Retrospective: Robert Siodmak

We saved the retrospective of Robert Siodmak, a director who, along with other Hollywood luminaries such as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Anthony Mann, most powerfully and consistently shaped the poetics of film noir, for the thirteenth edition of the festival. Siodmak was born in Dresden at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He got into film at the age of twenty-five, and before he turned thirty, he collaborated with his younger brother Kurt (later Curt), Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Edgar G. Ulmer on the groundbreaking silent film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1929). After Hitler came to power, like many others, he left for France, where he devoted himself to various genres and managed to complete four films in 1936 alone. However, political developments in Europe and his Jewish roots prompted him to continue his journey across the Atlantic at the end of the decade.

In Hollywood, Siodmak began as a director of B movies, which proved to be a valuable training ground for the rich series of films noirs he devoted himself to between 1944 and 1950. Siodmak’s noirs are characterized by a brilliant use of the city landscape, an innovative approach to plotting through the use of extensive flashbacks and more complex narrative patterns, and visual inventiveness that supports the overall atmosphere of hopelessness and fatalism. Many of Siodmak’s films have already been screened at the festival, but this time we offer the opportunity to appreciate his work as a comprehensive collection of recurring motifs and formal techniques. Films that return to our program will include the psychological thriller The Dark Mirror (1946, Noir Film Festival 2016) with the wonderful Olivia de Havilland and the essential film noir Criss Cross (1949, NFF 2015) starring Burt Lancaster. We will also premiere the unconventional Victorian story The Suspect (1944) and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), which provides a welcome link to the section Spoiler Alert! We will reveal more of this section’s program later, so stay tuned!