Douglas Sirk

The reputation of German director Douglas Sirk (b. 1897–d. 1987) rests on Hollywood films he made in the mid- to late 1950s that have since been canonized among the quintessential examples of film melodrama, both domestic (All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life) and romantic (Magnificent Obsession, The Tarnished Angels). While his most famous films were box-office hits at the time of their release, reviewers dismissed them for their sentimentality and heightened emotionalism, appeals to popular tastes, and implausible plots and emphasis on glossy spectacle that defied the privileged standards of social realism. Critics rediscovered Sirk’s films in the 1970s following the influence of Cahiers du Cinéma and the journal’s director-based approach to film appreciation during the postwar years, la politique des auteurs, and an academic interest in melodrama as a “progressive” genre that could expose and critique the ideology of the culture that produced it. As a result of this shift in taste politics and reading strategies, aided by the publication of Jon Halliday’s interview Sirk on Sirk in 1971, Sirk gained prominence as the auteur of melodrama par excellence, credited with subversively manipulating studio-assigned material through irony and parody, Brechtian distanciation, and modernist aesthetics of excess and self-reflexivity that could be found in the stylized artifice of his mise en scène. A legion of filmmakers, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, and Todd Haynes, have cited Sirk’s films as a source of inspiration for their own screen practices of melodrama. Other films Sirk directed such as Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris, All I Desire, There’s Always Tomorrow, and A Time to Love and a Time to Die have contributed to his association with Hollywood’s mid-century melodramas about doomed but passionate lovers and the ennui of bourgeois families, yet he also worked in action/adventures, suspense thrillers, musicals, and comedies. Further, he had a successful career in Germany under the name Detlef Sierck, first directing for the stage during the Weimar period and later for the film production company UFA (formerly Universum Film AG, now UFA GmbH), where he was responsible for turning Swedish singer Zarah Leander into a movie star. Sirk is best remembered for his collaborations with star Rock Hudson and producer Ross Hunter at Universal-International, which tend to dominate critical attention in the bibliographic entries that follow, practically dotting the routes of the historical developments in cinema studies as a contemporary discipline.