ABSTRACT
Douglas Sirk’s cycle of 1950s melodramas earned him recognition as one of Hollywood’s preeminent colorists. Along with Vincente Minnelli and perhaps Nicholas Ray, Sirk raised the aesthetic profile of the domestic melodrama in the 1950s by innovating expressive forms of color lighting and mise-en-scène. These qualities were understood by the first wave of Sirk’s auteur critics as generating a distancing, selfconscious artifice. Fred Camper commented in a 1971 issue ofScreenthat Sirk’s films are “about their own style,” “call attention to their own falseness,” and that “objects and areas are never allowed to have the primary physical meaning which they have in real life” (Camper 1971in Fischer 1991: 254, 255, 266). In the same issue ofScreen: Paul Willemen listed “the use of baroque colour-schemes” among Sirk’s six methods of introducing “a distance between the film and its narrative pretext” (Willemen 1971in Fischer 1991: 270). More recently Russell Merritt singled outAll that Heaven Allows(1955) for creating “an utterly transgressive color system” (Merritt 2008: 12). Sirk’s colors do ring of artifice, but at the same time they exact emotion. Following Barbara Klinger’s seminal observations on melodrama (1994), I want to suggest thatthe modernist argument can obscure the affective power of Sirk’s color designs, the way that color answered the overt expressive demands of mid-century melodrama.
