LAUSR

theorists and practitioners like Walter Benjamin, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. In a first part regarding the visual arts, Evans finds in Sirk’s highly distinctive studio style reminiscences of Wassily Kandinsky’s vivid use of colours, as the palette to open emotion up to a spiritual and a psychic realm. Part Two concerns Sirk’s response to the rhythms and intensities of mechanisation, before a lengthy discussion of Sirk’s final masterpiece Imitation of Life (1959) in relation to suburban space, violence, and the racial exclusion that the film so memorably denounces. The third section moves to architecture and home design with a case study of Sirk’s one urban-set film, the lesser-known German work Final Chord (1936), to finally consider All that Heaven Allows (1955) as exemplary of post-war interior design and the particularity of the modernist appreciation of nature.