Douglas Sirk and Representation

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The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently mounted a major retrospective of Douglas Sirk’s films, which included his first German productions from the Thirties (The Girl from the Marsh Croft, La Habanera) to his Technicolor melodramas of the Fifties (All that Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind). A masterful observer of American society—like fellow German émigrés Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch—Sirk’s films explore uncomfortable, unspoken truths and conjure complicated, conflicting feelings. FILM COMMENT’s Violet Lucca sat down with FC contributors Nick Pinkerton, Margaret Barton-Fumo, and Ashley Clark to discuss race and representation in Taza, Son of Cochise (54), The Tarnished Angels (57), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (58), Imitation of Life (59), and more.