One of the highlights of the Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland’s foremost film event, is always the retrospective, an in-depth look at a trend, country or filmmaker ripe for (re)discovery. This year’s edition, which ran August 3-13, was no exception, focusing on Douglas Sirk. The filmmaker has strong local ties beyond his historical importance: Sirk was a guest at the festival in 1978, and is buried in Lugano, roughly 27 miles south of Locarno. Additionally, a new book published to coincide with the event, authored by the retrospective’s co-curator Bernard Eisenschitz, drew heavily on research based on Sirk’s personal papers, stored at the Swiss Film Archive in Lausanne.
It was a suitably grand affair, including a guest appearance by noted Sirk aficionado Todd Haynes (whose 2002 effort Far From Heaven also screened as part of the tribute) to introduce the showings of All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. The latter played in Locarno’s flagship venue Piazza Grande, an open-air theater that can accommodate up to 8,000 viewers (added bonus: it was a gorgeous 35mm print, courtesy of the Cinémathèque Française). Haynes also sat down for an interview with the festival’s official video outlet, which you can watch here.
While he was on hand to talk about Sirk’s more widely known films, the melodramas that were the culmination of the filmmaker’s Hollywood years, another major selling point of the retrospective – indeed, the main cause of cinephile excitement when the subject was first announced – was the fact it would feature the complete works, including material that in some cases had been unavailable for years, primarily from the German period.
This was perhaps best summed up by the title Eisenschitz chose for his book: Douglas Sirk, né Detlef Sierck. Two sides of the same coin, a European auteur whose migrant status – not dissimilar to previous Locarno retrospective subjects like Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, and Jacques Tourneur – gave him a perspective that enabled him to put a different stamp on quintessentially American stories.
Ironically, U.S. studios were initially reluctant to work with him because, unlike Fritz Lang who had fled Germany in 1933, Sierck/Sirk had stayed until 1937 and willingly worked for UFA, which was under Nazi control (despite being married to a Jewish woman, which is also why his first wife prevented him from having contact with his son). To prove he didn’t share his former employer’s ideals, he accepted a modest Columbia gig and directed Hitler’s Madman (recounting a real-life massacre in a Czech village) in 1942, and this led to many more opportunities. A few years later, with Mystery Submarine, one could argue he poked fun at his early dealings with Hollywood via the story of a German immigrant who is accused of espionage.
Going back to the German films, the most striking aspect is perhaps how they go against Sirk’s dominant melodramatic image: a former stage director with a great appreciation for the classics, he brought the likes of Molière and Selma Lagerlöf to the screen, with the former as part of an early collection of shorts showcasing his sense of humor and comedic timing. The third of these works, Dreimal Ehe (1934), also stands out as a textbook example of the importance of archiving and film preservation, in terms of how the movie is now available to the larger public.
Originally made as a sound picture, the film survives only in a silent version, with subtitles accompanying the actors’ lip movements. The subtitles were written with the assistance of vintage censorship documents, which have proven increasingly valuable when it comes to figuring out how to reconstruct elements that time and/or third-party interference have damaged.
One could be forgiven for assuming Sirk’s career ended when he retired from Hollywood and returned to Europe, after years of commercial success and critical indifference. In fact, his artistic endeavors were bookended by German-language shorts, with the second batch invisible until very recently due to rights issues (once those cleared up, the three titles were restored just in time for Locarno, thus guaranteeing the retrospective’s status as a complete celebration of all things Sirk).
Released between 1975 and 1978, these films came about as a result of a reappraisal of the director’s work that was taking place in Europe. Among those championing Sirk’s output, besides the French magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma, was one Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who particularly enjoyed the 1950s Universal melodramas and drew on them for what became the most successful phase of his short but intense career. The two met, and Fassbinder suggested that Sirk become a teacher at the University of Television and Film in Munich. He accepted, on the condition that he get something out of it: the chance to make movies again after a decade-long hiatus.
The result was three short films he worked on with his students, credited as co-directors, and with some help from famous friends: Fassbinder appears in front of the camera in the final short, 1978’s Bourbon Street Blues. Much like the similar output of Italian director Marco Bellocchio, who runs a film school – though he hates to call it that – in his native Bobbio, these pieces of short form filmmaking are a great example of letting younger generations get acquainted with the basics of the profession, while the teacher gets to recognizably express himself in a slightly different format.
In short (pun not intended), over the course of ten sun-drenched days, Locarno attendees got to experience the full Sirk. And while not all screenings attracted equally sized crowds (Olaf Möller, who introduced the showing of Sirk’s second feature film The Girl from the Marsh Croft, joked that the not-so-full theater was due to it being one of the German movies), the enthusiasm was palpable at each of them, as a great of American cinema appeared in a new light on the biggest screens possible.
And the experience won’t be limited to Locarno. As is tradition, the retrospective will have reruns, in full (Paris, Madrid) or in part (Lausanne, Zurich). (Presumably, based on previous years, American venues will also take part in the celebration, but at the time of writing, no details have been announced.) A golden opportunity to rewatch stone-cold classics, get acquainted with the more obscure part of the oeuvre, and discover a previously unseen side of the director: the Sierck behind the Sirk, who learned to master all genres before becoming indelibly associated with one in particular. 
