oh Lana Turner we love you get up

My review of Sam Staggs’ “Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of Imitation of Life” appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. While revisiting Douglas Sirk‘s film I poked around the internet a bit, and here are some findings:

Errol Morris speculates about the Ryberg Electronics label on the packing crates that Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) crouches next to after her boyfriend (Troy Donahue) beats her up.

Corbis captioned this photo “Lana Turner in Imitation in Life,” but the shot really belongs to Juanita Moore.

Here’s Frank O’Hara reading “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed”) at the Lockwood Memorial Library at SUNY-Buffalo on September 25, 1964.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s essay “Six Films by Douglas Sirk” was originally published in Fernsehen und Film in 1971. Its translation later appeared in the New Left Review and it can be yours for £3. It’s worth it. Some excerpts below:

on All That Heaven Allows

Douglas Sirk’s films are descriptive. Very few close-ups. Even in shot-countershot the other person doesn’t appear fully in the frame. The spectator’s intense feeling is not a result of identification, but of montage and music. This is why we come out of these movies feeling somewhat dissatisfied. What we have seen is something of other people. And if there’s anything there which concerns you personally, you are at liberty to acknowledge it or take its meaning with a laugh.
…

Women think in Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.

on Interlude

All Sirkian characters chase an ideal, a longing. The one character who got everything she wanted was destroyed by it. Does this mean that in our society people are only accepted if they are always chasing something, like the dog with its tongue hanging out? Just as long as they stick to the rules which allow them to remain useful. After seeing Douglas Sirk’s films I am more convinced than ever that love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument of social repression.

on Imitation of Life

It is the mother who is brutal, wanting to possess her child because she loves her. And Sarah Jane defends herself against her mother’s terrorism, against the terrorism of the world. The cruelty is that we can understand them both, both are right and no one will be able to help them. Unless we change the world. At this point all of us in the cinema cried. Because changing the world is so difficult.