Essay about analyzing two films
Douglas Sirk Revisited: The Limits and Possibilities of Artistic Agency
Eric Rentschler
In many exchanges with David Bathrick over the last three decades, I have leamed much from his insistence on the complexities and tensions at work in cultural artifacts and his belief that the play of meaning is more often than not an unruly and a messy business. Texts, he main- tains, are fields of force in which duelling discourses make claims on our attention. How often have I heard him speak, in his inimitably ebul- lient and booming voice, of the need to appreciate and address compet- ing imperatives? Repeatedly in our work on special issues of NGC devoted to film and mass culture, I have seen at first hand how his care- ful suggestions (often tough and always to the point, but invariably encouraging) enabled colleagues to revise arguments that, because con- trary elements had been overlooked and underestimated, yielded fore- gone or schematic and, for that reason, not fully convincing conclusions. David's book and articles on East German literature dem- onstrate a consonant sensitivity to the many different ways in which the works of East German authors resonate and circulate, how writers and intellectuals in that country carved out spaces for opposition and open- ness in what appeared to be a closed and constrained public sphere. His longstanding interest in what he calls a "nonsynchronous Weimar" shifts our attention to artists and thinkers whose initiatives confound accepted notions of the era's aesthetic and political fronts. A recognition of the complex relationship between official and nonofficial perspectives guides his more recent project on film and mass culture of the Third Reich. As one of the key points of focus in debates about this contested
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150 Douglas Sirk Revisited
cinema's resistant potential, Douglas Sirk shall figure in the following as a case study of a central deliberation in David Bathrick's work, namely "the limits and possibilities of artistic agency."'
The Master of Subversion The story of Douglas Sirk's^ belated rise to intemational acclaim in
the 1970s is well known: a German re-emigrant, whose Ufa films ofthe 1930s and exile work had been all but forgotten, his subsequent endeav- ors with Universal Studios during the 1950s largely dismissed as soap operas and star vehicles, within a very short period re-emerged as a leg- endary figure, a site of lively exchanges for cinephiles and film schol- ars. Retrospectives of his work accompanied by interviews with cineastes retumed this forsaken corpus to the public light. Festival screenings, tributes in film joumals, and academic treatises, trans- formed this obscured figure into a master auteur.
Sirk's reemergence exerted a strong influence on discussions about authorship and authorial resistance to the ideological determinations of Hollywood and the studio system; the subversive possibilities of industri- alized mass culture; the political potential of generic pleasure; the critical or the resistant text; notions of genre, especially melodrama and, more specifically, feminist explorations of the women's film; the intemational discovery and subsequent valorization ofthe New German Cinema.
Among British, American, and French enthusiasts, there were only modest variances of opinion. Even when differing about what was most significant in Sirk's work, there was little question about the fact of its importance. Merging continental esprit and Hollywood professional- ism, it was said, he managed to function within the dominant cinema and follow generic convention while nonetheless crafting incisive social critiques; his nimble direction worked against and undermined the most tendentious and conventional plot lines.^ Curiously and consistently, when valorizing his early features in Gennany, his adherents tended to
1. David Bathrick, "State of the Art as Art of the Nazi State: The Limits of Cine- matic Resistance," in Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in Ger- man Literature 1933-1945, ed. Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner (New York: Berghahn, 2003) 304.
2. Upon his arrival in the New World, Detlef Sierck changed his name to Douglas Sirk. When speaking ofhis Gennan works ofthe 1930s, I will refer to the director as Sierck.
3. Speaking with two West German interviewers in 1973, Sirk said: "A story nearly always leaves you a chance to express something beyond plot or literary values [...] In pic- tures, the place of language has to be taken by the camera — and by cutting. You have to write with the camera." Cited in Heinz-Gerd Rasner and Reinhard Wulf, "Begegnung mit Detlef Slerk (1973)," in Douglas Sirk. Imitation of Life: Ein Gesprach mit Jon Halliday, ed. Hans-Michael Bock and Michael Toteberg (Frankfurt/Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1997) 215.
