from ... Nicholas Ray, and others have changed the genre. Additionally, the interior shots of the classroom (see figure 6) seem dominated by rectangular shapes: the classroom windows and the blackboard and map. Annie never reveals her true identity to Sarah Jane’s coworker. This interest has led to an increased understanding of the domestic melodrama's thematic motifs, narrative structure and presentational style — rescuing melodrama from the Woman's Picture ghetto. They were increasingly relying on big-budget blockbusters and avoid nuanced and culturally specific stories to make translation easy. Sarah Jane can “pass” as white because of her fair skin but despises the fact that her mother is black. Their contrast generates the theme of domestic love and its impediments. Second, the avenue the white mother chooses to pursue success becomes shifted to show business - represented by the decadent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda). Imitation of Life is a strong picture with an unusual plot. Sarah Jane seizes every opportunity to break away from her beloved mother to live (or perhaps imitate) a life that offers equal opportunities in the mainstream society. On the other hand, you have Beavers' being simple-minded, superstitious, and wanting to remain subservient to Colbert's, even when they've made enough money and it's no longer necessary. “I would have made the picture just for the title,” Douglas Sirk said of his last Hollywood production, “Imitation of Life” (1959). He asserts that Sirk's films fit into the category of films which initially appear to be fully and unquestionably within bourgeois ideology but which, upon closer examination, reveal cracks and fissures within it. Her pursuit of a career and denial of both Susie and Steve (who proposes, saying, "I want to give you a home") signify her rejection of love, both romantic and domestic - a rejection, however, the film cannot endorse. The black woman, Delilah, enters and says, in noticeable dialect, "It's raining so hard I brought rubbers and coat to fetch my little girl home." Or the films were said to be manipulative, just pulling the right strings to get a desired emotional response from the ticket-buyer. 28-29. Also, people almost preferred to create identity based on the gender and racism in the daily life. Romantic love, however, often confronts domestic love. The mammy/aunt jemima character type stands first and foremost for nurturing — raising and caring for children and adults. All rights reserved. Specifically, a mammy character does not just represent nurturing; she also promotes black women's exploitation as nurturers of white characters who hire and use her. and Ted Muehling Selects Lobmeyr Glass – A Brief Journal, BROOKLYN MUSEUM – Sam Taylor-Wood: “Ghosts”, THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART – Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, MORGAN LIBRARY AND MUSEUM – Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design, The Jewish Museum – Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margaret and H.A. Cinemark At first it appears there has been some mistake, but then Delilah sights her white-appearing daughter, Peola, half-concealed behind a book: "My poor baby. “Nature looms over the characters like a malevolent giant exhaling fetid vapors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 2001. Thematically, these events suggest that a certain amount of the 1934 moral code's stability has been disturbed by 1959. He lectures Lora, "Me, I'm a man of very few principles and they're all open to revision.". The film's unspoken tensions finally become articulated when Susie charges, "Annie's always been more like a real mother to me." Brandon French, On the Verge of Revolt: Women in American Films of the Fifties (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978). Sirk’s wide-screen, flaming Eastmancolor remake emphasizes the key elements of the earlier film but, eliminating the anticapitalist and feminist subtexts, renders the theme of racial exploitation all the more existential and horrific. 10. This tale of two single mothers, one black and the other white — and of maternal love, exploitation and crossing the color line — is a magnificent social symptom. The fifth episode, which involves a jailbreak, a hijacked train and a human bridge over a fearsome chasm, is an exercise in crosscutting worthy of Griffith. Teacher, has she been passing?" Set in New York in the 1950’s, Imitation of Life by Douglas Sirk portrays an intricate relationship between a Black American mother and her fair skin daughter, Sarah Jane. Recognizing that her theatrical career has distracted her from her responsibilities as a nurturer, Lora vows to return to Susie. Douglas Sirk, 1959) Sarah Jane does not want to be seen together with her mother and fears that her coworker will show up at any moment. It is not an easy decision and will undoubtedly torment her for the rest of her life. Another spectacle of injustice, “The House of Mystery,” a silent serial released in France in 1923 (out on DVD from Flicker Alley), might also have been called “Imitation of Life” (and vice