Later this week, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a new 4K DCP digital screening of Douglas Sirk’s final film, Imitation of Life. Sirk is one of the most influential directors of his era, a master ironist with an ear for dialogue and an eye for baroque mise-en-scene. The characters in his films wrestle with feelings and conflicts familiar to the audience, but he often adds an extra thematic or stylistic dimension, an unexpected perspective on a routine engagement. He once said, “Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.” In his best films, people who’ve seemingly overcome their problems are actually left with new and deeper issues—the characters in a Sirk film experience change, though the films also question the nature of their emotional and spiritual transformations.
- All That Heaven Allows
- All I Desire (1953) Sirk took an unconventional approach to all of his films, noir and otherwise; in this melodrama, an excellent Barbara Stanwyck attempts to reenter the family she once abandoned to pursue a career as an actress. One of Sirk’s most enduring themes is the phoniness of show business, an idea he explores here by playing it off the ideals of the nuclear family. The director depicts the manners and phony morality of bourgeois middle America in such a way that reflects the oppression, jealousy, and joy of celebrity, a stunning and ambitious contrast rendered in subversive and uniquely ironic terms. It’s an idea he’d explore further in . . .
