Preceded by short:Hold Me While I'm Naked (George Kuchar, U.S., 1966). Kuchar has a trembling finger on the pulse of Hollywood: his films fuse kitsch with kitchen sink, melodrama with masochism, film noir with fuchsia. Both the humor and the sadness of this film come from a deft counterpointing of unattainable Hollywood glamor with unbearable reality. Assisted by Mike Kuchar. With George Kuchar, Donna Kerness. (15 mins, Color, 16mm, PFA Collection, permission Canyon Cinema)Imitation of Life is Sirk's most titanic film: massive and faulted, its faults overcome by the very largeness of its successes. It is also one of the most moving American films ever made. Sirk subtly induces the audience to turn against the bland respectability of Lana Turner and Sandra Dee, the nominal leads, and draws us into an underworld of backstairs, neonized gutters, and assembly-line chorus-lines with an exploited black maid (Juanita Moore) and her daughter (Susan Kohner). (Both Moore and Kohner received Oscar nominations.) The film's true emotional dynamics burst forth at the end, and the extravagant concluding funeral procession is Sirk's apocalypse-a black mass for all the lost chances and futile desperations that form the core of his films.-PFA Sirk Tribute, 11/79