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understate or disavow Sirk's Germanness. Commentators typically (and wrongly) spoke of him as a Dane — even Fassbinder, who observed how Sirk had grown up in Denmark under the influence of Nordic films and Asta Nielsen.'* Beyond that, Sirk was seen as a representative of Weimar culture and an emigrant from Germany, the stress lying on his cosmopoli- tan sensibility and his liminal status, on a Germanness that had nothing in common with the Nazi Germany in which he had made seven features as well as three shorts, and everything to do with a subversive will that could manifest itself despite the ministrations of Goebbels and his minions.
The Screening of Sirk The cult of Sirk took initial shape in France. During the late 1950s a
number of notices appeared in Cahiers du Cinema, which praised Sirk's work, above all its formal properties. Fran9ois Truffaut lauded the expressive use of color in Written on the Wind;^ in a review of A Time to Love and a Time to Die from April 1959, Jean-Luc Godard found himself enchanted by the director's logic of delirium, his "mixture of medieval and modem, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope."^ Throughout the 1960s, Sirk's confident mise en scene and his studied self-refiexivity received acknowledgment by French cinephiles. The "boom period" for Sirk, however, came about in Great Britain during the early 1970s. Its highlights included a special issue of Screen, the book publication of Jon Halliday's career interview, retrospectives at the National Film Theatre and the Edin- burgh Film Festival, the latter accompanied by a collection of essays edited by Halliday and Laura Mulvey, and, finally, by Monogram's special issue on melodrama.^ The Sirk boom brought together auteurists and academics in a celebration of the director's modemist style, his formal pyrotechnics, and his progressive politics.^
4. The information related to Halliday by Sirk about his upbringing and his alleged Danish heritage was, in fact, apocryphal. See the entry, "Detlef Sierck/Douglas Sirk," in CineGraph, installments (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1987) BI.
5. Reprinted in The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978) 149.
6. Reprinted in Godard on Godard, trans, and ed. Tom Milne (New York: Viking, 1972) 136.
7. See the account of the Sirk reception in France and Great Britain in the first chapter of Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk {fi\oomm%ton: Indiana UP, 1994).
8. These discussions involved a trans-Atlantic exchange described by Laura Mulvey as a two-way movement: European intellectuals embraced the products of American popu- lar culture, which were then received back into their homeland and negotiated into academia through another exchange of cultural fantasy, the arrival in the United States of European- grown ideas. See "Americanitis: European Intellectuals and Hollywood Melodrama," reprinted in Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) 21.
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Discourse about Sirk, in sum, proved instrumental in constructing and promulgating the influential notion of a formally subversive and politi- cally transgressive text that could emerge within the Hollywood studio system. And yet, this redemptive reading rested on an exegesis that deferred uncritically to Sirk's own claims.^ Halliday's interview, Will- iam Horrigan remarks in his meticulously researched dissertation, laid the groundwork for Sirk as a function of a few repeated themes as well as a unified transcultural subject: "Sirk, or Distance; Sirk, or Style as Self-Critique; Sirk, or Weimar in Hollywood."'" British critics recast Sirk as a political creature and an adversary of Cold War sensibility. They studiously ignored his penchant for speaking about "regression, futility, the impossibility of change," and instead presented him as a man ofthe left." In this discourse, the Hollywood narrative appeared as a standardized monolith and the Eisenhower era as uniformly repres- sive. Textuaily oriented analyses of ideology and spectatorship, con- cludes Barbara Klinger in her important monograph, isolated Sirk's productions from their sociohistorical context.'^ The academic literature of the 1970s either belittled popular response as formally blind and politically ignorant or removed Sirk's films altogether from the realm of popular reception.' ̂ Quite correctly, Klinger considers these approaches problematic, because "films assume different identities and cultural functions" under different circumstances.'^ This is certainly the case,
9. William James Horrigan, "An Analysis ofthe Construction of an Author: The Example of Douglas Sirk," diss., Northwestern University, 1980, 31. One suspects, quipped German critic Wolfram Schlitte, "that wise old Sirk (who holds the interviews) is a lot more clever than his deferent young interlocutors. "See Schlitte's polemic, "Funf arg- erliche Thesen und eine Frage," in epd Kirche und Film (February 1974): 6. It is well- known that prior to his interview with Halliday, Sirk had read Andrew Sarris's auteurist primer (which includes a laudatory entry on Sirk), The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968) as well as the first edition of Peter Wol- len's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington/London: Indiana UP, 1969).
