Suburbia as a Narrative Space in the Cinematic Universe of Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk, now fully recognized as an influential filmmaker, was considered a successful but uninteresting director in the 1950s. His melodramas were considered bland and subsequently ignored because they focused on female-centric concerns. In the following decades, he started to be considered as an auteur that not only had an impeccable and vibrant mise-en-scène, but also a unique ability to deliver movies that might seem superficial on a surface level but were able to sneak in some subtle and revolutionary criticism about American society. The aim of this paper is to analyse the most rebellious and subversive aspects of Sirk’s classic All that Heaven Allows (1955) from a gender perspective and how Todd Haynes’s tribute Far from Heaven (2002) added new challenges by touching upon thorny subjects that already existed in Sirk’s time but were deemed taboo for mass audiences.

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

USA Director Douglas Sirk Runtime 108 minutes Blu-ray USA, 2019 Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A)

Imitation of Life: Cinema and the Moral Imagination

The influence of film's compelling images, characters and storylines has polarized perspectives on cinema and the moral imagination. Does film stimulate the audience's imagination and foster imitation in morally dangerous ways, or elicit ethical insight and empathy? Might the presentation of images on screen denude the capacity to conjure images in the mind's eye, or cultivate the imaginative capacity for moral vision as spectators attend to the plight of protagonists? Using Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) to interrogate paradoxical perspectives on the cinematic imagination, this article develops an account of the moral imagination focusing on sensory, emotional and empathic aspects of the audience's imaginative relationship with screen characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings.

Cinema: Adapting Decadence

This article analyzes the role of decadence in cinema, first by comparing two adaptations of plays by Oscar Wilde: Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (1922) and Ernst Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925). These films illustrate, respectively, two subsequent cinema aesthetics that could not be more unlike: the camp and the classic. Nazimova’s inadvertent camp leads to Ken Russell’s deliberately tasteless adaptation of Wilde in Salome’s Last Dance (1988). Questions of taste, technique, and audience become especially problematic in the relationship of John Waters to Douglas Sirk. In the 1950s, Sirk’s melodramatic films were enormously popular with mainstream audiences, but their outlandish plots and artificial style now appeal mostly to the camp sensibility. Waters’s Polyester (1981) doubles down on Sirk’s middle-class decadence: while still camp, Polyester is such an extreme instance of the style that it is better described as “trash,” Waters’s own preferred term for the tasteless fakery of his cinematic world.