Inviato 25 giugno 2007 - 21:01
The best way to understand postmodernism is to think about the story of
Douglas Sirk. Of Danish extraction, Sirk settled in Germany, working in the
theatre until 1934 when he began making films at UFA, the largest German
studio. He left three years later, by which time his vaguely leftist credentials
had begun to cause him trouble. Settling in the United States in 1939, he
languished at Warner Brothers and Columbia before catching on with Universal
where he made the five movies on which his reputation rests: Magnificent
Obsession (1952), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind
(1956), Tarnished Angels (1957) and Imitation of Life (1959). This work is
of a piece: big-budget, commercially successful (except for Tarnished Angels)
melodramas, starring Rock Hudson (except for Imitation). At their release,
they received no critical attention; like most Hollywood products, they
entertained, made money and vanished.
In the late 1960s, however, then retired to Switzerland, Sirk began giving a
series of interviews to film scholars. He now claimed that his movies
(remarkably dated in just 10–15 years) had, in fact, been subversive, critical
parodies of American ‘bourgeois values’ and Hollywood’s taste for melodrama.
Intentionally or not, Sirk had perfectly timed his play. It was eagerly received
by an Anglo-American film studies community aflush with two incompatible
enthusiasms: auteurism (which focused on a movie’s director) and leftist
ideology. Sirk provided a bridge between the two, as an auteur hero whose
struggle against Hollywood’s ‘repressive studio system’ had involved sly
criticisms of capitalist values. That these values rested above all on exactly
the kind of individualism auteurism assumed bothered no one. The Sirk boom
was on, and analyses of his films flowered in journals and at conferences. By
1978, one film scholar could matter-of-factly refer to Sirk’s ‘famous ironic
subtext’.
As a parable, what does this story tell us about postmodernism? To start
with, Sirk’s interviews involved a remotivation of his own films: by commenting
on them, he changed their meaning, redeeming an otherwise valueless currency.
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