10. Horrigan, "An Analysis ofthe Construction of an Author" 37. 11. Horrigan, "An Analysis ofthe Construction of an Author" 35. 12. Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning 34. 13. Cf the conversation between Fritz Gottler and Frieda Grafe, "Imitation is Life:
Conversation zu Douglas Sirk," 24 [Munich] 12 (Winter/Spring 1997): 21. We have to think of Sirk, argues Gottler, not just as a melodramatist, but as a genre director, someone who made film noirs, war epics, and Cold War cloak-and-dagger productions. If Sirk refers to Shakespeare in his interviews, he does not do so to raise himself above cinema and evoke elite culture. Rather, claims Gottler, he aligns himself with Shakespeare as a pragmatist and a popular artist aware of his public. One needs to consider Sirk as someone who recognized how genres worked and respected his audience's expectations. If he infused literature and irony into genre cinema, it was not simply because he believed these elements would ennoble it.
14. Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning xvi.
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particularly when we look at the culturally specific nature of Sirk's histor- ical reception in Germany as well as critical responses to that reception.
Sierck = Sirk? The Sirk renaissance hallowed a Brechtian filmmaker who had made
movies within the Hollywood system which challenged the dominant ideology. Sirk's self-representations in his interview with Jan Halliday served as a master text, introducing central categories such as "melo- drama as social commentary, reading below the surface for irony, the false and self-reflexive style and distanciation, and pertinent themes."'^ When Anglo-American commentators tumed their attention to the Ufa productions, they were quick to grant his work from the Nazi period the same special status: Detlef Sierck, it seemed, had always already been Douglas Sirk. Halliday, not unduly burdened by knowledge of German history beyond Sirk's recollections, hailed "a left-wing direc- tor" whose output during the Third Reich had been oppositional and ironic. Going through the features ofthe 1930s, Halliday portrayed a critical director who emerged fiilly formed as a stylist quite adroit at reshaping recalcitrant materials and transforming conformist scripts into acerbic social parables. Sirk fused "the traditions of Weill, Ophuls, Brecht and Stemberg"'^ — and managed to do so while being moni- tored by the Nazis. Seen in this light, Detlef Sierck's Ufa films repre- sented rare and surprising indications of aesthetic resistance against the Hitler order. William Hordgan was essentially alone when he dared to question the Anglo-American acolytes of Sirk for denying "the exist- ence of Nazi repressiveness altogether by claiming a strong continuity — with no fundamental differences recognized — between that [Ger- man] work and the work in America in the 1950s."'^
German responses to Sierck's first features were, to be sure, far less effusive. In his work with Zarah Leander, it was the Swedish star rather than the filmmaker who garnered the praise of reviewers. Sierck demanded respect primarily as a competent "Spielleiter" (the Nazi appel- lation for director) who could work well with actors and facilitate solid productions, blending "the various emotional and affective elements of
15. Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning 9. 16. Jon Halliday, "Notes on Sirk's German Films," in Douglas Sirk, ed. Laura Mul-
vey and Jan Halliday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972) 20-21. 17. Horrigan, "An Analysis of the Construction of an Author" 130-131.
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the plot into a moving musical unity."'^ If anything, Sierck stands out during these years as a well-regarded professional, one of the era's few trusted and "competent directors" (Goebbels's phrase is ''konnende Regisseure"), more a master of illusion than a voice of resistance.'^
After his departure from Germany, Sirk became a nonentity in his homeland, virtually unnoticed during the Adenauer era. Rarely men- tioned by the West German press (and completely ignored in the GDR), his films of the 1950s seemed at best to be serviceable albeit imper- sonal products of the Hollywood studio system. In no way did review- ers feel moved to speak of a unique directorial presence or stylistic impetus. Sirk was, in the words of Hans Helmut Prinzler, "reduced to a nobody."^^ Between 1958 and 1973 precious Httle coverage of Sirk's work appeared in the leading West German cinema journal, Filmkritik — and the few notices, which repeatedly did not even mention him as a film's director, were derogatory, at times downright devastating.^'
A marked change of tone and attitude, a function of a seismic shift on Filmkritik's editorial board away from ideological critiques to apprecia- tions of form and style, became apparent in Heinz-Gerd Rasner and Reinhard Wulfs lengthy Sirk interview of November 1973. The direc- tor came alive as a filmmaker with a clear sense for what he had accomplished and what he had intended. His West German interlocu- tors, like Halliday, hung on the master's every word:
He is a man with an aristocratic appearance and manner, full of nuanced subtleties and fine distinctions. Nothing about him is like Hollywood, none of the usual solicitous joviality, loud ties, perfunc- tory friendliness, shallow and well-known anecdotes. But also none of the intellectual arrogance or cynical misanthropy. In his films as in his person one finds a simultaneous blend of warm humanity and sharp analytical thought; his melodramas are fiill of idylls, hopes, and happy
18. S-k., "Schlussakkord," Film-Kurier (25 July 1936). 19. For a more general account of Sirk's status in Nazi Germany, see my The Minis-
try of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996) esp. 129-135.