versa). |, October 21, 2019 Imitation of Life Analysis. Soon after, she sends her lover on a sea voyage (he's an ichthyologist) so that her daughter won't be disturbed by their marriage. After the subjects were exposed to aggression, they were tested for the amount of imitation and non-imitation aggression. (e.g., Robert Warshow on the gangster and Westerner, and Andre Bazin on 1930s genres). It remains an enigma because Annie's death halts all development of the narrative and there is no post-funeral sequence, as in the 1934 film. The viewer also disregards the dancer's tongue-in-cheek attitude when he/she accepts Annie as the true mammy; just as in 1934, she cannot bear to "unborn (Delilah's term) her own child. True, some of these films do present the victimized woman sympathetically, but female viewers easily get the central message: express your sexuality outside of marriage and you will be punished. Hollywood is more driven by foreign markets abroad. Having discussed some of the domestic melodrama conventions operating in IMITATION OF LIFE (1934), we may now summarize a working definition of the genre: IMITATION OF LIFE (1934) well represents each of these tenets and illustrates how a topical theme (racial inequality) becomes shaped to fit the genre's demands: Peola's mother becomes the target of her anger as the anger remains displaced from its true target, white societal structures. 17. Sara Jane has ostensibly left her mother in order to enjoy the advantages of white culture, but this scene illustrates just how illusory white bourgeois values are. Essay, Use multiple resourses when assembling your essay, Get help form professional writers when not sure you can do it yourself, Use Plagiarism Checker to double check your essay, Do not copy and paste free to download essays. Marxist feminists argue that woman's consignment to limited wife and mother roles serves the interests of the bourgeoisie and its (dominant) ideology. The sense of Brechtian alienation produced by Moore’s masklike, near-perpetual smile is matched by having a white actress (Susan Kohner) play her daughter, Sarah Jane. You have Colbert's character inviting Beavers into her home and not showing an ounce of racism as she talks to her, or concern when by hiring her they'll live together. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Determined to break away from her mother, Sarah Jane then picks up her suitcase to start packing. Thematically, the most interesting of these is the already mentioned sequence in which Sara Jane denounces Annie just before the mother dies. The real martyr, however, is Washington’s Peola. This appalling spectacle of pride and shame is topped by the climactic funeral, in which the remorseful child flings herself on her mother’s white-on-white coffin. I think Bea would answer that question: "No. André Bazin's admonitions against a "cult of personality" ring in my ears when reading Grosz, Willemen, Halliday and others. Armed with this tentative definition of 1930s melodrama, we may now proceed to the next step - to understand how the genre has changed over the years. Plato believed the original idea to be the truth and the imitation that comes after to be inferior. Delilah's nurturing impulse has quickly become Peola's uncovering. They also show movie stunts to attract audiences. How true this trend was 82 years ago, and how true it is today (see 'Creed'). Women are charged with the wifely duty of maintaining the worker (providing food and sex, maintaining the home as a site of re-creation and recreation, washing, repairing clothes, and so on) and the motherly duty of producing, nurturing, and socializing new workers (children). "[11] Haskell characterizes a major ideological shift between 1934 and 1959; she discusses the unresolved discord in 1950s U.S. society (as represented in the cinema) which results in, "the paradox - the energy, the vulgarity, the poverty of values, the gleaming surfaces and soulless lives, the sickness of delusion, the occasional healthy burst of desire - of America, of the fifties, of the cinema itself."[12]. Imitation of Life was originally a popular but unremarkable romantic potboiler novel by Fannie Hurst. The Colbert story is cute on its own, but I wish the emphasis had been placed more on Beavers, that it had been a movie more from her viewpoint with the minor character and subplots belonging to Colbert instead. It is encouraging to come across a film which treats so controversial a subject so honestly, even though the producers have played for safety by making It the minor theme. However, anyone familiar with the genre's conventions knows that such hedonism can't last long. It originally appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, No. a performance in the Cotton Club, Beauty Behind the Veil… an unfinished story. Thus the 1959 version of IMITATION OF LIFE may be read as a critical, disrupted vision of a world that 1930s Hollywood usually took for granted. Sarah Jane does not want to be seen together with her mother and fears that her coworker will show up at any moment. That solution is rooted in the ideology of the suffering woman and it's outdated.