FrontRow Presents: A Film Series — The Melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Last December, we concluded FrontRow’s inaugural film series with a wonderful, well-attended showing of Cinema Paradiso at The Texas Theatre. Now, we pick up where we left off. I’m very proud to announce a new FrontRow Film Series in partnership with The Texas Theatre:

The Melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder

April 11 – All That Heaven Allows(1955), Douglas Sirk

April 18 – Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (1974), Rainer Werner Fassbinder

May 2 – Imitation of Life(1959), Douglas Sirk

May 16 – In a Year With 13 Moons (1978), Rainer Werner Fassbinder

(All movies begin at 7:30 p.m. — click the movie titles for synopses)

Last fall, FrontRow kicked off its film series programming with movies chosen by local arts leaders in response to a question: “What movie do you believe people living in Dallas today need to see?” This next series is, in many ways, my answer to that question. Taking place over the course of four Mondays in April and May, and featuring post-screening discussions in the Texas Theatre’s bar, the film series will pair the work of two great German filmmakers who utilized the genre of the melodrama to look deeply into the underbelly of civilized society.

Douglas Sirk was a German émigré who moved to the United States in 1930s. Once settled in Hollywood, Sirk developed a unique style: lush, lyrical cinematography dressing deceivingly simple romantic tales that sweep audiences up in an emotional tide, while subtly leveling pointed critiques at the manners and mores of contemporary society.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is Douglas Sirk’s unofficial heir. One of the most prolific filmmakers in the history of cinema, Fassbinder discovered the films of Sirk in the early 1970s. He immediately set about imitating their style and form, creating scathing cultural critiques of a West German society still mired in an uncertain relationship with the history that underpinned its cultural habits. Through the genre of melodrama, both Sirk and Fassbinder found a way to transcend national cinema and create enduring, universal parables of human struggle and love. These are movies that, I believe, continue to hold strong lessons and insight into our own time and culture.

We hope you can join us for the series and support The Texas Theatre in the process, kicking off with Sirk’s classic All That Heaven Allows, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. After each screening, we will convene in the bar of the Texas Theatre to discuss the films, and we hope to include some special guests later in the series to assist the conversation. Pre-purchase tickets on the The Texas Theatre’s website.

UPDATE:You can pre-purchase tickets for individual screenings on the Texas Theatre’s website, but if you come to the first screening, you can purchase a package of tickets for all four screenings at a discount (a savings of eight bucks). And remember, ticket sales proceeds all go to supporting The Texas Theatre and all the fantastic, one-of-a-kind programming they have been bringing to Dallas.

UPDATE2: Looks like you can’t quite pre-purchase tickets on the website yet. But that is not a big deal, since you want to come to the first screening and purchase the four pack. We’ll let you know on this post when the online ticket sales are working.

More about the idea behind the series:

The Social Bends: The Melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The melodrama is a contradictory, underestimated cinematic genre. Often dismissed as cheap, dime-store storytelling, melodramas are deeply engaged in movie watching as momentary escape. They are deliberately constructed to provide the viewer with an exaggerated emotional experience and bring the audience member on an almost out-of-body emotional ride. Focusing on regular, everyday people engaged in romantic or aspirational situations, melodramas seek to manipulate our emotions — usually in an overt manner.

And yet it is this very exaggerated nature, the overt-ness of the melodrama that lends it a particular self-conscious quality, breaking down the barrier of believability between the viewer and the illusion of reality provided through the experience of the movie theater. You know a melodrama when you become aware of its efforts to seduce you emotionally; thus the melodramatic experience is one of continual fluctuation between an immersion in and resistance to the manipulated reality put forth on the screen.

It is precisely this “in-between” state that fascinated German-born filmmaker Douglas Sirk with the genre of the melodrama. For one, the brute appeal of stories of exaggerated passions offered the filmmaker what any artist desires: that a great number of people see his or her work. But the irony of watching an escapist melodrama is that, in a way, you are made more aware of the act of watching than in other genres of movies. The stories draw you in and out of gossip — and there is much gossip in Sirk’s films’ dialogue — the audience continually being implicated with, and made suspect of, the story and its players. The films also create simple dramatic dilemmas that emerge as ingeniously critical probes into a far-reaching social disease. What always lingers after watching a Sirk film is as a sense of an underlying, unseen, inexplicit tension — a sense of frustration not dissimilar to the experience of a Kafka story — and social tone that feels darker and darker with each viewing of his movies.

The career of Douglas Sirk overlaps an intriguing period in the history of German cinema. Back in Sirk’s native country, movie audiences dwindled and studios churned out a steady stream of diversion films, glossy trifles that accompanied an unreflective period of economic boom in that country’s history. It is in reaction to these movies that the filmmakers who made up the New German Cinema emerged in the late 1960s, flourishing in the 1970s.

One of those filmmakers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, discovered the movies of Douglas Sirk in the early 1970s. As critic Anton Kaes describes in his book From Hitler to Heimat, in Sirk, Fassbinder saw a way of reading continuity into the history of German cinema between the great expressionist masters of the 1920s and 1930s and the young filmmakers of the 1970s. In addition, the concerns present in Sirk’s studies of 1950s America translated easily in the stifled, suspicious, and xenophobic society which Fassbinder observed around him. Kaes writes:

[Sirk’s] melodramas invariably deal with people doomed to failure in a hostile social environment. In Fassbinder’s eyes, Sirk depicted unbridled passion in a distinctive manner, making filmic space itself signify through high-contrast lighting, through the symbolic use of everyday objects like flowers, mirrors, pictures on the wall, pieces of furniture, and clothing, and finally through careful compositions and a dramatic mise-en-scene– most of which harked back to Sirk’s beginnings as a theater director.

Fassbinder also had deep roots in the theater, and often the translation of his sense of theatrical blocking to the screen amplifies an unsettled, awkward feeling that permeates Fassbinder’s films like a bad hangover. Fassbinder’s films are more severe and aggressive than Sirk’s, but, as Kaes writes, his language is essentially the same:

[Fassbinder’s films] consciously evoke Sirk’s style, making use of melodramatic plots, “unrealistic” lighting, obtrusive camera movements, and artificial, highly stylized décor. Overly melodramatic music breaks the illusion, and a theatrical gestural language keeps the viewer at a critical distance despite the open display of strong emotions.

It is precisely this combination of the open display of emotions and the critical distance that I found interesting about the idea of pairing the films of Fassbinder and Sirk. They are challenging films, and especially in the case of Fassbinder, not always easy to watch. But they also embody qualities that the cinema particularly excels in: they are deeply feeling, robustly involving, and eerily transporting. These movies allow you to enter a world both strange and familiar, and it is impossible to leave any of these films without a new reading on the mechanisms of social mannerisms presence in the world around us.

The particular insights (and accusations) of these individual films may or may not ring true to the Dallas in which we live today. But the method by which these films draw attention to the underlying tensions in society — covered up and subdued by the blur of the everyday — force associations with the world around us to rush to the surface. The experience of a Sirk or Fassbinder film is analogous to that of a diver making his or her way to the water’s surface level too quickly. It is a disorienting, painful experience: the after effect of emergence.