20. See Prinzler's unpublished manuscript, "The Nobody: The Reception of Doug- las Sirk's Films in the Federal Republic of Germany during the Fifties."
21. Typically, critics panned Sirk's films without even mentioning the director's name. There is, however, one striking formulation redolent of subsequent auteurist appre- ciations in the closing passage of an otherwise unsigned negative notice on Written on the Wind: "The cold glowing colors, the stylized takes, the reserved performances, the super luxurious sets and costumes, all impart to the piece a cold splendor whose cool undertone almost neutralizes the kitsch ofthe story" (Filmkritik 1.6 [June 1957]: 90).
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ends, but at the same time they contain an awareness that all bourgeois self-satisfaction is ultimately spurious and ephemeral.̂ ^
Rather than hailing the return of a prodigal son, this homage served as a national celebration of an international talent.^-' Albeit belated, the Sirk boom had a substantial impact in West Germany. It was to a great degree, although not exclusively, the consequence of Fassbinder's spir- ited recommendation. '̂*
Fassbinder's Sirk Sirk's appeal for Fassbinder was that of a European artist who had
worked in Hollywood and made anti-American films. Fassbinder's essay, published first in Film und Fernsehen and translated by Thomas Elsaesser for an Edinburgh Festival booklet, merges close description, incisive analysis, and visceral reaction. (The essay abounds with excla- mations like "It's just too much" or "Really sad!"^^) Its interests bear much in common with those of Anglo-American enthusiasts. It focuses solely on the Universal melodramas, not the other genre films; the Eisenhower era endeavors come under discussion, not the German pro- ductions or the early exile films. The emphasis lies on style and subver- sion, on expressive lighting effects and strained happy ends. The fledgling auteur hones in, as one might well expect, on Sirk's dysfunc- tional families and disturbed male protagonists. At certain points, Fass- binder's projective appropriation becomes downright narcissistic: Sirk, Fassbinder notes, fied to the cinema as a child, escaping from his bour- geois household. He, as the young director, would go on to make "films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked
22. Rasner and Wulf, "Begegnung mit Detlef Sierk (1973)" 211. 23. The Filmkritik interview came in the wake of a Munich Sirk-retrospective in
1972 and accompanied a twenty-five film tribute in the Munich Film Museum. ARD would air five Sirk films in November 1973; on the 28th ofthe month, the regional station Sud 3 screened Wolfgang Limmer's documentary on Sirk.
24. Contrary to accepted opinion, it was not Fassbinder alone who transformed the nobody Sirk into a somebody in the Federal Republic. Cineastes in Cologne and Munich reconsidered his films with great interest already in the late 1960s. The Cinemathek Koln sponsored a series devoted to Sirk's Hollywood melodramas in 1969 and published an elaborate documentation. This event was followed late in the year by a comprehensive work retrospective. See Sebastian Feidmann, "Leserbrief," Film 3.10 (October 1986): 14.
25. It appeared in the February 1971 issue oi Film und Fernsehen. For an English translation, see "Imitation of Life: On the Films of Douglas Sirk," in Rainer Werner Fass- binder, The Anarchy of Imagination, ed. Michael Toteberg and Leo Lensing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 77-89.
