"For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty"
About this Quote
There is something deliciously profane about a filmmaker best known for immaculate domestic melodramas bragging that he "moved the church" and "took off the steeple". Sirk frames it like a piece of practical Americana - find a relic, relocate it, remodel it - but the verb choices give away the real thrill: appropriation. The church isn’t revered; it’s repurposed. The steeple, that architectural finger pointing to heaven, gets yanked off like a costume piece. What remains is faith stripped of its official silhouette, turned into shelter, studio, or private refuge. In other words, set design as worldview.
The Los Angeles proximity matters. Midcentury Southern California was a factory for reinvention: orange groves into subdivisions, identities into screen personas, Europe into an exportable dream. Sirk, a German emigre who fled Nazism and then quietly dissected American respectability on screen, is talking about craftsmanship, but he’s also admitting a sensibility: the willingness to dismantle inherited symbols and rebuild them to fit a new life. That’s assimilation with a wrench.
"I got my hands dirty" lands as both brag and alibi. It’s the director insisting he’s not only a manipulator of surfaces but someone who understands labor and material. Coming from Sirk, it’s also a sly wink: the man accused of glossy artifice revealing that his gloss was always built on demolition, carpentry, and a keen eye for which sacred structures deserve to be un-made.
The Los Angeles proximity matters. Midcentury Southern California was a factory for reinvention: orange groves into subdivisions, identities into screen personas, Europe into an exportable dream. Sirk, a German emigre who fled Nazism and then quietly dissected American respectability on screen, is talking about craftsmanship, but he’s also admitting a sensibility: the willingness to dismantle inherited symbols and rebuild them to fit a new life. That’s assimilation with a wrench.
"I got my hands dirty" lands as both brag and alibi. It’s the director insisting he’s not only a manipulator of surfaces but someone who understands labor and material. Coming from Sirk, it’s also a sly wink: the man accused of glossy artifice revealing that his gloss was always built on demolition, carpentry, and a keen eye for which sacred structures deserve to be un-made.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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