by Tag Gallagher
I first saw Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life in 1959 at The Yeadon, a neighbourhood movie house in a white working-class suburb of Philadelphia. I was 16. Imitation of Life was about four women, two of them black. When we came out afterward, most of us were crying. The theatre owner's wife was standing in the lobby with a box of Kleenex. Many people gratefully took a tissue to dry their eyes.
This is what Sirk wanted, I believe. The critics had barfed all over the film, hating it as “a soap opera” for the same reasons Sirk and we loved it. The movie had played us, communally, as its instrument. It had passed like a ritual sacrifice, with fear and pity climaxing with the immolation of the (black) heroine for us whites. This movie experience had had a quality I would call “sacramental” but which Douglas Sirk, following his beloved Arthur Schopenhauer, preferred to call “irony” – in the Aristotelian sense: art's ability to clarify and anneal. Sirk thought movies should function for society, as Socrates' dialogues and Euripides's melodramas did in ancient Athens. Imitation of Life seared us. The melodrama played the audience, as though we were its piano. “Melodrama” means “music and drama”. Music with the text accentuates emotions, which in cinema enact battles of love and dread, good and evil, light and darkness, in movements choreographed. Movies that move, which have first of all to be emotional experiences, are quintessentially melodramatic – motion and light and music and text. L'Arrivée d'un train à la gare de Ciotât, The Searchers, Star Wars, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Birds, Pierrot le fou, Paisà, Snow White, Citizen Kane, Diary of a Country Priest (1) … what good movie is not ultimately good melodrama?
more on senses of cinema