156 Douglas Sirk Revisited
at."^^ Sirk's films confirm Fassbinder's own suspicions as well as echo the affective dynamics of his earliest features. After watching Douglas Sirk's films, he is more convinced than ever that "love seems to be the best, most sneaky and effective instrument of social oppression."^^
The widely read and often quoted homage to Sirk provided an author- itative validation of the master's subversive appeal and his social com- mentary, all the more so since this essay came from an enfant terrible whose radical will and stylistic indulgence by that time were attracting festival and arthouse followings. The tribute, then, served a double function. It resuscitated Sirk for West German audiences, catalyzing a series of retrospectives, tributes, and television programs. Beyond that, it aligned Fassbinder with a more popular genre cinema, taking him out of the underground and expanding his appeal, transforming him from an uncompromising agent of distanciation into a choreographer of surfaces, illusions, and emotions. Fassbinder's major lesson from Sirk was one of strategy, not of style. From films like All That Heaven Allows and Writ- ten on the Wind he leamed how a popular form could be recast to appeal to audience expectations while simultaneously undermining them.
Fassbinder's recourse to Sirk also came as a result of a search for legiti- mation. In this encounter inhered the implied question of tradition and origins for a young generation of German filmmakers. Early on, Schlon- dorlf expressed his veneration for Fritz Lang, both as a classical Weimar filmmaker and a director who bad fied Nazi Germany. Wim Wenders repeatedly paid tribute to Lang as he did to F. W. Mumau. Werner Her- zog entertained a high-profile relationship with tbe patron saint of a better German film tradition, Lotte Eisner. Niklaus Schilling posed an exception in bis outspoken endorsement of Nazi cinema, altbough his words of praise cited important films without singling out tbeir directors.^^ Like Walter Bockmayer,̂ ^ Fassbinder identified witb Sirk as a director trained in Germany wbo was at once un-German and anti-American.
Tbe rediscovered auteur Sirk and tbe New German Cinema of authors fed on and nourisbed eacb other. Tbe contemporaneous constructions of cineastes and cinepbiles, botb would become tbe privileged objects of a
26. Fassbinder, "Imitation of Life" 78. 27. Fassbinder, 6 Imitation of Life" 84. 28. See Schilling's comments in "Tradition im Kino 15.10.78," Filmforum (Decem-
ber 1978): 61. 29. Walter Bockmayer, "Hommage — Douglas Sirk: Schande fiir uns und Ehre zu
wenig," Filmforum (November 1978): 8.
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burgeoning Film Studies. Tbrougb Fassbinder's intervention, Sirk secured wide attention; via Sirk's model, Fassbinder aligned himself witb a differ- ent cinema and a displaced better Germany tbat wbile turning its back on tbe Third Reicb bad found a bome in Hollywood and yet retained its intellectual and political integrity. Botb entities represented more dynamic and radical possibilities for narrative film and tbe institution of cinema.
West German Dissenters In tbe wake of Fassbinder's bomage and Sirk's growing media pro-
file, several prominent German film critics spoke out early in 1974. Tbeir essays in epd Kirche und Film saw tbe Sirk boom as trendy, fool- isb, and misguided. In a scathing ideological critique. Wolfram Schutte of tbe Frankfurter Rundschau cbided bis colleagues for fixating blindly on Sirk's McCartby era films and failing to understand that beneatb tbe scintillating surfaces of tbese works lurk a repressed reality and spuri- ous consolation. In bis mind tbe embrace of Sirk by German critics was a sign of leftist melancholy and social restoration, a post-1968 retreat to interiority in keeping witb tbe era's New Subjectivity. Sirk's Universal features offer no true resistance or critique; tbey surely do not stand up well to Luis Bufiuel's works in tbis vein wbicb are mucb more unrelent- ing and intractable in tbeir acts of rebellion (e.g.. El Bruto and Abismos de Pasion). Sirk's melodramas, in comparison, are (and Scbutte lets out all tbe stops and truly goes into a rant): "Legitimations of tbe status quo, tbe grand bumanization of tbe 'evil' world, mediocre emotional slop, moralistic pbilistinism, in sbort: melodrama at its worst, i.e., false tbougbts plus false feelings equal false films, films (tbat for good and bad reasons) are considered to be great ones." German film critics do not realize bow truly regressive tbese films are, especially since tbey bave taken leave of Kracauer and replaced symptomatic criticism witb auteurist and formalist persuasions.
Peter W. Jansen concurred, but be went even furtber. Sirk's melodra- mas, be grants, provide critical views on tbe regressive psycbopatbol- ogy of Eisenhower America. But wbo says dissatisfaction witb tbe way tbings are and tbe affirmation of escapism need to be mutually exclu- sive? "History, especially German bistory, offers sufficient examples; and it is bardly a coincidence tbat Sirk's cultural understanding and
30. "FUnf argerliche Thesen und eine Frage" 6. SchUtte particularly has in mind the recent shift in editorial policy of Filmkritik.
