A biography for Douglas Sirkhasn’t been written yet.
“In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.”
“At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.”
“Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.”
“Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.”
“So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.”
“But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.”
“The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.”
“Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.”