Line #14 Creator/DouglasSirk


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3	-> ''"In tragedy the life always ends. By being dead, the hero is at the same time rescued from life’s troubles. In melodrama, he lives on — in an unhappy happy end."''
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5	Douglas Sirk (April 26, 1897 – January 14, 1987) directed several {{melodrama}}s that defined, for some, TheFifties at its kitschy worst: they were usually set in stereotypical StepfordSuburbia, had plots with the worst melodramatic clichés, and often featured the most boring and obvious {{Happy Ending}}s. They were also huge box-office hits at the time, but even when FilmNoir and TheWestern became VindicatedByHistory, people thumbed their noses at Sirk for not being TrueArt. That changed -- gradually, of course -- thanks to the help of edgy directors like Creator/JeanLucGodard and Creator/RainerWernerFassbinder, who picked up on the subtext of his films and realized that there was MoreThanMeetsTheEye, that the real story was to be found in the MeaningfulBackgroundEvent and the visual style of the film rather than the actual plot which was compromised by the era's censorship.
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7	Put simply, Sirk's films were a first-class GenreDeconstruction of the typical American family of TheFifties – rather than being obvious examples of all that was conventional and conformist, his films were an UnbuiltTrope that pointed out all that wrong with middle-class society and why the generation gap that defined the post-war generation happened. This was not willful reading, as Sirk had an incredible cultural and intellectual background.
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9	Born Hans Detlef Sierck in UsefulNotes/{{Hamburg}}, Sirk became involved with the German artistic community in the 1920s and '30s. He knew the likes of Max Brod, Creator/BertoltBrecht, Music/KurtWeill, and several others. He was also a major intellectual who knew his Creator/{{Euripides}} and Creator/WilliamShakespeare well. To put it simply, Sirk was already a master of PlayingWithATrope way before it became cool. The rise of [[UsefulNotes/NaziGermany Nazism]] caused personal trauma for him; his first wife became a Nazi and his second wife was Jewish, so his first wife consequently won custody of their son and Sirk was barred from seeing him. He stayed in Germany even during the early years of the Third Reich in the vain hopes of rescuing his son but ultimately, he and his wife had to be smuggled out of Germany to France and then to America. His son, sadly, died on the Russian front.
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11	In Hollywood he made his mark directing UsefulNotes/WW2 propaganda films before making a series of Creator/{{Universal}} melodramas in the '50s that starred Creator/RockHudson. They remain the star's best performances and Sirk felt that the latter was very underrated. He quit film-making after 1959's ''Imitation of Life'' (which would be Universal's biggest box-office hit until ''Film/{{Airport}}'' a decade later), and in his retirement he became TheMentor for several young film-makers including Creator/RainerWernerFassbinder, who made several films in homage to him. He would influence such subsequent film-makers as Creator/DavidLynch, Creator/ToddHaynes, and Creator/QuentinTarantino. (In ''Film/PulpFiction'', Creator/JohnTravolta's character orders the "Douglas Sirk steak," which can be served burned or bloody.)
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14	!! Selected Filmography:
15	[[index]]
16	* ''Film/PillarsOfSociety'' (1935)
17	* ''Film/{{Schlussakkord}}'' (1936)
18	* ''Film/LaHabanera'' (1937)
19	* ''Film/HitlersMadman'' (1943)
20	* ''Summer Storm'' (1944)
21	* ''A Scandal in Paris'' (1946)
22	* ''Shockproof'' (1949)
23	* ''The First Legion'' (1951)
24	* ''Film/ThunderOnTheHill'' (1951)
25	* ''Film/AgainstAllFlags'' (1952)
26	* ''Take Me to Town'' (1953)
27	* ''All I Desire'' (1953)
28	* ''Taza, Son of Cochise'' (1954)
29	* ''Film/MagnificentObsession'' (1954)
30	* ''Film/AllThatHeavenAllows'' (1955)
31	* ''There's Always Tomorrow'' (1956)
32	* ''Film/WrittenOnTheWind'' (1956)
33	* ''Battle Hymn'' (1957)
34	* ''The Tarnished Angels'' (1957)
35	* ''A Time to Love and a Time to Die'' (1958)
36	* ''Film/{{Imitation of Life\|1959}}'' (1959)
37	[[/index]]
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Context Creator / DouglasSirk