Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity by Victoria L. Evans

Author:Victoria L. Evans [Evans, Victoria L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, Guides & Reviews, Individual Director
ISBN: 9781474409414
Google: vDVYDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07CN9S4KB
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2017-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.1 Frankie’s brutal beating of Sarah Jane in Imitation of Life.

Twenty years after Imitation of Life was first released, the director couldn’t remember if he had been able to make the mixed race girl’s ‘degradation’ extreme enough, but this brief scene remains shockingly brutal. In his faceless anonymity and the cold implacability of his fury, Frankie does become the all-encompassing personification of ‘Whitey’ that Sirk had asked his scriptwriters to provide.57 In the director’s own words, he wanted ‘the audience to get the feeling that this is not just the boy knocking [the mixed race teenager] down but society’, and there is no doubt that he has succeeded in his intention.58 The theme of racial oppression is also underscored by the words that are visible on the glass front of an empty building, just before Sarah Jane’s ordeal begins. When Frankie initially leads his former sweetheart to believe that they will both run away to ‘Jersey’, her joyous smile (shown mirrored on the window behind him as if this huge pane were a screen) is immediately cancelled out by the phrase that surrounds her reflected image. The combination of the words ‘liberty’ and ‘bar’ sums up Sarah Jane’s whole deplorable racial patrimony, an inheritance so pernicious that it threatens to destroy all of her hopes. Once the light-skinned mulatto’s African-American ancestry has been revealed, it will present an almost insurmountable obstacle to her freedom to pursue an entertainment career, to engage in a romantic liaison with a white man, or to remain in what is essentially a segregated neighbourhood.

Whatever reflexivity was evinced in the director’s decision to film the prelude to Frankie’s barbaric attack as a reflection (in the second such shot, he backs the frightened girl up against a brick wall), I would argue that it does not impair the spectator’s ability to empathise with his victim.59 This was not the opinion of Michael E. Selig, who concluded that these two indirect images (along with what he has described as the ‘excessively contrived action’ of this sequence) have the effect of qualifying ‘the viewer’s engagement’. To my mind, this abrupt switch to a completely different visual register, with its sombre tonality, accelerated pace of editing, unusual fragmentation and odd perspectives, serves to denaturalise the situation rather than to alienate the observer. This remarkable degree of stylisation forces the viewer to recognise the problem of racial discrimination, while at the same time enabling us to experience something of the suffering of its victims.

In particular, the many reaction shots of Sarah Jane’s imploring face, the helpless curve of her back when Frankie suspends her in the air and the crumpled heap formed by her body after she has been tossed aside all elicit our sympathy. This emotional connection is further enhanced by the keening wail of the ‘hot’ jazz saxophone and trumpet playing that accompanies these images of the unfortunate teenager’s vicious assault. Unlike the anodyne dance tune being broadcast over the radio while Sarah Jane tells Susie about her

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