Los­ing faith in the world? Time to watch Imi­ta­tion of Life

Pure infor­ma­tion has lim­its in terms of advanc­ing our wis­dom on a par­tic­u­lar sub­ject. More is con­veyed when infor­ma­tion is encod­ed with­in skil­ful­ly-craft­ed emo­tion­al arcs. A clever melo­dra­ma deliv­ers aware­ness on a com­plex mat­ter while seem­ing to bypass the intel­lect. It cre­ates emo­tions in view­ers, grat­i­fy­ing both the craven desire for cathar­sis and the sophis­ti­cat­ed desire to have our life and times illu­mi­nat­ed, prefer­ably in Technicolor.

Once melo­dra­ma aris­es as a sub­ject, it’s hard­ly orig­i­nal to praise the Ger­man direc­tor Dou­glas Sirk or to note that – although he has become some­thing of a cinephile god­head; his influ­ence ablaze in recent films like Todd Haynes’ Car­ol – his most endur­ing melo­dra­mas were dis­missed by crit­ics of the day.

Born Hans Detlef Sier­ck, Sirk left his home­land for Hol­ly­wood in 1937 in sol­i­dar­i­ty with his Jew­ish wife, as the Nazi régime grew in pow­er. He adopt­ed an Angli­cised pseu­do­nym and began work­ing reg­u­lar­ly through­out the 1940s and ​’50s until his biggest box office hit, and final fea­ture film from 1959, Imi­ta­tion of Life. This was a sec­ond adap­ta­tion of Fan­nie Hurst’s 1933 nov­el, the first being a black-and-white John M Stahl pic­ture star­ring Claudette Colbert.

Imi­ta­tion of Life, Sirk-style, is a per­fect melo­dra­ma. Beneath pas­tel colours and a Dis­ney-like score, it sneaks in a lament for what it means to be black in Amer­i­ca. Watch­ing the film in Novem­ber 2016, amid the din of racist voic­es embold­ened by Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump, it plays like a clar­i­on call to wake up. The bell it rings may hit sweet cin­e­mat­ic notes but the song is one about the tragedy wrought by injustice.

Tragedy’s face belongs to Juani­ta Moore. Her smile is warm and deter­mined, but most of all tired. Her deliv­ery is punchy and respect­ful, but most of all tired. She is Annie or Mrs John­son. At first, her tragedy as a black woman is hav­ing aspi­ra­tions that are unfair­ly tame when seen in tan­dem with white Lora Meredith’s (Lana Turn­er). Annie’s only want is a home for her­self and her daugh­ter. For this, she is will­ing to work as a maid every­day, accept­ing a life of ser­vil­i­ty in return for a place where her small fam­i­ly won’t be per­se­cut­ed. As Annie focus­es on the ground beneath her feet, her boss, Lora looks up to stars, defy­ing a hand­some photographer’s pro­pri­etary desire to keep her, as well a sleazy agent’s indeco­rous desire to pimp her, by becom­ing an inde­pen­dent­ly wealthy Broad­way star.

The two women main­tain a close rela­tion­ship that is full of dou­ble mean­ing. On the one hand, both char­ac­ters are sym­pa­thet­ic and rich in their own ways. On the oth­er, their rela­tion­ship depends upon Annie’s sub­servience to Lora. The pow­er bal­ance is based on pow­er inequal­i­ty. It’s an imi­ta­tion of friend­ship just as their jobs are imi­ta­tions of life.

All of this is a false-bot­tom to Annie’s tragedy. The title of the film comes into its own for Annie’s daugh­ter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohn­er), who is pale enough to ​‘pass’. Where­as Annie, with all the dig­ni­ty she can muster, accepts lim­its imposed on her by a racist soci­ety, Sarah-Jane wants the oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to the white woman she can pre­tend to be. The prob­lem is that every time Annie shows up, announc­ing her­self as Sarah-Jane’s moth­er, her cov­er is blown. Sarah-Jane, scream­ing her shame, push­es away the woman to whom she offers the only real bond.

Sirk nev­er stacks the ten­sion between the two so as to make us fall down on either side. Root for Sarah-Jane and you root for fil­ial cru­el­ty. Root for Annie and you root for a black woman to stay in society’s shack­les. The per­son­al and sym­bol­ic vie for dom­i­nance with­in a sweep­ing sto­ry of shift­ing emphases that nev­er yields an ugly sur­face, no mat­ter how much suf­fer­ing is shown. Kohn­er and Moore were both nom­i­nat­ed for Oscars for per­for­mances that pow­er­ful­ly embody con­trast­ing woes. Mean­while oth­er lives play out with equal weight­ing, and so the conun­drum of how you nav­i­gate a racist soci­ety is mixed in with whether Lora spends enough time with her daugh­ter, Susie (San­dra Dee) and what will become of Susie’s crush on Steve (John Gavin).

“How do you explain to your child that she was born to be hurt?” says Annie after Sarah Jane, aged eight, dis­owns her moth­er at school. Sirk shows how deep that hurt goes while the melo­dra­mat­ic form allows char­ac­ters grand emo­tion­al moments in which they are potent and unfor­get­table forces of cinema.