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Genre Films: OLLI: Spring 2021: week 5: Melodrama: Douglas Sirk: King of Hollywood Melodrama IMITATION OF LIFE: 1933: novel: Fannie Hurst / 1934: film: director: John Stahl: white mother & daughter: Bea & Jessie Pullman black mother & daughter: Delilah & Peola Johnson both book and 1934 film straightforward & unambiguous in attitudes re: race, motherhood, emotional centers for story title: refers to daughter trying to "pass" for white: imitating white life; Sirk subverts this: Stahl version: 1934 Sirk version: 1959 "invisible" storytelling techniques techniques that call attention to themselves story of 2 mothers: complementary issue of motherhood: as clouded as race: both black & white mothers exposed: clichés: excessive love/excessive egotism present mother/absent mother nurturer/sex object bald opposition becomes ironic versions of "good" mom opening scene: in the home: opening scene: in public: Coney Island: Bea caring for Jessie ("quack- Lora has lost Susie quack") Bea's success due to Delilah's recipe: Lora's success due to her beauty: partnership between 2 women she's a sexual object: actress Annie not part of it man enters Bea's life: after her success man enters Lora's life: in 1st scene: he's conscious reminder of her choice: between career & love Sirk's version deals with issues of: 1. race: but in 1950s America: issue much more complex than in 1930s: Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, etc.; Civil Rights issues not resolved Sirk avoids direct reference to Civil Rights Movement: but it's there under surface: Sarah Jane's refusal to go to school: Brown v. Board Sarah Jane's affair w/white man: loosening prohibitions Mahalia Jackson: participation in Civil Rights demonstrations : introduced black gospel music to mainstream theme of race not dealt with directly: becomes issue between black mother & light- skinned daughter : not issue between black domestic & white employer familial, not social, problem: crucial that white actress plays Sarah Jane: her problem shown as internalized: split character Sirk's reversal: stereotypes: blonde woman: self-centered, bad / dark woman: martyr-like, good (too much): shows how white woman & black woman are used vs. each other: white woman: embodies social standards of beauty that black woman can't achieve black woman: powerful rebuke to self-indulgent narcissism of white woman: white woman: dares to think of herself: Sirk's version deals with issues of: 2
2. failed motherhood: time frame of story: 1947-58: period of drastic shifts for women: female employment: grew by 50%: women pulled between careers & domestic life: mixed signals given to women at the time: restrictive attitudes: re: woman working & need or desire to work: 1963: 4 years in future: Betty Friedan: "The Feminine Mystique": suburban wives: sympathetically described: "Is this all?": women torn 2 mothers: Lora's life a sham, a performance / Annie has too much heart: smothers child: film becomes drama of split female consciousness: Annie as Lora's psychic other half: good mother to Lora's bad nurturer / to her egotist "natural" mother to her synthetic one "janitorial" worker to Lora's professional woman symbolically --- and literally --- black and white: film offers no way out: caught: Lora: the careerist: a female mannequin Annie: the traditional woman: fails at raising her daughter
3. criticism of American materialism: beads falling under credits: ultimate symbol of self-reflexivity of film: primary iconography of film: performance, spectacle, visual display: women's sole escape: towards theater: Lora: literally: actress: finds salvation on stage: maternal activities seem contaminated by material ones Susie: "Oh, mother, stop acting": but she's Lora's understudy (romance with Steve) Annie: pretends to be Sarah Jane's "mammy" / orchestrates her own funeral Sarah Jane: pretends to be white / mimics slave / works as showgirl and so, too, with many woman who saw film: element of pretense to their lives "Feminine Mystique": McCall's magazine: mid-1950's: "... the bored editors ... ran a little article called 'The Mother who Ran Away.' To their amazement, it brought the highest readership of any article they had ever run. 'It was our moment of truth,' said a former editor. We suddenly realized that all those women at home with their three and a half children were miserably unhappy." in other words: these women had been role-playing just like protagonists in film
One other factor: Lana Turner: 3
IMITATION OF LIFE as narrativized version of Lana's life: 1. Lana as "uninvolved mother": Cheryl Crane: recollections of maternal absence: but her nannies were European, not black Crane: amazed at parallels between their lives and characters' lives onscreen: star who spoils her daughter, but is never there / the pink bedroom her actual junior high school used for Susie's graduation 2. Stompanato affair: 4 April 1958 (Good Friday): Crane 15: overheard fight between Lana & Johnny Stompanato (gangster/thug); was alarmed when he threatened violence; got knife from kitchen, stabbed Johnny in chest in mother's bedroom; Lana: status as "unfit mother" broadcast: "greatest performance of her life" given on witness stand intimations of Cheryl's romantic involvement with Stompanato event was the context within which IMITATION was made: capitalized on scandal: filming: August thru October 1958: film: capitalized also on Lana's persona: what's onscreen bled over to personal life: characterized by quality of "detachment" in both dress & acting style: 1. dress: thruout 1950's: Lana associated with clothes: her films "sold" on basis of "million $ wardrobes": certain "Lana Turner look": expensiveness: jewelry, elaborate head-dresses, etc.: not "working" clothes: impractical: associated with glossy, "modern artifice": rather than "old-fashioned values" using synthetic fibers /colors plays down softness: dehumanizing: emphasizes artifice: gives sense in many of her films: she is "on show," performing: Sirk used this 2. acting style: key metaphor for imitation in the film: acting: Turner: set up as "actress" apart from her ability to act well; but she puts on performance thruout film: she's just as detached by acting style as by clothes Turner's habit: many later films: turns away from person she's acting with to deliver line: her acting poised and posed: she often looks out of the frame: towards camera her face moves little: compare to Judy Garland Sirk: "After Imitation of Life, Lana Turner said, 'Douglas, for the first time you have made me feel like an actress. It is not just being beautiful.' --- which, of course, is all she has ever been required to do."
Quotes: I tried to make it into a picture of social consciousness --- not only of a white social 4
consciousness, but of a Negro one, too. Both white and black are leading imitated lives .... There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass. It's hopeless. --- Douglas Sirk
The most important tool of my trade was a mirror. I always had a three-way full-length mirror outside my trailer door so that I could check my appearance before I went on the set. --- Lana Turner The mirror is the imitation of life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite. --- Douglas Sirk Every element in a Sirk film is on some level a reflection or mockery only of some other element of that same film. The revelations --- the moments which seem to take on special power --- lead us only to more reflections of these revelations, until we realize that the only real revelation is that everything is a reflection. --- Fred Camper
Film's finger on pulse of crucial issues: race and emerging feminism: #4 box-office draw of 1959: Universal's biggest money-maker till JAWS (1975) "Bending the Material": what to look for when viewing film: 1. unusual camera angles 2. lighting: does it match source? 3. placement of objects within frame: especially screens & mirrors placement of characters within frame 4. rooms heavily marked with characters' social situations 5. actors' delivery of lines 6. moving camera 7. color 8. heavy use of medium and long shots 9. backgrounds brought forward: screen has appearance of flat surface 10. choreography: as direct expression of character 11. theme of blindness