Theory and Popular Cinema

Theory and Popular Cinema

Introduction

The film director Douglas Sirk, whose reputation blossomed in the generation after his 1959 retirement from Hollywood filmmaking, was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1900, in Hamburg, Germany to a journalist. Both of his parents were Danish, and the future director would make movies in German, Danish and English. His reputation, which was breathed to life by the French nouvelle vague critiques who developed the "auteur" (author) theory of film criticism, casts him one of the cinema's great ironists. In his American and European films, his characters perceive their lives quite differently than does the movie audience viewing "them" in a theater. Dealing with love, death and societal constraints, his films often depend on melodrama, particularly the high suds soap operas he lensed for producer Ross Hunter in the 1950s: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and his last American film, Imitation of Life (1959). (Sirk's favorite American film was the Western, Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), which was shot in 3-D).

Sirk's path to crafting what are now considered paradigmatic dissections of conformist 1950s American society began when he was 14 years old, in his native Germany, when he discovered the theater. He was very influenced by Shakespeare's history plays. The young Sirk also liked the cinema, particularly films starring the Danish actress Asta Nielsen. Sirk credited Nielsen's films with providing him an early exposure to "dramas of swollen emotions".

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.

Discuss two of Smirk's films which are La Habanera (1937) and Boefje.

La Habanera 1937

This movie can be taken as a soft-sell Nazi-era propaganda film that was used as a vehicle for its Swedish born redheaded star Zarah Leander.

This German overbaked B-film melodrama was shot in the Canary Islands, which subbed for its Puerto Rico setting. Douglas Sirk ("Written on the Wind"/"Interlude"/"Take Me To Town") helms this luminous kitschy b/w musical drama with a strained effort to keep it surging as a love serenade of romantic illusion matching in intensity the ocean's waves hitting the beach (shown at both the film's opening and closing) while hiding as best as he could its anti-American slings. It's a soft-sell Nazi-era propaganda film that was used as a vehicle for its Swedish born redheaded star Zarah Leander--billed as "the new Garbo." It was shot before Detlef Sierck changed his name and fled to America to get out of the Nazi clutches.

It has in 1927 the vivacious Swede named Astree Sternhjelm (Zarah Leander) chaperoned by her overbearing Aunt (Zarah Leander) on vacation to Puerto ...