Douglas Sirk summary

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Douglas Sirk, orig. Claus Detlef Sierck, (born April 26, 1900, Hamburg, Ger.—died Jan. 14, 1987, Lugano, Switz.), German-U.S. film director. He was artistic director of theatres in Bremen (1923–29) and Leipzig (1929–36), Ger., and made several films before fleeing the country in 1937. He arrived in Hollywood in 1939, and in 1943 he directed his first American film, Hitler’s Madman. He joined Universal Pictures in 1950, where he directed comedy, western, and war movies but was best known for popular melodramas such as Magnificent Obsession (1954), There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), and The Tarnished Angels (1957), in which frightful emotional warfare lurks beneath the facade of upper-middle-class life. After directing his greatest success, Imitation of Life (1959), he retired to Europe.

Leipzig Summary

Leipzig, city, western Saxony Land (state), east-central Germany. It lies just above the junction of the Pleisse, Parthe, and Weisse Elster rivers, about 115 miles (185 km) southwest of Berlin. Leipzig is situated in the fertile, low-lying Leipzig Basin, which has extensive deposits of lignite

directing Summary

Directing, the craft of controlling the evolution of a performance out of material composed or assembled by an author. The performance may be live, as in a theatre and in some broadcasts, or it may be recorded, as in motion pictures and the majority of broadcast material. The term is also used in

film Summary

Film, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film