and cinematographer Russell Metty.
Although Sirk continued to produce films in other genres, including the glossy adventure story Captain Lightfoot (1955), the war drama Battle Hymn (1956) -- both starring Hudson -- and an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), his subsequent reputation rested on four late-'50s melodramas. Re-teaming with Hudson, Wyman, Metty, and Hunter, Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) crystallized his ability to lather up the crowd-pleasing romantic soap while caustically critiquing 1950s America. Set in a perfect town lit and styled for maximum artifice, the love story between Wyman's uptight middle class widow and Hudson's younger free spirit gardener becomes a study in contrasts between her imprisoning home and his rural aerie, her stifling friends and children and his relaxed comrades. Perhaps untouched by the visual suggestion that this couple could never really work, audiences loved it.
Described by one scholar as the "consummate" Sirk film, Written on the Wind (1956) featured Hudson, Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall, and Dorothy Malone in a tortured love quadrangle set against the spectacle of a declining oil dynasty. With a plot that included alcoholism, impotence, nymphomania, violent death, an ultra-theatrically lit family estate shot from odd angles, and such remarkable set pieces as Malone's fervid dance with Hudson's picture, Sirk powerfully evoked the corrupt desperation of the wealthy, despite the "happy" ending. A rare contemporary critical hit, Written on the Wind earned Malone the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Reuniting the trio of Hudson, Malone, and Stack, the even more downbeat The Tarnished Angels (1957) was, as Sirk put it, a thematic "study in failure." Adapted from William Faulkner's Pylon and shot in pristine black and white CinemaScope, the Depression-era story of reckless air show performers once again displayed Sirk's skill for melding story and form, with the monochrome matching the somber mood of hopelessness while the wide screen vistas underlined flying's dangerous allure for the eponymous aerialists.
Sirk's final Hollywood feature was another popular soap opera that also epitomized his cool yet garishly elegant visual style and sharp social conscience. In his version of Imitation of Life (1959), the obsession with surfaces that drives Lana Turner's star actress Lora to succeed at all costs and Susan Kohner's light-skinned black Sarah Jane to "pass" for white is brought to emotional life through florid interiors and a plethora of mirrors, windows, and polished objects. With Sandra Dee as Lora's neglected daughter and Juanita Moore as Lora's loyal servant and Sarah Jane's mother, Sirk created another quartet of contrasts (including Turner's occasionally hilarious star "acting" versus Moore and Kohner's naturalism) that illuminates the cost of American ambition and racism. As Sirk noted of the climactic funeral scene and teary reconciliation of mother and daughter(s), "Everything seems to be OK, but you well know it isn't." Regardless, Imitation of Life became Universal's biggest hit to that point, and Kohner and Moore received Oscar nominations for Supporting Actress.
Though he retired early due to health problems, Sirk lived long enough to see his once disdained melodramas attract ardent fans among film savants; a reconsideration enhanced by the first Sirk retrospectives in the early '70s and the publication of extensive interviews with the director, Sirk on Sirk, in 1972. By the time Sirk died in 1987, critic Andrew Sarris's prediction that "Time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk" had been fulfilled. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
| Filmography: Douglas Sirk |
| Wikipedia: Douglas Sirk |
| Douglas Sirk | |
|---|---|
| Born | Hans Detlef Sierck 26 April 1900 Hamburg, German Empire |
| Died | January 14, 1987 (aged 86) Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland |
| Years active | 1934 - 1979 |
| Spouse(s) | Hilde Jary (?-?) Lydia Brinken (?-?) |
Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck on 26 April 1900 – 14 January 1987) was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas in the 1950s.
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Life and work
Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg, Germany to Danish parents. He was raised in Denmark, but later moved to Germany as a teenager. He spread his education over three universities. He started his career in 1922 in the theatre of the Weimar Republic, including the direction of an early production of The Threepenny Opera. He joined UFA (Universum Film AG) in 1934, but left Germany in 1937 because of his political leanings and Jewish wife. On arrival in the United States, he soon changed his Germanic name. By 1942 he was in Hollywood, directing the stridently anti-Nazi Hitler's Madman.
