The Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk

Abstract

Sharon Willis is professor of French and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, where she also directs the Film and Media Studies Program. A member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective, she is the author of Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, and High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. This essay is drawn from a chapter of the book she is completing on representations of the civil rights movement in narrative film from 1949 to the present.