158 Douglas Sirk Revisited
consciousness have a Gennan foundation."-" Sirk's undialectical approach to social criticism does not further understanding, but instead compels the viewer to retreat into interiority when the world outside offers no solace. Sirk's cinema may well reveal the lack of correspon- dence between reality and hope. But it moves any relation between real- ity and hope to one in which parallel lines only meet in infinity.
The resonance of Sirk's films must be seen in the context of many other contemporary new subjectivities which, according to Jansen, "all derive from a widespread cultural political rollback, be it among those who embrace hippy or drug culture, be it Jesus People, or those who are reviving the Heimatfilm."^^ Sirk's films are "perfect industrial prod- ucts" of a rationalized mass culture, whose "greatest ambition lies in the absolute clarity and literalness of their appeal." And these films are both products and functions ofthe culture industry, a pseudo-liberal cinema of predigested emotions meant to reconcile its viewers with the ways things are. In the process the possibility of Utopia (which can only be concrete) is forsaken. That may not be the result of these films, but it surely explains their effectiveness. "Because the promise that abides in Dou- glas Sirk's cinema implies ultimately the prospect of liberation from the burden of a concrete political Utopia. Only in this way can capitalism gain converts and make profits."^^ In these quadrants at least, the leg- acy of Horkheimer/Adomo continued to exercise a strong — and dis- missive — influence. Melodrama, even with Sirk's consummate style and a socially critical infiection, remained for Schutte and Jansen sub- ject to the affirmative logic of mass culture.
Gertrud Koch's analysis of 1988 (published in Frauen und Film) offered an incisive challenge to auteurist dogma. She questioned the tendency to find persistent emphases across Sirk's work by tracing them "from past to present or from present to past, thus always resulting in a teleological whole which suppresses any ruptures." The director's work demonstrates an unfailing continuity in different times and different places only because critics do not bother to question the historical legiti- macy of their methodology.• '̂' Koch conceded that there are continuities
31. Peter W. Jansen, "Wo Utopie vor die Hunde geht," epd Kirche und Film (Febru- ary 1974): 7.
32. Jansen, "Wo Utopie vor die Hunde geiit" 7. 33. Jansen, "Wo Utopie vor die Hunde geiit" 8. 34. Gertrud Kocii, "From Detlef Sierck to Douglas Sirk," trans. Gerd Gemunden,
F;7OT Cr/7/mw 23.2-3 (Winter/Spring 1999): 16.
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of form and theme between Sirk's Ufa films and his Universal produc- tions, but saw them in a critical light. His melodramas, for all their ostensible humanism and warmth, privilege an authoritarian and sadistic gaze that transforms female bodies into deformed fetishes. This morify- ing force fixes on the living (especially sexualized women who invari- ably are made to look degenerate and unnatural), devivifies it, and consigns it to a fixed place. The "evil eye" at work in Sierck/Sirk's films has little to do with the nervous mise en scene of Weimar cinema and much in common with the perspective of Nazi features which seeks "a place assigned by tradition often established by a dictatorial camera. The dead gaze of the blind who have lost all orientation is a motif that will preoccupy Sirk throughout his most famous American films."
Reflexive Space Revisited It is not surprising that Linda Schulte-Sasse places Koch among the
ranks of "backlash critics" (these also include myself and Katie Trumpener) who question previous approaches to Sirk. In subjecting his output of the Third Reich to careful historical inspection, these com- mentators elaborate how this work, precisely because of its formal grace, stylistic flair, and apparent lack of politics, could find approval from both studio heads and party luminaries. At the same time, as press coverage from the period indicates, these features were in fact anything but devoid of ideological inscriptions. Schulte-Sasse pays lip service to some of these objections, but is uneasy about replacing what she calls one kind of apodicticism with another. In her own curious act of back- lash, Schulte-Sasse insists "that it is possible to look for something like resistance in his German work without being motivated by missionary zeal or historical apology. What is at stake in such a query is not only the stature of a canonized auteur, but the resistant potential of aesthetic operations themselves, whether within a totalitarian or a democratic context."''^ Proceeding to a close textual analysis of Schlussakkord [Final Accord], she shows how the film opens up a "reflexive space" that "forces its audience to move away from a seamless identification with narrative figures and a linear absorption by the plot's trajectory, and which encourages an awareness of the text as form." This space.
