American Filmography:

YEAR	STUDIO	FILM
1943	MGM	HITLER’S MADMAN
1944	United Artists	SUMMER STORM
1946	United Artists	A SCANDAL IN PARIS
1947	United Artists	LURED
1948	United Artists	SLEEP MY LOVE
1949	Columbia	SLIGHTLY FRENCH
1949	Columbia	SHOCKPROOF
1950	Universal	MYSTERY SUBMARINE
1951	United Artists	FIRST LEGION
1951	Universal	THUNDER ON THE HILL
1951	Universal	THE LADY PAYS OFF
1951	Universal	WEEKEND WITH FATHER
1952	Universal	HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL
1952	Universal	NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM
1952	Universal	MEET ME AT THE FAIR
1953	Universal	TAKE ME TO TOWN
1953	Universal	ALL I DESIRE
1953	Universal	TAZA, SON OF COCHISE
1954	Universal	MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
1954	Universal	SIGN OF THE PAGAN
1955	Universal	CAPTAIN LIGHTFOOT
1955	Universal	ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS
1956	Universal	THERE’S ALWAYS TOMORROW
1956	Universal	WRITTEN ON THE WIND
1957	Universal	BATTLE HYMN
1957	Universal	INTERLUDE
1958	Universal	THE TARNISHED ANGELS
1958	Universal	A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE
1959	Universal	IMITATION OF LIFE

Melodrama: basic characteristics:

1. Legibility: everyone can read it

2. Expressiveness: given to exaggeration: everything brought into the open

3. Simplification of roles: good & evil clearly delineated

4. Strong identification: emotions alive with high suffering

5. Devaluation of language: less important than mise-en-scène

Bending the material:

1. Irony

2. Distancing: mise-en-scène:

• camera angles
• lighting
• placement of objects & characters within frame:
• objects: particularly, screen & mirrors
• characters placed in rooms heavily marked w/their social situations
• general flattening of the image
• moving camera: expresses irony
• use of baroque color schemes

3. Style of acting

4. Absence of heroes

5. Choreography used as a direct expression of character

6. Theme of blindness: characters blind to their situations

7. Purpose of manipulation/distortion of the genre: commenting on contemporary society

Quotes:

Thomas Schatz: Hollywood Genres:

" ... [the term] ‘melodrama’ was applied to popular romances that depicted a virtuous individual (usually a woman) or couple (usually lovers) victimized by repressive and inequitable social circumstances, particularly those involving marriage, occupation, and the nuclear family."

"Sirk’s popularity seems closely related to his capacity to flesh out the unnatural aspects of America’s social reality, to articulate cinematically how that reality is itself a collective cultural fantasy."

Rainer Werner Fassbinder:

"Women think in Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly."

Douglas Sirk:

"The mirror is the imitation of life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite."

Fred Camper:

"Every element in a Sirk film is on some level a reflection or mockery only of some other element of that same film. The revelations --- the moments which seem to take on special power --- lead us only to more reflections of these revelations, until we realize that the only real revelation is that everything is a reflection."

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