Douglas Sirk quotes
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“These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.”
-- Douglas SirkSource : "The Essentials: Douglas Sirk", www.indiewire.com. April 26, 2013.
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“At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.”
-- Douglas SirkSource : Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker
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“For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”
-- Douglas SirkSource : Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker
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“There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections”
-- Douglas SirkSource : Douglas Sirk, Lucy Fischer (1991). “Imitation of Life”, p.228, Rutgers University Press
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“I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them”
-- Douglas Sirk -
“There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.”
-- Douglas Sirk -
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“My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.”
-- Douglas Sirk
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