Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher

by Robert B. Pippin, Costică Brădățan (Series Editor)

It would be easy to dismiss the films of Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) as brilliant examples of mid-century melodrama with little to say to the contemporary world. Yet Robert Pippin argues that, far from being marginal pieces of sentimentality, Sirk's films are rich with irony, insight and depth. Indeed Sirk's films, often celebrated as classics of the genre, are attempts to subvert rather than conform to rules of conventional melodrama.



The visual style, story and characters of films like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are explored to argue for Sirk as an incredibly nuanced moral thinker. Instead of imposing moralising judgements on his characters, Sirk presents them as people who do 'wrong' things often without understanding why or how, creating a complex and unsettling ethics. Pippin argues that it this moral ambiguity and ironic richness enables Sirk to produce films that grapple with important themes such as race, class and gender with real force and political urgency.

Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher argues for a filmmaker who was a 'disruptive not restorative' auteur and one who broke the rules in the most interesting and subtle of ways.

Genres: Film

168 pages, Hardcover

Published April 8, 2021

About the author

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Amir · Rating 4 out of 5]

به لطف مؤلف، بخت اینرا داشتم که اثر را پیش از انتشار مطالعه کنم. جذاب‌ترین بخش کتاب برایم مقدمه‌اش در باب ملودارم بود که، در کنار مقالۀ کلاسیک توماس الزاسر، یکی از بهترین متونی است که در باب ملودرام در سینما خوانده‌ام. سه فصل بعدی هر کدام به خوانش یکی از سه فیلم «تمام آنچه خدا مجاز می‌داند» و «نوشته بر باد» و «تقلید زندگی» اختصاص دارند. فصل مربوط به «تمام آنچه خدا مجاز می‌داند»، که نسخه‌هایی از آن قبلاً در قالب مقاله و فصلی از کتاب پیشین پیپین منتشر شده بود، یکی از درخشان‌ترین خوانش‌های سینمایی اوست، دو فصل دیگر اما، به رغم نکات نظیرگیری که داشتند، انتظارم را برآورده نکردند. در واقع پیپین با نوشته‌های قبلی‌اش انتظار را به حدی بالا برده که این دو فصل خوب برایم در حد بهترین تفسیرهایش قرار نمی‌گیرند.‏

[David Sterritt]

Robert B. Pippin’s new book on “Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher” is surprisingly weak, especially since Pippin has stronger philosophical credentials than most cinema scholars, and Sirk was the certified intellectual who made the oft-quoted remark that “the angles are the director’s thoughts, the lighting is his philosophy.” Pippin gives serious discussion to only three of Sirk’s many films, and while they’re certainly among his most important, it’s hard to imagine why such major works as “The Tarnished Angels” and “Magnificent Obsession” and “There’s Always Tomorrow” and “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” are barely mentioned, or not even that, much less probed and analyzed. Pippin has a shaky understanding of how film music works, and his responses to Rock Hudson’s quintessentially Sirkian performances are superficial at best. On the upside, he has interesting things to say about melodrama as a mode of American self-understanding, and he got me thinking again about the relationship between Sirk’s ingenious irony and the way general audiences tend to perceive his films. Then again, Pippin has a Kael-like tendency to mistake his own perceptions for “correct” perceptions, which is a poor way to understand the multiplicity of thoughts and feelings that a Sirk masterpiece can evoke. And what a carelessly written book this is, full of shaky syntax and iffy punctuation. In all, quite a let-down.

[Nat]

I didn't know that Sirk (born Hans Detlef Sierk) studied with Panofsky! (p.21)