Douglas Sirk

Too bad it was moderated by this bearded film professor/Sirk expert who kept asking loaded questions that the actresses weren't much interested in, and interjecting his own (bland) opinions and readings of the movie. (At one point, after an awkward silence when neither of them could answer his question about who else had been tested for their roles, the prof moved along with the comment, "Well, I happen to know the answer, anyway.")

It turns out that Susan Kohner is the mother of those two "American Pie" guys (they stood up in the crowd and took a bow), which I thought was a fairly bizarre connection.

Christ, Film Forum audiences can be the worst. I remember a critic in the Voice once complained that a screening of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, of all things, there was marred by audience laughter. I saw The Beast of Yucca Flats there about ten years ago, and damn, while it IS a famously godawful film, it's more of a venal, depressing, crawl-into-a-ball-and-die kind of godawful rather than a riotous and spirited kind of godawful (cf. Showgirls, The Apple), yet the whole audience was forcing the laughter out of their lungs at even the most entropic scenes. (And it was definitely forced rather than spontaneous laughter: a little too loud, high, staccato, and fast.)

And don't get me started on the time I saw Grey Gardens...

And at one point at this very screening Wed. night - this was at L.A.'s Egyptian Theater - a guy on the other side of the theater erupted at some laughers: "Will you shut up and give the film a chance!? It's STYLIZED!" I was bemused, as there wasn't too much laughing, really, and it was more or less at "appropriate" points in the movie. (There is quite a lot that's funny in it, mostly "intentionally," I guess I would say. I was laughing at stuff, and exchanging glances with my girlfriend, who had never seen it before.)

It seems to be universal that every crowd viewing "Imitation of Life" will burst into laughter and applause when Sandra Dee says, "Oh, mother! Stop acting!" Gets 'em every time.

on the one hand, it can be a kind of honest reaction, on the other, it seems often above all a controllable social reaction, somewhat forced. (but so are so many reactions to films, and other things.)

my snobbishness (or whatever it is) often gets the better of me, although i don't really regret that. the worst experience i had of this kind is during a screening of "ordet," when the crucial moment came and a few people behind me were chortling. i felt imposed upon (especially since i was crying my eyes out at the time), as though this person or persons had decided that a scene of resurrection was simply too silly to countenance, and--perhaps i was being paranoid--i took this to mean that he was thinking that dreyer, and the many sympathetic audience members the film has found in 50 years, are all somehow beneath his chastened view of things.

when i see a moment of extremity, extreme stylization, whatever, in a film, i often sort of let out an unanticipated grunt of awe, which can even resemble a laugh, but it's a laugh of being so impressed as to be beside myself. i find those sort of moments in films produce several reactions at once and i seem to make different sorts of sounds depending. that's not the same as howling laughter though.

pedantic sirk critics are many, unfortunately; not many critics that i've read seem to have really looked at the films for themselves. tag gallagher is one who has, i'd recommend his essays on sirk (though he prefers "scandal in paris" to any of the late universal pictures, oddly enough).

favorite moment in "imitation of life": "look, a falling star!", which i find to be totally inexplicably moving *and* funny, one of those moments where i tend to smile widely and/or make strange little noises in appreciation.

this was in boston ca. 2000. i think most of the audience was sympathetic.

i guess the way i view it, despite myself perhaps, is that that guy--for example--failed a test. it's not a good way to view things, because it can lead to a vision of cinema where directors are vying for the most patience-testing, most extreme forms. i.e. a world of von triers. there are other and better ways to go about making art. but i think crucially that neither sirk nor dreyer were ever after any sort of prize for extremity, quite the contrary. and it's the evident sincerity of their respective films (though i esteem dreyer much more, i should add) that makes me appreciative, and have so little patience for those who don't have any patience or imagination face to them.

reading many reviews of the passion showed a lot of critics determined to NOT be moved by something--and it makes me wonder how much an emotional reaction to art is voluntary.

I do this too. : \

i gotta see imitation of life! it's my mom's favourite movie!

'so please, no flash, no necking in the pew,
or snorting just to let your neighbour know

you get the clever stuff, or eyeing the watch,
or rustling the wee poke of butterscotch

you'd brought to charm the sour edge off the sermon.'

[...]

I do this too... kind of a guffaw of disbelief and delight. I haven't seen nearly enough movies that get this out of me, of course.

and it's the evident sincerity of their respective films (though i esteem dreyer much more, i should add) that makes me appreciative, and have so little patience for those who don't have any patience or imagination face to them.

