1POPULAR CINEMA

Sirk continues to feature prominently in the debates on genre cinema and
dominant ideology. Organized around oppositional terms such as conventional
vs. innovative, subversive vs. affirmative, and transgressive vs. repressive,
these debates have shed light on the remarkable productivity of the
melodramatic form and its potential as a means of aesthetic resistance. During
the last decade, such readings and rereadings have been extended to the
German Sierck and his hyperbolic representations of femininity in the registers
of the foreign and the exotic. 3
However, is it possible to examine the changing currency of stylistic excess
in the transition from 1930s German cinema to 1950s American cinema
through the textual categories of genre and authorship without taking into
account the changing historical contexts? More specifically, can we apply
these critical oppositions to a popular cinema in which the ideological function
of melodrama seems so closely linked to oppressive notions of gender
and where authorship remains a highly contested category, particularly in
connection with a problematic notion like resistance? On the following
pages, I focus on Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936) to address some of these
questions, first through a closer look at the various influences on the early
Sierck and his subsequent elevation to the status of auteur and, second,
through the high-cultural references, including music, that made melodrama
the preferred form of artistic expression both for him and for an entire
generation of directors during the Third Reich. 4 As I hope to show,
closer attention to the historical articulation of film authorship moves the
terms of the debate beyond the false alternatives of melodrama as a liberating
excess in signification, especially around issues of femininity, and of
melodrama as part of a masochistic aesthetic that ends up legitimating
social and sexual discrimination. 5 By considering the cultural and social significance
of stylization, I want to explore a third possibility, the role of formal
excess in engaging particular audiences and granting particular pleasures
within the changing determinants of genre cinema.
An authorial style defined in such contextual terms includes the director’s
reliance on, and reference to, shared tastes, sensibilities, and modes of
appreciation. These elements influence his aesthetic choices, including the
affinity for theatricality, and connect them to the class-based cultural traditions
that inform the popular reception of the melodrama. Such a framework
of references sheds light on how existing cultural and critical traditions
are integrated into, and transformed within, the framework of the
melodramatic and how transgressive and affirmative effects can be ascribed
108 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich