Sirk Retrospective Brings Art of Sabina Streeter to Sag Harbor Cinema

In the 1950s, German-born director Douglas Sirk became a master of the melodrama in Hollywood, making films that reflected a complicated postwar American suburban society, replete with all its hidden truths and subverted meanings.

From March 10-16, Sag Harbor Cinema will present “Tarnished Angels: Douglas Sirk’s America,” a mini-retrospective focusing on the filmmaker’s career. Some of Sirk’s most successful and memorable Hollywood films will be screened, including “Imitation of Life,” “Written on the Wind,” “All That Heaven Allows” and “The Tarnished Angels.”

As a director, Sirk had a strong influence on the work of subsequent filmmakers, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch and Todd Haynes. As part of the retrospective, Haynes’ 2002 film “Far From Heaven,” which has been described as his most “Sirkian” work, will be screened at Sag Harbor Cinema in 35mm on March 11 at 5 p.m. Afterward, the film’s cinematographer, Ed Lachman, will take part in a Q&A. Recently he offered some thoughts both about the importance of Sirk’s work and Haynes’s interest in furthering it.

“Sirk was looking at and questioning the social, racial and sexual mores at the time after World War II, in the mid-’50s, through Hollywood’s creations of the ‘chick flicks’ designed for mass audiences,” Lachman wrote. “With ‘Far From Heaven,’ Todd Haynes wondered if the same effect of melodrama’s use of beauty as a form of repression for the middle class values would still hold up in 2002, to question the sexual, racial and social mores of our time.

“In melodramas, the subjects are never up to the demands their lives make on them, of small town notions of dignity,” he added. “In the end, we are entrapped by what we desire.”

Curated by the cinema’s founding artistic director, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, “Tarnished Angels: Douglas Sirk’s America” does, indeed, offer a look back at films from an era when life appeared idyllic on the surface, but there was a lot more going on than meets the eye. The retrospective is being offered in conjunction with an exhibition of paintings inspired by Sirk’s films by artist Sag Harbor Sabina Streeter, who actually knew Sirk in her native Germany. A reception for Streeter’s exhibition will take place March 11, from 7 to 9 p.m. on the cinema’s third floor gallery area after the screening of “Far From Heaven.”

“When Sabina suggested we combine a tribute to Sirk’s films with a showing of some of her paintings, I was thrilled,” says D’Agnolo Vallan. “I always loved the heartbreak and the irony behind Sirk’s beautifully stylized ’50s melodramas; his heightened use of color and design; his brilliance with light and sound. The quiet doom that haunts his characters.”

Sirk, who began his career as a theatrical director before turning to filmmaking, fled Nazi Germany with his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, in 1937, and found great success in Hollywood in the 1950s. But eventually, he and Jary chose to return to their native Europe and ultimately retired in Switzerland. That’s where Sabina Streeter first met the filmmaker in the late 1960s, when she was a child. Sirk and his wife were friends of Streeter’s parents, and he had asked her mother, documentary filmmaker Eva Hassencamp, to work with him on “Homes Lost,” which would have been his last film, had Sirk not died in 1987.

“My mother realized it was a costume epic and very involved,” Streeter said in a recent interview at her Sag Harbor studio. “It was way over her head. That script ended up in our library. When I gave up my mom’s apartment, I found it. That was the inspiration for this show.

“The original idea was I was trying to make paintings based on the script my mom turned down, but it was so far-fetched and also turn of the century,” she added. “Then, I was approached by an art person in Berlin about whether I could do a cinematic series.”

That series of paintings, “Magnificent Obsession,” was based on the films of Douglas Sirk and first shown in Berlin in 2019. In 2021, the show traveled to Streeter’s native Munich, and, now, several of the works (along with some new ones) will be on view at the Sag Harbor Cinema show.

Cinema imagery has long been an inspiration for Streeter, especially films from the 1940s and 1950s, and she renders her stylized artworks in charcoal, pastel, gouache and oil on canvas or paper. The works that will be shown at the cinema capture both the beauty and the drama inherent in many of Sirk’s films. Using stills from his movies as her source material, Streeter creates unique art pieces that are a melding of figurative painting and abstraction.

“I watch the films over and over and over, and I photograph from the screen and weed them out,” she explained. “I try to find recognizable imagery by selecting a scene I find pivotal, but not make appropriations of his scenes.

“The film is already in my head and I watch them so many times,” she added. “Sirk has a symbolic language. In ‘Written on the Wind,’ whenever there is red, it’s a metaphor. His costumes are mostly monochromatic, violet or beige, but the complicated female character played by Dorothy Malone is slightly unhinged, and always has a red orchid or wears a red dress. I keep the coloration and then add the certain film knowledge element. Some of the paintings are completely stylized.”

It’s a style that works particularly well with the imagery from Sirk’s films of the post-war era.

