Douglas Sirk
Douglas Sirk ( born April 26, 1897 in Hamburg, † January 14, 1987 in Lugano, Switzerland; civil Hans Detlef Sierck ). He was born a German, had to flee Germany because of persecution by the Nazis in 1937. After stopovers in the Netherlands and France, he managed to reach the United States. Meanwhile expatriated, he accepted the proffered U.S. citizenship. After the war Sirk lived in Switzerland. Sirk was a successful stage director and theater director. When he was attacked, he went as a film director for Ufa and later became a successful director at Universal Pictures in Hollywood.
Life
Germany
Detlef Sierck spent his youth as the son of a teacher partly in Hamburg and Denmark. After graduation, he spent the end of the First World War as a midshipman in the Navy. From 1917 he studied under other laws of science at several universities and worked as an editor at the New Hamburg newspaper. From 1920/21 he was auxiliary dramaturg at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. From 1923 to 1929 he was senior director at Bremen Theatre. After another commitment, he was from 1929 to 1935 director of the Old Theatre in Leipzig. Although known as an opponent of the Nazis, he was awarded in 1934 by UFA, which was looking good directors after the emigration of many well-known artists, a contract as a director. In 1935, he made his first film and was responsible for the rise of Zarah Leander in the following years. His greatest success in Germany was the movie final chord. In his first marriage Sierck was the stage actress Lydia Brincken († 1947), married, who kept his name even after the separation, and had a son with her, the actor Klaus Detlef Sierck. The marriage was divorced in 1934. In 1934 he married Hilde Jary. With regard to the pursued as a Jewess Hilde Jary the couple left Germany in 1937 and went through the Netherlands, first to France, then to emigrate to the USA.
USA
In Hollywood, where Detlef Sierck renamed Douglas Sirk, he initially began working as a screenwriter. It was not until 1943, the film studio MGM him his first directing job. His first film in Hollywood was the anti-Nazi film Hitler 's Madman, a film about Reinhard Heydrich. He gained reputation with the elegantly staged melodrama Summer Storm of 1944, which was based on a play by Anton Chekhov. The critics praised the intelligent implementation of the template, and especially the sensitive management of the actors, including Linda Darnell in her best ever role. In 1948 he was selected by Claudette Colbert in person to be directing the film noir Sleep, My Love, during which Don Ameche attempts to drive Colbert unsuspecting wife to madness. Again could Sirk the sometimes illogical breaks the template into a compactly staged action to integrate.
1949 Sirk returned briefly to Germany, but he found no suitable environment for his creative impulses and soon returned to Hollywood, where he finally found his new artistic home at Universal Pictures. In the 1950s he became one of the most successful directors of melodramas that were his trademark. Together with producer Ross Hunter, he turned in 1953 some of the most stylish films of the genre, often remakes of old Universal classics. After a few smaller films, he was with all my longing, which describes the fate of a woman with a dubious past, played by Barbara Stanwyck, to its actual form language as a director. In his films, the individual is fighting for a place for his feelings against the conformist and restrictive codes of conduct of the Company.
In Jane Wyman Sirk found his ideal actress for emotional woman portrayed fates. The two films, the wonderful power of 1954 and All That Heaven Allows 1954 were successful at the box office and found favorable reception from the critics. In addition, they ensured the rise of Rock Hudson to the top star of the studio, which rendered his best acting performances under Sirk's directing. In subsequent years, Sirk turned with Written on the Wind, Battle Hymn, The Tarnished Angels, and time to live and time to die some of the best films of the genre at all. Especially with the latter film, a sensitive adaptation of the eponymous novel by Erich Maria Remarque with Liselotte Pulver, Sirk won the special respect by Jean -Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which were enthusiastic about the innovative use of new technologies like CinemaScope and Technicolor for describing well as sensitive and intimate moments. 1959 turned Sirk with As long as there are people with Lana Turner and Sandra Dee in the lead roles his last and most financially successful film. The strip offered a restrained study of racial prejudice and the inability feelings and Career unite. Juanita Moore was nominated for her portrayal of a self-sacrificing mother for an Oscar as best supporting actress.
Switzerland
A short time later Sirk moved for health reasons from public life to Lugano. In the 1960s he took sporadically Theater Director jobs in Germany, especially at Hamburg's Thalia Theatre, and the Munich Residenz Theater. From 1974 to 1978 he taught as a guest lecturer at the University of Television and Film Munich, where Rainer Werner Fassbinder one of his courses besuchte.1978 he received for his lifetime the German Film Award in 1986 and the Bavarian Film Prize.
Findings | Douglas Sirk Award
Sirk is one of today's most esteemed directors of the 1950s. Rainer Werner Fassbinder expressed partly ecstatic about the cinematic qualities of Sirk and was always freely admitted to have been influenced by his work. Pedro Almodóvar and Kathryn Bigelow also count him as their role models. Wim Wenders called Sirk a " Dante of the soap operas, " the was masterfully able to convey associated with the "American Dream" dark underbelly of U.S. society in dramatic pictures.
The Filmfest Hamburg awards since 1995, the Douglas Sirk Award annually to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to film culture and film industry. Laureates were much more inter alia Jim Jarmusch, Jodie Foster, Clint Eastwood, Tilda Swinton, Wong Kar- Wai, Isabelle Huppert, Stephen Frears, Peter Weir, Aki Kaurismäki, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Andreas Dresen