"And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world"

A young artist encounters Einstein and feels the ground shift. Relativity arrives not as a stack of equations but as a permission slip to reimagine the world. Calling it “only a theory” does not deny its rigor so much as place emphasis on its status as a model, a frame that reorganizes perception. What matters, for an image-maker, is that the old absolutes, fixed time, universal perspective, stable frames, lose their authority. The world becomes contingent on the observer, on position and motion, on the relation between things rather than their isolated essence.

That imaginative pivot is decisive for cinema. A camera is a machine of relativity: move it a few feet and the truth seems to change. Cross a cut and time dilates or compresses. Parallel montage makes two moments coexist; a close-up collapses space; a tracking shot turns solid architecture into flowing geometry. Proof, in the laboratory sense, is not the point. Suggestion is. The theory licenses an aesthetics of shifted vantage, of parallax, of truths revealed by changing the angle.

Sirk’s mature films are saturated with this sensibility. Surfaces gleam, colors flare, mirrors slice and double faces; domestic interiors act like gravitational fields that bend social trajectories. He stages moral and emotional life as a system of forces, desire, class, race, conformity, curving paths away from linear expectation. Characters inhabit different reference frames: what looks like virtue in one social frame becomes hypocrisy in another; what reads as love from a private angle appears scandalous from the public sidewalk. The melodramatic intensity is not excess for its own sake but a way of making the curvature visible.

Saying the theory “suggested a completely different picture” foregrounds suggestion as artistic catalyst. The provocation is that reality is not a single, settled picture. It is a set of relations susceptible to rearrangement by where we stand, how we look, and whom we allow to look back. From that insight, a cinema of ironies, doubles, and refracted truths could begin.