“I was trained as an illustrator and did a lot of storyboards in advertising,” Streeter explained. “I was a little past the ‘Mad Men’ period, but a lot of my art teachers came out of the ’50s, and they had this sensibility. Since this work is representational, but also graphic, it came easily. I just recently veered into classic painting in oil.”

Streeter has lived in the United States since the early 1980s, but she recalls that when she was still in Germany, Sirk was well-respected in her social circle and she enjoyed having him as an influence in her life.

“Sirk was incredibly important in Munich. I had many friends involved in film, and, for them, he was legendary,” said Streeter. “He discovered Rock Hudson. He was rediscovered by Fassbinder and Goddard, and, later, here, by Todd Haynes. He was always dealing with class struggle or feminism. He was also very stylized.

“His life’s tragedy is that, before Hilde, he was married to another actress, Lydia Brinken, and she became a full-fledged Nazi,” said Streeter. “When he left her for Hilde, she took their son, and when Sirk immigrated to the U.S., the only way he could see him was in movies. His son had become a child actor in Nazi propaganda films.”

After World War II, Sirk returned briefly to Germany, where he learned that his son had been killed at age 19 as a soldier in Hitler’s army.

“Goebbels pulled him out and sent him to the front lines to be killed,” said Streeter. “He was angry Sirk had left the country. It was a very tragic footnote.”

Throughout her time in Munich as a young adult, Streeter had the opportunity to spend time with Sirk and his wife, and during her childhood, he had become something of a substitute grandparent for her.

“I remember being 9 or 10 when I first met him. I went with my parents to visit him and I was very concerned with the horses in the westerns. I asked, ‘Do they kill them?’” recalled Streeter.

A few years later, as a sullen adolescent, she recalls having another encounter with Sirk.

“I was incredibly difficult, I probably had an unrequited crush on someone. Sirk came over and my mother said, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ He said, ‘Let me handle it,’” said Streeter. “He was an incredible gentlemen with dark glasses, and he said, ‘Why don’t we take a walk?’”

A young Streeter agreed, and as they walked together, she recalls him saying to her, “Well, I like very much what you’re wearing, but I think you resemble Lauren Bacall. I told Lauren, with her narrow hips, ‘You should wear wide shoulders,’ and I think it’s the same thing for you.”

“I said, ‘Really?’ It snapped me out of my morose mood,” laughed Streeter. “Of course, I looked nothing like Lauren Bacall.”

“Tarnished Angels: Douglas Sirk’s America,” runs March 10-16 at Sag Harbor Cinema, 90 Main Street, Sag Harbor. An opening reception for Sabina Streeter’s art exhibition on the cinema’s third floor will take place on Saturday, March 11, from 7 to 9 p.m. following the 5 p.m. 35mm screening of Todd Haynes’s film “Far From Heaven” with special guest, cinematographer Ed Lachman. For details, visit sagharborcinema.org.

Friday, March 10, 6 p.m.; Sunday, March 12, 5:45 p.m.; Wednesday, March 15, 7:30 p.m.

Among Sirk’s most self-conscious and artistically ambitious creations, a relentlessly bleak and disturbing work about the erotic attraction of death. Hudson, so self-effacing that he seems to be fading from the screen, is a reporter in 1932 New Orleans who finds himself morbidly and irresistibly drawn to LaVerne (Dorothy Malone), a professional parachute jumper who herself is obsessively involved with her husband (Robert Stack), a barnstorming pilot with a pronounced death wish.

Saturday, March 11, 8:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.

One of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood, Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece turns a lurid, melodramatic script into a screaming Brechtian essay on the shared impotence of American family and business life.

Friday, March 10, 8 p.m., Saturday, March 11, 2:30 p.m., Thursday, March 16, 7:30 p.m.

When their romance prompts the scorn of her children and country club friends, a widow must decide whether to pursue her own happiness or carry on a lonely, hemmed-in existence for the sake of the approval of others.

Sunday, March 12, 2:30 p.m., Monday, March 13, 7:30 p.m.

Lana Turner stars as a young widow and mother who will do anything to realize her dreams of Broadway stardom; her story is intertwined with that of Susan Kohner, the light-skinned daughter of Turner’s Black maid, who is tempted to pass for white. By emphasizing brilliant surfaces, bold colors, and the spatial complexities of 1950s modern architecture, Sirk creates a world of illusion, entrapment, and emotional desperation.

Saturday, March 11, 5 p.m.

Cathy Whitaker, a 1950s housewife, lives in wealthy suburban Connecticut as she sees her seemingly perfect life begin to fall apart. It is done in the style of a Douglas Sirk film (especially 1955’s “All That Heaven Allows” and 1959’s “Imitation of Life”), dealing with complex contemporary issues such as race, gender roles, sexual orientation and class.