Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Articles Department of Cinema and Photography Winter 1993 Pomp(ous) Sirk-umstance: Intertextuality, Adaptation, and All That Heaven Allows Walter C. Metz Southern Illinois University Carbondale,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cp_articles Published in the UIP Journal of Film and Video. Recommended Citation Metz, Walter C. "Pomp(ous) Sirk-umstance: Intertextuality, Adaptation, and All That Heaven Allows." The Journal of Film and Video 45, No. 4 (Winter 1993): 3-21. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Cinema and Photography at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Pomp(ous) Sirk-umstance: Intertextuality, Adaptation, and All That Heaven Allows By Walter Metz Published in: The Journal of Film and Video. 45.4 [Winter 1993]. 3-21. In “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” Christine Gledhill exposes the problems caused by film scholars attending to melodrama after privileging Douglas Sirk, creator of many 1950s melodramas, as a modernist, Brechtian auteur capable of transforming the lachrymose material presented to him into subversive art. The concentration on Sirk as an auteur did, however, ironically enable the 1970s critical discovery of the melodrama as a genre worthy of scholarly attention. However, the subsequent development of melodrama studies has never completely exorcized these auteurist roots. Film melodrama has primarily been judged politically progressive if it can be explained as using visual distanciation interventions by auteurs like Sirk.