Abstract
This essay investigates Douglas Sirk’s highly nuanced use of the color purple in two of his so-called melodramas made for Universal Pictures in the 1950s: Magnificent Obsession and especially, Written on the Wind. With reference to Cezanne’s proto-cubist esthetic in which colored areas connect and disconnect, thereby undermining traditional representational art, the essay argues that Sirk employs similar techniques in fashioning cinematic spaces and the psychic effects of those spaces. This is especially apparent in a scene in Written on the Wind in which, through the interplay of light and the blurring of color boundaries, Sirk creates a modernist interior space in which his characters seem oblivious to the complex world of color they have entered. Color is for Sirk a means to elevate his films above a popular understanding of melodrama to one in which he might explore in a very sophisticated manner the inner workings of his characters.
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