35. Koch, "From Detlef Sierck to Douglas Sirk" 25. 36. Linda Schulte-Sasse, "Douglas Sirk's Schlussakkord and the Question of Aes-
thetic Resistance," Germanic Review 73.1 (Winter 1998): 5.
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unlike that of most Nazi features, "is indebted to a refusal of a totaliz- ing narrative with an unambiguous moral anchorage." She lauds the opening of such a site of reflection as a "major accomplishment," deem- ing it a rarity given the Nazi state's strict coordination [Gleichschal- tung] of cinematic sights and sounds.''^
Schulte-Sasse celebrates Sirk's "reflexive space," responding to back- lash critics by beating a retreat to the Sirk boom. In Schulte-Sasse's argument, the Nazi feature (as once the Hollywood dominant cinema) appears as a standardized monolith and the age of Hitler (as previously the McCarthy era) as uniformly repressive.^ Many of the Nazi era's melodramas by Forst, Tourjansky, Harlan, Ucicky, Kautner, and Froelich (none of which receive mention in an essay that offers no out- side points of comparison) also present complicated networks of inner- and intertextual meanings as well as well as profusions of inscribed spectacles and references to the arts and the media. The claims Schulte- Sasse makes about Sirk's singularity could in fact, to varying degrees and with some necessary distinctions, be made (and, in fact, have been made) about the women's films of these other directors. Sierck is hardly singular or anomalous in having directed melodramas that are full of gaps and fissures. "Ideological contradiction is actually the overt main- spring and specific content of melodrama," Laura Mulvey pointed out while challenging Paul Willemen's notes on the Sirk system, "not a hid- den, unconscious thread to be picked up only by special critical pro- cesses. No ideology can ever pretend to totality: it searches for safety- valves for its own inconsistencies."^^
y\s I ponder Schulte-Sasse's notion of "reflexive space," I am reminded of Karsten Witte's far more compelling contributions on aes- thetic resistance.'*^ (Indeed, the influence of his seminal work on this subject seems very present in her argument, but it does not receive credit in her footnotes.) Although Witte nominally grants that moments of for- mal exception can be found in the productions of Helmut Kautner, Wolf- gang Staudte, and Peter Pewas, he does not allow us to forget that these films figured and functioned within a larger system and in no way
37. Schulte-Sasse, "Douglas Sirk's Schlussakkord" 6. 38. See Schulte-Sasse's characterization of "a regime and film apparatus whose own
totalizing effect is so well documented" (6). 39. Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," Movie 25 (1977-78): 53. 40. See particularly "Aesthetische Opposition? Kautners Filme im Faschismus,"
Sammlung: Jahrbuch fiir antifaschistische Literatur und Kunst 4 (1980): 110-123.
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undermined the operations of that system. To view works in isolation, he points out, is a favored ploy of revisionists who play up the exception and downplay the rule. "No Wysbar, Sierck, Tourjansky, Hochbaum, Pewas, or Kautner will ever keep Steinhoff, Riefenstahl, Ucicky, Ritter, or Harlan in the shadows. This infamous legacy is not divisible. One either accepts it as a whole or one misunderstands it altogether."^'
Contemplating Sierck's work in the Third Reich, I benefit from David Bathrick's conviction that any consideration of the possibilities and lim- its of artistic agency must ground endeavors within apposite historical times and places. Aesthetic complexity is not necessarily a mark of ideological subversion, for collusion and resistance, as Bathrick's work on GDR culture painstakingly demonstrates, can and do coexist. The Ufa films of Sierck readily confirm (and they are hardly unique in this regard) that a certain degree of resistance and reflexive space were in fact tolerated and even encouraged by the repressive ideology itself. If we talk about space, and I can hear David Bathrick speaking with his charismatic animation, we surely need to inspect the formal space of films with all due care, but we also must attend to the social space of cinema as well as the larger space of the public sphere from which films issue and in which they resonate.
41. Karsten Witte, "The Indivisible Legacy of Nazi Cinema," trans. Eric Rentschler, New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 30.