Locarno Chief Giona Nazzaro on The Fest’s Douglas Sirk Retro That Aims to Provide a New Take on His Work

variety.com:

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentThe Locarno Film Festival recently announced a complete retro dedicated to Douglas Sirk, 35 years after the death of the director best known for melodramas made in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, such as “Magnificent Obsession” and “Written on the Wind,” that aims to provide a fresh critical interpretation of his work.Sirk, who was born in Denmark and worked in Germany, which he left for Hollywood during Hitler’s rise to power, later returned to Europe and eventually retired in Switzerland.Among his most prominent fans were late great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci.For the first time, Sirk’s filmography will be reviewed in the light of unpublished documents made available by the director’s family through the Douglas Sirk Foundation and preserved since 2012 at the Cinémathèque Suisse, broadening the perspective on this major auteur.

Variety spoke to Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro about his goals for the Sirk retro. Excerpts.Douglas Sirk has always been on our minds for several reasons: it is widely known that when he left Hollywood he came to Switzerland, and specifically to Ticino [the country’s Italian-speaking region] and he chose Ascona, a stone’s throw from Locarno, as the place to spend the rest of this life.

So first of all we consider Douglas Sirk as a member of the community in Ticino.The second reason is that when in 1978 Locarno did a small showcase of some of his American pictures it somehow resonated and fit in with the rediscovery of Sirk that was going on at the time in cinephile circles.In Germany there was Fassbinder who was paying lots of attention and is at the forefront of the recognition of how crucial his.