Programmed February 2022

Douglas Sirk Melodramas

While melodrama had been a cinematic staple since the dawn of film history, it took Douglas Sirk, working in luridly expressionistic Technicolor, to realize the full emotional and aesthetic possibilities of the form. Throughout the 1950s, the German-born Sirk helmed a string of deliriously stylized soap operas that turned the genre’s artifice against itself, using its lavish mise-en-scène, wildly improbable plotting, and histrionic excess to create scorching critiques of suburban conformism, traditional family values, and American class and racial attitudes. These films—including the operatically perverse Written on the Wind and the stingingly subversive Imitation of Life —stand as some of the most heartbreaking, outrageous, and visually complex ever made within the Hollywood studio system.

No longer streaming