Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity

Description

The first truly interdisciplinary analysis to link Douglas Sirk's striking visual aesthetic to key movements in twentieth-century art and architecture, this book reveals how the exaggerated artifice of Sirk's formal style emerged from his detailed understanding of the artistic debates that raged in 1920s Europe and the post-war United States. With detailed case studies of Final Chord and All That Heaven Allows, Victoria Evans demonstrates how Sirk attempted to dissolve the boundaries of cinema by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into the colour, composition and setting of many of his most well-known films. Treating Sirk's oeuvre as a continuum between his German and American periods, Evans argues that his mise-en-scène was the result of an interdisciplinary, transnational dialogue, and illuminates the broader cultural context in which his films appeared by establishing links between archival documents, Modernist manifestos and the philosophical writings of his peers. Book jacket.;Part I. Sirk and the visual arts -- Thinking with the heart: Sirk and pictorial reception -- Concerning the spiritual in art: Magnificent obsession and the influence of modernist painting -- Part II. The shock of the new: traces of modernity -- The invasion of machines and machine culture -- Imitation of life and the depiction of suburban space -- Part III. Two architectural case studies -- Final chord and "Die neue Welt': the mise-en-scène of Aufbruch -- Back to the future: modernist architecture and All that heaven alows. Part I. Sirk and the visual arts -- Thinking with the heart: Sirk and pictorial reception -- Concerning the spiritual in art: Magnificent obsession and the influence of modernist painting -- Part II. The shock of the new: traces of modernity -- The invasion of machines and machine culture -- Imitation of life and the depiction of suburban space -- Part III. Two architectural case studies -- Final chord and "Die neue Welt': the mise-en-scène of Aufbruch -- Back to the future: modernist architecture and All that heaven alows.