Love may be blind, but Douglas Sirk, one of Hollywood's greatest directors of love stories, observed his métier with revelatory clarity. A 1980 feature-length interview with Sirk, "From UFA to Hollywood," a splendid extra on a two-disk set of his "Magnificent Obsession" (Criterion), from 1954—the film that made Rock Hudson a star and brought new life to the soppy genre of "women's pictures"—distills the director's artistry and offers a lesson in moviemaking. UFA, the leading German movie studio of the prewar years, is where Sirk (born Claus Detlev Sierck) made films before leaving the country, in 1937. The interview is not a survey of Sirk's career but rather an in-depth exploration of several key experiences, beginning with his creation of a star—Zarah Leander, a Swedish singer who had little acting talent but impressed him with "the force of her personality."
He describes their work together with the sort of psychologically acute visual sensibility that marks his movies: "My camera explored the whole strange Nordic landscape of her face. It was as if covered by a blanket of ice."At the time of the interview, the aged Sirk (whose precise birth date is uncertain) was still sharp; speaking in German, he enlivens incidents from five decades earlier with a wealth of precise and piquant detail and describes scenes from his movies with a three-dimensional fullness that makes them seem to unspool before your eyes. Sirk had always admired one Hollywood genre—melodrama, "these strange stories in which the bizarre, the impossible, the accidental, and the odd were boldly embraced to expose a force that lay underneath." He made his name with this genre, in films such as "Magnificent Obsession," about a playboy who becomes a brain surgeon in order to win the love of a woman who was widowed and blinded because of his recklessness. But in the interview Sirk reveals the political basis for these movies, which he calls "a whole series of investigations into the American middle class, because I remembered the middle class from the Hitler era as the soil in which dictatorships take root." He also expounds the extraordinarily modern aesthetic philosophy behind his glossy romances—"The surface isn't really the surface, but rather a manifestation of the depths"—and delivers a directorial credo: "Style is the most profound expression of personality." There's much, much more in the interview to fix a viewer's attention; the coherence and profundity of his deceptively casual reflections match those of his films.
Da The New Yorker, 9 febbraio 2009