And this is what I'm really wondering - what is it about the particular kind of "stylization" you see in Sirk movies (I haven't seen any Dreyer films - YET) that makes them so "risky" in this regard - so likely to produce uneasiness and maybe derisive laughter from modern-day (art house) audiences (but is it just modern-day? how did people respond back when these movies came out?) - whereas other movies that are very effectively and famously "stylized" to produce certain kinds of engagement and responses are more "safe," i.e. people won't laugh at them? (Obvious big names that pop to mind are Hitchcock, Godard, Kubrick, etc.)

I don't think it's as easy as saying, "The stylizations in those other movies are designed to 'distance' the viewer in a certain way, and lots of people 'know how' to appreciate those techniques as 'intellectual and ironic' - while movies like Sirks' use techniques to engage/"implicate" the viewer [see Am's citation of Von Trier as another kind of "implication"] that are more likely to make people feel uncomfortable or 'duped,' and so they laugh, etc."

I mean, that kind of explanation comes to mind, but I know it's more complicated than that. All these kinds of "stylization" are different, anyway; and I'm sure there are kinds of "engagement" in Godard and "distancing" in Sirk that makes it even less clear-cut a distinction. But there's clearly something different going on at a Sirk movie, when it can make a certain kind of supposedly film-savvy crowd uncomfortable in a way that some violent, here's-the-camera, here's-the-money Godard film won't. (But now I just feel like I'm just piling all this on the back of some hypothetical Film Forum-goers.)

Is it all just a matter of what kind of "stylization" someone personally finds effective, anyway? Am I "failing the test" when I laugh at "Titanic" or a Spielberg movie because I feel like it's just cheaply, uncreatively, ineffectively "manipulative"? Maybe Sirk (or whatever some other present-day examples are of movies that work like Sirk's, like the "Spotless Mind" anecdote above) just don't "work" for some people, and that's okay? Or does it really come down to more concrete things like "sincerity" (as Am describes), a sustained engagement with a set of ideas (visual and otherwise) and what's done with them, etc.? (Obviously I think the latter.)

cf

i think the code stuff was a way for me to say,i love the style, the melodrama and the beauty. esp. the beauty...holy fuck is the house that they move into cumworthy.

Not much to add to this thread that amateurist, ryan and others haven't already said. I do remember reading in the book Sirk on Sirk DS claiming he used his theater background a lot in thinking about his stories, particularly Greek tragedy. At first I thought this was incredibly prententious but I have come to believe it- thinking about the the Hadleys in Written On The Wind as being doomed to their fate makes a lot of sense and makes them even more sympathetic.

I probably agree with this but his influence on Fassbinder adds to his classic qualities

Polyester.

i hate the i-got-the-reference "HA!"

You people clearly need to see movies in sensory deprivation tanks.

The best recent essay on Sirk is by James Harvey. It appears as a chapter in his wonderful book "Movies in the Fifties."

For meta-significance, you should now watch its meta-remakes Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Far from Heaven.

i don't understand.

As for All That Heaven Will Allow, had the movie ended with Wyman entombed before her TV set, it might have been a masterpiece.

right because getting a man is the fucking be-all, end-all.

Churlish Alfred! Forgive the first Mrs. Reagan!

Yeah, Written, Tarnished Angels and Imitation are my favorites ... There's also a restrained (for him) b&w should-we-adulterate suburban soaper, There's Always Tomorrow, that reunites everyone's favorite killers Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.

riiiiiight.

this movie gives me hope in an american bohemia, it makes me happy that wyman saved herself from the suburbs, it makes me glad that rock hudson's charachter gor fucked, the tidy and neat ending literally gives me this tight, warm, optomistic, hope in the middle of my belly.

_Lured_ is wonderful.

Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Boris Karloff, and Cedric Hardwicke -- how eclectic can you get?

I said TCM but I meant Criterion. Trying to watch SHOCKPROOF sinced I can watch LURED elsewhere. So far so good,

since

Shockproof is pretty good, marred by a stiff villain and some very obvious studio interference with Sam Fuller's (!) script.

Literally just got done with Lured, which effin' rocked.

Made you post this? In every old British movie ever

Yes.

Very good, sir!

Stiff, non-menacing villain somehow added to the Sirkiness of it all. Seems like that guy was mostly a television actor who appeared on almost every single show during his heyday, at least according to his Wikipedia article, although nowadays he is pretty much forgotten.

Would have been a different movie if that guy was played by, say, Cagney or Widmark, by Dan Duryea or Robert Mitchum.

The new-ish Criterion Blue-ray of WOTW is luminous.

In the included featurette Robert Stack surprised me with his subtlety and intelligence.

Yeah, I remember thinking the same thing about hin.

Him even

I remember the Airplane guys saying that of all the old school stars they worked with Robert Stack was the one who TOTALLY got what they were up to.