Thinking with the Heart: Sirk and Pictorial Reception
Chapter 1 ("Thinking with the Heart: Sirk and Pictorial Reception) analyses some of the still moments that have been built into many of this director's most arresting cinematic tableaux in relation to three different models of pictorial reception (two contributed by Michael Fried, one by the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl). Evans's discussion of Fried's divergent notions of "absorption" and "theatricality" (the two ways in which a contemporary painting may address its beholder, according to the American critic) and Riegl's more complex conception of the possibility of attaininga state of "sympathetic attention" isused to elucidate a crucial scene in Sirk's 1953 film All I Desire, before being correlated with current research on the film spectator's "affective" response to melodrama to some degree.