The Films of Douglas Sirk

The Films of Douglas Sirk
Author: Tom Ryan
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1496822382

Best known for powerful 1950s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk (1897–1987) brought to all his work a distinctive style that led to his reputation as one of twentieth-century film’s great directors. Sirk worked in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions provides an overview of his entire career, including Sirk’s work on musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies, and westerns. One of the great ironists of the cinema, Sirk believed rules were there to be broken. Whether defying the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or arguing with studios that insisted characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, what Sirk called “emergency exits” for audiences, Sirk always fought for his vision. Offering fresh insights into all of the director’s films and situating them in the culture of their times, critic Tom Ryan also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including his own conversations with the director. Furthermore, his enlightening study undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical survey of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s up to the present day.

Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life
Author: Douglas Sirk
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1991
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780813516455

Douglas Sirk (Claus Detler Sierck) was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1900. He made nine films before fleeing Nazi Germany, eventually coming to America. His best-known films, made during the 1950s--all of them melodramas--were Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, The Tarnished Angels, Written on the Wind, and Imitation of Life (made in 1958, released in 1959). This volume includes the complete continuity script of the film, critical commentary and published reviews, interviews with the director, and a filmography and bibliography. It also includes an excellent introduction by Lucy Fischer.

Melodrama and Meaning

Melodrama and Meaning
Author: Barbara Klinger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1994-08-22
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780253208750

Melodrama and Meaning is a major addition to the new historical approach to film studies. Barbara Klinger shows how institutions most associated with Hollywood cinema—academia, the film industry, review journalism, star publicity, and the mass media—create meaning and ideological identity for films. Chapters focus on Sirk's place in the development of film studies from the 1950s through the 1980s, as well as the history of the critical reception (both academic and popular) of Sirk's films, a history that outlines journalism's role in public tastemaking. Other chapters are devoted to Universal's selling of Written on the Wind, the machinery of star publicity and the changing image of Rock Hudson, and the contemporary "institutionalized" camp response to Sirk that has resulted from developments in mass culture.

Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk
Author: Robert B. Pippin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2021-04-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1350195693

It would be easy to dismiss the films of Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) as brilliant examples of mid-century melodrama with little to say to the contemporary world. Yet Robert Pippin argues that, far from being marginal pieces of sentimentality, Sirk's films are rich with irony, insight and depth. Indeed Sirk's films, often celebrated as classics of the genre, are attempts to subvert rather than conform to rules of conventional melodrama. The visual style, story and characters of films like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are explored to argue for Sirk as an incredibly nuanced moral thinker. Instead of imposing moralising judgements on his characters, Sirk presents them as people who do 'wrong' things often without understanding why or how, creating a complex and unsettling ethics. Pippin argues that it this moral ambiguity and ironic richness enables Sirk to produce films that grapple with important themes such as race, class and gender with real force and political urgency. Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher argues for a filmmaker who was a 'disruptive not restorative' auteur and one who broke the rules in the most interesting and subtle of ways.

Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life
Author: Fannie Hurst
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2004-12-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780822333241

A reprint of the 1933 classic novel, the basis for two film versions, with a new introduciton.

CinemaTexas Notes

CinemaTexas Notes
Author: Louis Black
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1477315446

Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael. This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity
Author: Victoria L. Evans
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2017-05-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474409415

The first truly interdisciplinary analysis to link Douglas Sirk's striking visual aesthetic to key movements in twentieth century art and architecture, this book reveals how the exaggerated artifice of Sirk's formal style emerged from his detailed understanding of the artistic debates that raged in 1920s Europe and the post-war United States. With detailed case studies of Final Chord and All That Heaven Allows, Victoria Evans demonstrates how Sirk attempted to dissolve the boundaries of cinema by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and setting of many of his most well-known films. Treating Sirk's oeuvre as a continuum between his German and American periods, Evans argues that his mise-en-scene was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and illuminates the broader cultural context in which his films appeared by establishing links between archival documents, Modernist manifestos and the philosophical writings of his peers.

Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance

Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance
Author: Elena del Rio
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0748689427

The first study of the interface between Deleuzian theory and film performance.

The Dark Side of the Screen

The Dark Side of the Screen
Author: Foster Hirsch
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2008-11-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786726776

Foster Hirsch's Dark Side of the Screen is by far the most thorough and entertaining study of the themes, visual motifs, character types, actors, directors, and films in this genre ever published. From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.