He made his name with a series of lush, colorful melodramas for Universal-International Pictures from 1952 to 1958: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959). But it was at the pinnacle of his high-profile accomplishments as Universal's most successful director that he left the United States and filmmaking. He died in Lugano, Switzerland nearly thirty years later, with only a brief and obscure return behind the camera in Germany in the 1970s.
Reputation
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Contemporary reception
Sirk's melodramas of the 1950s, while highly commercially successful, were generally very poorly received by reviewers. His films were considered unimportant (because they revolve around female and domestic issues), banal (because of their focus on larger-than-life feelings) and unrealistic (because of their conspicuous style).
Later reception
This dismissal of Sirk's films changed drastically in the 1970s when his work was re-examined by British and French critics. From around 1970 there was a considerable interest among academic film scholars for Sirk's work - especially his American melodramas. Often centering on the formerly criticized style, his films were now seen as masterpieces of irony. The plots of the films were no longer taken at face value, and the analyses instead found that the films really criticized American society underneath the banal surface plot. The criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was dominated by an ideological take on Sirk's work, gradually changing from being Marxist-inspired in the early 1970s to being focused on gender and sexuality in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Sirk's reputation was also helped by a widespread nostalgia for old-fashioned Hollywood films in the 1970s.[1] His work is now widely considered to show excellent control of the visuals, extending from lighting and framing to costumes and sets that are saturated with symbolism and shot through with subtle barbs of irony. Film critic Roger Ebert, in praise of Written on the Wind, has said that "To appreciate a film like Written on the Wind probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message."[2]
Sirk's films have also been praised and quoted in films by directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is partly based on All That Heaven Allows and, later on, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, John Waters and Lars von Trier. For instance, Almodóvar's vibrant use of color in 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown recalls the cinematography of Sirk's films of the 1950s.
Awards
- 1985 Bavarian Film Award, Honorary Award[1]
Filmography
Feature films
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Short films
- Zwei Genies (1934)
- Der Eingebildete Kranke (1935)
- Dreimal Ehe (1935)
- Sprich zu mir wie der Regen (1975) co-director
- Sylvesternacht (1977) co-director
Quotes
- "This, anyhow, is what enchants me about Sirk: this delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope." - Jean-Luc Godard in a review of Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die".[SOURCE - Godard on Godard, Translated by Tom Milne, Da Capo Press]
See also
- Far from Heaven (2002) directed by Todd Haynes was largely inspired by Sirk's work—especially All That Heaven Allows.
- Polyester (1981) directed by John Waters was, according to Waters, informed by Sirk's Universal melodramas.[citation needed]
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf) (1974) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder transposes All That Heaven Allows into contemporary Germany, with Rock Hudson's Thoreau-esque man of the soil recast as a Moroccan "guest worker".
- Out There in the Dark (2006) by Wesley Strick features a protagonist called "Dieter Seiff" loosely based on Sirk.
- Drachenfels (1989) in this gothic fantasy novel by Kim Newman (who penned it under the pseudonym Jack Yeovil) the protagonist is a young thespian and dramatist named Detlef Sierck, who receives the task of writing a piece about a renowned epic deed by the same prince who accomplished it twenty years before.
References
- ^ Barbara Klinger Melodrama and Meaning: history, culture, and the films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, USA, 1994
- ^ :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies :: Written on the Wind (xhtml)
Further reading
- Douglas Sirk Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
- Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: history, culture, and the films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, USA, 1994.
External links
- Douglas Sirk at the Internet Movie Database
- Douglas Sirk Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
- "Douglas Sirk", Dartmouth College course, "Exiles and Émigrés"
- "Douglas Sirk" Yahoo! Movies
- "Douglas Sirk" MSN Movies
- Austin Chronicle overview of Sirk's work and life
- Bright Lights Film Journal special on Sirk
- Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
- The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair, by Fred Camper
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Mentioned in
- Zarah Leander (Actor, Drama/Romance)
- Robert F. Boyle (Actor, Comedy/Drama)
- Rosas Blancas Para Mi Hermana Negra (1969 Drama Film)
- All I Desire (1953 Drama Film)
- All That Heaven Allows (1955 Drama Film)
- The First Legion (1951 Drama Film)
- Mystery Submarine (1950 Drama Film)
- No Room for the Groom (1952 Comedy Film)
- Pillars of Society (1936 Drama Film)
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- Taza, Son of Cochise (1954 Western Film)
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