Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria Evans (review)

In the interviews Douglas Sirk granted at the end of his career, his early experience as a painter and theatrical director in Weimar Germany allowed him to augment his new reputation as a cinematic artist as well as a progressive social critic. While later studies have challenged any consistent view of him as a subversive auteur, many of the best have continued to combine aesthetic, historical, and political approaches in order to reassess his films within a fuller context. A recent book by Victoria Evans, which largely explores how Sirk’s melodramas are informed by key trends in modernist painting and architecture, offers a valuable contribution to Sirk scholarship by establishing its own links between the visual design of his films and their broader social and political dimensions.

The book is organized in three parts, each containing two chapters. The first two chapters evaluate Sirk’s cinematography with reference to painting, with the opening chapter offering an alternative to ironic, Brechtian readings of the director’s signature use of internal framing. Here Evans first reviews Michael Fried’s distinction between “absorptive” and “theatrical” modes of pictorial representation, noting how the former parallels the customary view of melodrama as fostering an unreflective, immersive sort of audience identification, whereas the latter parallels the more distanced critical reflection associated with Brecht’s “alienation effect.” Against this backdrop, Evans then argues that a third mode drawn from Austrian art historian Alois Riegl—“attentiveness”—overcomes Fried’s dichotomy by allowing a more balanced, dynamic reciprocity between these impulses in the viewer. For Evans, it is this third mode that does fuller justice to the nuanced effects of Sirk’s compositions, and her sustained analysis of the homecoming scene in All I Desire offers one of the finest examples of these effects.

In the second chapter Evans turns to the influence of expressionist painting in Sirk’s color design with, among other things, a rather intriguing comparison between Wassily Kandinsky’s color theories and the director’s Technicolor palette in Magnificent Obsession. While Sirk did not name Kandinsky among his artistic influences, the painter’s association of blue with spiritual transformation and white with spiritual rebirth emerges in pivotal moments of Sirk’s film, and Kandinsky’s theosophical background is shown to have its own counterpart in the numinous transcendentalism of the Lloyd C. Douglas novel. Evans explores these affinities within a broader discussion of how Sirk’s expressive color design responds to contemporaneous debates about modern art in the United States, essentially providing a syncretic combination of European high culture and American mass culture that can also be seen in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris.

The next two chapters more strongly emphasize social and political themes. Chapter Three, “The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture,” draws on Ben Singer’s analysis of cultural anxieties towards technology in post-WWI melodrama, with The Tarnished Angels serving as the fullest reflection of this theme in Sirk. While Sirk initially struggled to understand the motives of Robert Stack’s self-destructive stunt pilot in the studio script, Evans argues that the director would have found a familiar analog in Ernst Jünger’s cult of the mechanized modern warrior—a proto-fascist vision of perpetually mobilized, technologically advanced masculinity that arose in reaction against the decadence of Weimar culture. Seen in this light, the film steers away from the Faulkner novel’s tragic romanticism, offering in its place a more grounded, humane rebuke of Stack’s neurotic addiction to the euphoria he once felt as a World War I fighter pilot.

In the following chapter, Evans offers a comparison of John Stahl’s 1934 version of Imitation of Life with Sirk’s 1959 remake, with particular attention to how the racial divide is reflected in their settings. The key difference explored here is Sirk’s distinctive counterpoint between urban and suburban housing, which Evans situates within the social history of post-New Deal government and commercial policies...