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Event
Imitation of Life
Sirks last movie in Hollywood, and last commercial picture, is the absolute triumph of melodramaa coldly brilliant weepie, a tale of two intertwined families in which the materialist optimism is continually counterpointed by an emphasis upon racist tension and the degeneration of family bonds.
"Sirk closed the 1950s and his feature-filmmaking career with Imitation of Life (1959), his most commercially successful movie. Its themes of mother-daughter love and abandonment, shame, and racial injustice provoked in many viewers at the time an endless flow of tears and can still bring on the waterworks today. I cant recommend this or any of Sirks melodramas highly enough, whether for first-time or repeat viewers." - Village VoiceEarly in IMITATION OF LIFE, Lana
"Turners character says, Maybe I should see things as they really are and not the way I want them to be. Oh, the irony. In Douglas Sirks films, however, it doesnt so much burn as blazeso fiercely, in fact, that its not difficult to understand how the irony and subversiveness for which Sirk is known among the cinephile crowd was lost on popular audiences at the time." - Kathleen Sachs, Cine-File
"For his last Hollywood film, Douglas Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent of rage at the corrupt core of American lifethe unholy trinity of racism, commercialism, and puritanism For Sirk, the grand finale is a funeral for the prevailing order, a trumpet blast against social façades and walls of silence. The price of success, in his view, may be the death of the soul, but its wages afford retirement, withdrawal, and contemplationand, upon completing the film, thats what Sirk did." - Richard Brody, New Yorker
"The film opens with a shot of diamonds slowly falling into a glass container and filling the frame from top to bottom. Sirk immediately and deliberately acknowledges the precious and artificial nature of the film and, much greater, the films metaphoric, almost pathological obsession with surfaces (from mirrors to the color of the characters skins)." - Slant Magazine
"A true womans picture and a masterpiece of female empowerment/female entrapment, the film, working from Fannie Hursts novel, is a lush Ross Hunter-produced Technicolor dream. But through dealing with single motherhood, racism, class-ism and what it means to better yourself and your children it also showcases some pretty intriguing human behaviors." - Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun
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LocationSuns Cinema (View)
3107 Mount Pleasant Street NW
Washington, DC 20010
United States
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