Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.

Introduction

After describing one of Peter Greenaway's recent efforts to move beyond the limits of the cinema, Evans proposes that Douglas Sirk had already begun to dissolve the boundaries the medium by assimilating elements of avant-garde art, architecture and design into his mise-en-scène. She goes on to assert that Sirk's importation of a high art aesthetic into the low genre of melodrama echoed the widespread European Modernist preoccupation with the creation of a synergistic Gesamtkunstwerk or "total art work" during the period in which he intellectually came of age. Finally, the director's tendency to create "pictures" of the external landscape that the characters (and the viewer) are obliged to contemplate through the window frame is interpreted in the light of the theories of Le Corbusier.

Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space

After some discussion of the impact of the automobile on the shape of the twentieth-century American city, Chapter 4 ("Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space") contrasts John Stahl's 1934 adaptation with Sirk's 1959 cinematic version of Fanny Hurst's best-selling 1933 novel. Among other things, this comparison shows how the director has inscribed the "color line" that divided African-Americans from whites after World War II into Lora Meredith's leafy suburb in the later remake. The historically informed interpretation of the built environment that supports this conclusion also establishes the general context for the final section of this book, which consists of two architectural case studies that are each devoted to one particularly significant film.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Magnificent Obsession and the Influence of Modernist Painting

Chapter 2 investigates the influence of Modernist art and art theory on this highly sophisticated film artist's formal approach, which includes a rereading of Magnificent Obsession that has been deeply informed by the writings of the pioneering German Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky. Some mid-century American responses to Modernist art published in the popular press are also scrutinised before looking at Sirk's depiction of the other characters' reactions to the self-described "Surrealist" artist that appears in his 1951 small town musical comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal? Finally, two texts that have previously addressed the relationship between film and painting, Brigitte Peucker's Incorporating Images: Film and the Rival Arts and Angela Dalle Vacche's Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film, are considered in passing.

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.

Final Chord and ‘Die Neue Welt’: The Mise-en-scène of Aufbruch1

Chapter 5 ("Final Chord and 'Die Neue Welt': The Mise-en-Scène of Aufbruch")examines the only film from Sirk's German period to depict twentieth-century urban life. In the prologue that the director added to the existing script, two antithetical aesthetics appear to underscore the philosophical and political disparities that distinguish a democratic New York from a Fascist Berlin. Because the architectural symbolism of each of these cities may be read both positively and negatively (from a Modernist and a National Socialist point of view), after outlining the main arguments on either side, the author then attempts to resolve the vexed question of which metropolis offers the most desirable "New World" of the future, based upon the formal and narrative evidence that is provided by the film.

The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture

Chapter 3 ("The Invasion of Machines and Machine Culture") builds upon Ben Singer's observation in Melodrama and Modernity that this genre reflects the spectator's growing fear of the machines that have begun to physically invade our space. It further expands upon this insight by moving beyond the widespread feelings of psychic unease Singer identifies to address some of the more specific pathologies that arose from theincreased mechanisation of war during the early twentieth-century. This chapter culminates in an explication of The Tarnished Angels that has been grounded in Ernst Jünger' spaens to the hard-bodied men who were forged in the furnace of battle (a particularly apt means of explaining Roger Schumann's personality), widely circulated writings that the German born director would no doubt have known.