By all accounts, Douglas Sirk’s 1950s melodramas rocked Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s world when he first saw them in the early 70s. In “Imitation of Life: On The Films of Douglas Sirk,” a 1971 essay on Sirk included in the Criterion edition of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Fassbinder presages his own late-career turn towards films centered around female protagonists by marveling at Sirk’s unique way with women. “In Douglas Sirk movies the women think,” Fassbinder writes, as if this plain realization has knocked the wind out of him. “I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any.” He also marvels at the Hollywood director’s ability to subvert dominant society via low art, sneaking radical critique into “films that people in Germany with his level of education would have smirked at.”
What Fassbinder must have seen that those academic stiffs would have missed, was that Sirk needed the smirk in order to mask what he was “really” up to. When Fassbinder reworked Heaven’s basic plot and ideas into his own Ali: Fear Eats the Soul 18 years later, he dispensed with the beard. Refusing to allow the audience the option of wallowing in redemptive fantasy and ignoring the subtext, he brought the tragedy up to the surface where it couldn’t be missed.
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