Imitation of Life 1959

Douglas Sirk

Hans Detlef Sierck

• German born son of Danish parents• Bremen Playhouse (1923-1929) Artistic

Director• Old Theater in Leipzig 1929-1936

Beginnings as Film Director

• Mirror shots• Theme of hypocrisy exposed• Fled Nazi Germany in 1937• Arrived in US in 1939• Hitler’s Madman, 1943 (1st American

Film)

• Assigned only B-movies to work on • Until he began working for Universal

Studios in 1950• He directed comedy, westerns, and war

films• Most noted for complicated melodramas

that showed a dark side to upper middle class life

• 1954 Magnificent Obsession• 1955 There’s Always Tomorrow• 1956 Written on the Wind• 1958 All that Heaven Allows• 1959 Imitation of Life

McCarthyism• U.S. Senator

Joseph McCarthy

• increased fears about communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents

• During this time many thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels

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Hollywood Blacklist• entertainment industry

blacklist, into which it expanded ﾑ was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or associations, real or suspected

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• Artists were barred from work on the basis of their alleged membership in or sympathy toward the American Communist Party, involvement in liberal or humanitarian political causes that enforcers of the blacklist associated with communism, and/or refusal to assist federal investigations into Communist Party activities; some were blacklisted merely because their names came up at the wrong place and time

Presented a dangerous environment for politically subversive work

• Imitation of Life seems to present a conformist or accomodationist stance.

• Story focuses on two women• Lora who is ambitious • Annie who lives in two worlds (as an

African American maid in the middle class white world and as a community leader in her own)

• The film seems to recommend that its female characters can find happiness by conforming to “more natural” domestic roles as mother and wife.

• For the women who rebel against their limitations it recommends the path of least resistance

• Acceptance of society’s view of women and women of color as different or inferior

• (cuny purchase library)

Douglas Sirk Revisited: The Limits and Possibilities of Artistic Agency

-Eric Rentschler

Sirk’s Women’s Films

• Dismissed as soap operas until the 60’s and 70’s

• Subversive possibilities in mass culture• Genre study• Feminist revision• New German Cinema• Cahiers du Cinema

Within the Hollywood Studio

• Subversive and transgressive text• Distance, self critique• Response to the repressive Eisenhower

era

Melodrama as social commentary

• Brechtian (avant garde theater: Three Penny Opera August, 1928)

• Distanciation• Self-reflexive

Ranier Werner Fassbinder on Sirk

• Saw him as a European artist who worked in Hollywood and made anti-American films

• Expressive lighting (garish colors) and strained happy endings

• This writing is considered as some to be narcissistic and Anti-Americanism is a simplistic reading of Sirk’s work

How can melodrama be critical?

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