Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk
Born	Hans Detlef Sierck (1897-04-26)April 26, 1897 Hamburg, German Empire
Died	January 14, 1987(1987-01-14) (aged 89) Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland
Years active	1934–1979
Spouse(s)	Hilde Jary (1899–1989) Lydia Brinken (d. 1947)

Douglas Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierck; April 26, 1897 – January 14, 1987) was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas in the 1950s.

Life and work

Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1900, in Hamburg, of Danish parentage, and his father was a newspaper reporter. Sirk discovered the theatre in his mid-teens, particularly Shakespeare’s history plays. and also began to frequent the cinema, where he discovered what he later described as “dramas of swollen emotions”; one of his early screen favourites was Danish-born actress Asta Nielsen. In 1919, he enrolled to study law at Munich University. He then moved to Hamburg University, where he switched to philosophy and the history of art, and attended lectures by Albert Einstein and Erwin Panofsky. To support himself while studying, Sirk wrote for newspapers and began working in the theatre. In 1922, he directed his first production in Hamburg, Hermann Bossdorf’s Bahnmeister Tod ("Stationmaster Death"), and by the 1930s he had become one of Germany's leading stage directors.

After making a name for himself in German theater, Sirk joined UFA (Universum Film AG) studios in 1934, where he directed three shorts, followed by his first feature, April, April (1935), which was filmed twice (once in Dutch and then in German). His exotic melodramas Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera made a star of the Nazi cinema out of Swedish singer Zarah Leander. He left Germany in 1937 because of his political leanings and his Jewish (second) wife, actress Hilde Jary. Still in Europe he worked on films in Switzerland and the Netherlands. On arrival in the United States, he soon changed his given, German name to Douglas Sirk. By 1942 he was under contract to Columbia Pictures and directing the stridently anti-Nazi Hitler's Madman for the exiled German Producer Seymour Nebenzal.

Sirk briefly returned to Germany after the War ended, but returned to the U.S. and established his reputation with a series of lush, colorful melodramas for Universal-International Pictures from 1952 to 1959: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and Imitation of Life (1959).

Despite the enormous success of Imitation of Life in 1959 (partially fueled by the scandal surrounding the murder of Lana Turner's boyfriend by her daughter), Sirk left the United States and retired from filmmaking. He died in Lugano, Switzerland, nearly thirty years later, with only a brief return behind the camera in Germany in the 1970s, teaching at the film school, Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film, in Munich.

Reputation

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

Attitudes toward Sirk's films changed drastically in the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s as his work was re-examined by French, American, and British critics. As Jean-Luc Godard wrote in his review of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), "...I am going to write a madly enthusiastic review of Douglas Sirk's latest film, simply because it set my cheeks afire."

The major critical reappraisal of Sirk began in in France with the April 1967 issue of Cahiers du cinéma, which included an extended interview with Sirk by Serge Daney and Jean-Louis Noames, an appreciation by Jean-Louis Comolli (“The Blind Man and the Mirror or The Impossible Cinema of Douglas Sirk”), and a “biofilmographie” compiled by Patrick Brion and Dominique Rabourdin. Leading American critic Andrew Sarris praised Sirk in his 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, although Sirk failed to qualify for Sarris' controversial "pantheon" of great directors. From around 1970 there was a burgeoning interest among academic film scholars for Sirk's work - especially his American melodramas. The seminal work in this field was Jon Halliday's book-length interview, Sirk on Sirk (1971) which presented Sirk as "... a sophisticated intellectual, a filmmaker who arrived in Hollywood with a very clear vision, leaving behind him an established career in German theatre and film". Several major revival seasons of Sirk's films followed over the next few years, including a 20-film retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Festival (which Sirk attended), which also generated a book of essays. In 1974 the University of Connecticut Film Society programmed a complete retrospective of the director’s American films, inviting him to attend. but on the way to the airport for the flight to New York Sirk suffered a haemorrhage that seriously impaired the vision in his left eye.

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. 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 has said, "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."

In popular culture

Sirk's films have been quoted in films by directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is partly based on All That Heaven Allows) and, later, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Pedro Almodóvar, Wong Kar-wai, John Waters and Lars von Trier.

More specifically, 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, while Haynes' Far From Heaven was a conscious attempt to replicate a typical Sirk melodrama - in particular All That Heaven Allows - but with a more obviously ironic take on the material. Tarantino paid homage to Sirk and his melodramatic style in Pulp Fiction, when character Vincent Vega, at a '50s-themed restaurant, orders the "Douglas Sirk steak" cooked "bloody as hell." Aki Kaurismäki alluded to Sirk as well; in his silent film, Juha to Sirk, the villain's sport car is named "Sierck".

Awards

• 1985 Bavarian Film Award, Honorary Award [4]

Filmography

Feature films

• April, April! (1935)
• T' was 1 April (1936) co-director (Dutch language version of April, April)
• Das Mädchen vom Moorhof (1935)
• Stützen der Gesellschaft (1935)
• Schlußakkord (1936)
• The Court Concert (1936)
• La Chanson du souvenir (1936) co-director (French language version of Das Hofkonzert)
• Zu neuen Ufern (1937)
• La Habanera (1937)
• Accord Final (1938) (uncredited)
• Triad (1938)
• Boefje (1939)
• Hitler's Madman (1943)
• Summer Storm (1944)
• A Scandal in Paris (1946)
• Lured (1947)
• Sleep, My Love (1948)
• Shockproof (1949)
• Slightly French (1949)
• Mystery Submarine (1950)
• The First Legion (1951)
• Thunder on the Hill (1951)

• The Lady Pays Off (1951)
• Week-End With Father (1951)
• No Room for the Groom (1952)
• Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952)
• Meet Me at the Fair (1953)
• Take Me To Town (1953)
• All I Desire (1953)
• Taza, Son of Cochise (1954)
• Magnificent Obsession (1954)
• Sign of the Pagan (1954)
• Captain Lightfoot (1955)
• All That Heaven Allows (1955)
• There's Always Tomorrow (1956)
• Written on the Wind (1956)
• Battle Hymn (1957)
• Interlude (1957)
• The Tarnished Angels (1957)
• A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)
• Imitation of Life (1959)

Short films

• Zwei Windhunde / Zwei Genies (1934)
• Der eingebildete Kranke (1935)
• 3 x Ehe (1935)
• The Christian Brothers at Mont La Salle (1941)
• Sprich zu mir wie der Regen (1975) co-director with group of film students
• Sylvesternacht (1977) co-director with group of film students
• Bourbon Street Blues (1979) co-director with group of film students

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.
• 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.

Further reading

• Douglas Sirk Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)

External links

• Douglas Sirk at IMDb
• "Douglas Sirk" Yahoo! Movies
• "Douglas Sirk" MSN Movies
• "The Films of Douglas Sirk: The Epistemologist of Despair", by Fred Camper