Sirkian Sundays: Celebrating the films and influence of Douglas Sirk at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
HOME explore the films of Hollywood master Douglas Sirk and trace his influence on contemporary world cinema this January with a new film season for the new year. An émigré director who fled his native Germany at the start of the Second World War, Sirk is best known for lush, enveloping melodramas often featuring star-crossed lovers frustrated by circumstance. Somewhat pejoratively referred to as ‘women’s pictures’ or ‘weepies’, these melodramas were critically dismissed on release, but they were reevaluated in France in the 1960s by the same group of Cahiers du cinéma critics who championed the genre pictures of Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
Since then, Sirk’s films have become a firm fixture in the canon of American cinema and he has spawned no shortage of admirers, imitators and homages. Critics, filmmakers and audiences alike continue to be drawn to the hyperreality of his films, as their soaring emotion is matched by vivid colour, sweeping camerawork and swelling strings. Indeed, from Todd Haynes to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodóvar to Aki Kaurismäki, film directors from across the world have drawn from Sirk, with queer filmmakers in particular finding fertile ground in stories of romance forbidden by the social codes of the 1950s.
film directors from across the world have drawn from Sirk, with queer filmmakers in particular finding fertile ground in stories of romance forbidden by the social codes of the 1950s.
For Sirkian Sundays, HOME have gathered three of Sirk’s greatest triumphs and paired them with a film apiece from Almodóvar and Kaurismäki, allowing audiences the chance to first discover both the world of Douglas Sirk and then its continued influence. The season starts on Sunday 5 January with 1955’s All That Heaven Allows, a signature Sirk melodrama featuring Jane Wyman as wealthy widow who falls for her gardener, played by Rock Hudson. It’s a gorgeous example of the director’s skewering of middle class social mores, with autumnal colours to take your breath away. There will also be an introduction by HOME and University of Salford’s Andy Willis who will help set up the season for audiences.
Hudson is back in 1956’s Written on the Wind (Sun 19 Jan), where he is joined by Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone in a lavish, and utterly American, tale of alcoholism and dysfunction amongst a Texas oil family. On Sunday 26 January, Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life remakes John Stahl’s adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s novel about a black mother and a white mother struggling to raise daughters without fathers. Diving into class, gender and, of course, race in America, this is Sirk at his most devastating as he draws out the parallel fates of the two mothers and daughters in a story that also features the realities of showbusiness and the politics of passing.
Rounding out the season, there’s opportunity to see Pedro Almodóvar’s seldom screened 1995 film The Flower of My Secret (Sun 2 Feb), which stars Marisa Paredes as a writer who puts out low-brow romance novels under a pseudonym. One of a series of female-fronted dramas from the director, Almodóvar is perhaps one of the only filmmakers who can match Sirk shot-for-shot for colour.
That’s followed by Kaurismäki’s deadpan drama Fallen Leaves which echoes All That Heaven Allows with its depiction of an autumnal frustrated romance, told with the Finnish filmmaker’s trademark deadpan wit. Both The Flower of My Secret and Fallen Leaves will be accompanied by introductions by Willis who will help trace and illuminate the connections to Douglas Sirk.
