Preceded by Short Home Stories (Matthias Mueller, Germany, 1991). "Clichés of melodrama unite into a drama of stereotypes. The brilliant montage of cases-in-point reveals the mechanism of voyeurism" (German Assoc. of Film Critics). (6 mins, Color, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema) (Schlussakkord). It has been nine years since its last screening at PFA, but the structure of Schlussakkord remains in my memory as seamless and flawless, every movement and gesture inextricable from the narrative flow. No wonder Douglas Sirk defined melodrama as "music plus drama." This was his first full-scale melodrama, made in Germany before he came to Hollywood. In it, the music of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Handel provide an ingenious aspect of the setting. The story involves a concert conductor and his wife whose unhappy marriage is made more dramatic when the mother of their adopted child hires herself on as a nurse to the family. Sirk critic Jon Halliday writes, "Sirk (intensifies) the conventions of the genre: Beethoven, clairvoyants, suicides, courtroom drama all contribute to the emotions in which Sirk ruthlessly implicates his audience....According to Sirk, Schlussakkord marks a definite signpost in his career: his decision to accept an atrociously mawkish story, loaded down with 'melodrama,' and turn it into something new."