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Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
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Supercut video
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Washington Post
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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:
Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario
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De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002
De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006
Enthusiasms...
Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense
Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule
The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold
Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!
Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy
Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site
Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records
Later in the clip, Brian De Palma and Jay Cocks visit Scorsese a day later to have some cake and celebrate. De Palma mentions to Scorsese that he begins mixing in January, and we can surmise that he is talking about Casualties Of War, which would be released the following summer. The three begin to discuss Scorsese's next picture, which ended up being GoodFellas, although that might not necessarily be what they thought might be his next picture at the time. But when Scorsese is asked if it will be a New York picture, he replies, "I don’t know, it might have to be Chicago." Then he starts laughing, pointing toward De Palma, who had just had great success the year before with a gangster picture shot in Chicago, The Untouchables. "Or maybe Toronto," says De Palma. Scorsese replies, "Toronto is a problem because it’s so clean." (A New York Times obituary of former New York film commissioner Richard Brick, who died this past Wednesday, explains that around this time, "the cost of shooting movies in New York had driven both independent and big-budget studio filmmakers to seek alternative locations, even when authenticity would seem to have been called for.")
When Scorsese tells the camera that he had mistakenly told them yesterday that he was 47 years old (he was 46), De Palma is reminded of something he "found out," and wants to tell Scorsese and Cocks. And when he starts whispering it, Scorsese says, "No-- you say that on the camera." De Palma shakes his head, saying, "No, you can't tell anybody." It sounds like he's saying something about Steven Spielberg, who would have been turning 42 exactly one month later. Scorsese mentions that "he" [Spielberg] came by a few weeks earlier. A couple of years later, Scorsese would make Cape Fear with Spielberg producing.
You can watch the entire documentary in easy order at The Playlist.
When I was very young, I was fascinated by computers. I built many of them, and won many science fairs.
[Talking about Blow Out] I was sort of fascinated by the fact that even if you had the correct information about the Kennedy assassination, no one would care. And I also wanted to create the mystery that can only be solved with filmic means. Only by syncing the sound, the basic building block of cinema solved the mystery. I wanted to use a purely cinematic visual to solve the mystery. And that’s why I think it’s so effective.
There’s a big white canvas up there. You can hold the audience with a series of images that are poetic and dramatic. And it takes a lot of thought in order to create these sequences. Non-verbal cinema is something that has almost died in the last couple of decades.
I like Rear Window. It’s a very clever idea, shooting everything from Jimmy Stewart’s point of view, and keeping the movie in the apartment of Jimmy Stewart, and dealing with the fact that he can’t get up and do anything, because he’s in a wheelchair.
Well, Hitchcock showed a way of telling a movie with pictures. And he was a genius at producing these sequences in his movies, and nobody really is following in that tradition.
And I remember seeing Vertigo when I went to college. Well, Vertigo is a movie that greatly affected me. I have used the idea and images in it throughout my career.
Some great cineaste once said the history of cinema is about men photographing women, and I think that’s pretty much true. I’ve made stories with lots of men in them, like The Untouchables, or Scarface, but if you’re interested in beauty, you’re interested in photographing women.
When I read about the incident in Iraq, about the rape and killing of an innocent Iraqi girl, I said, well, this is just like Casualties Of War, except it’s happening again. It was a great story, and a very tragic story. But our invasion and destruction of Vietnam was very much like the rape and murder of this girl. It was the best story from out of the Vietnam war. To me, it represented everything wrong we were doing there. [Now back to talking about Redacted] When I did the search about the original incident on the internet, it came up with all these blogs, and YouTube postings, and a montage of Iraqi casualties. [It was] totally original, in a whole new language, and that’s the form in which I told the story. I’d like to use their own dialogue, the real things that they said, but I couldn’t, because they were being prosecuted while the movie was being made. I’m afraid to say that if you haven’t learned from the lessons of the past, you’re doomed to repeat them, and obviously, America did not learn from those experiences in Vietnam. So maybe you have to tell the same story again so that maybe they’ll get it this time.
There were some very good reviews, but again, it was not an image of American soldiers that anybody wanted to see. Because it’s too disturbing. They don’t want to see the pictures. They don’t want to see the images. They don’t want to think that their soldiers are [anything] but valiant crusaders planting democracy in a mid-east country. And they’re difficult movies to get made, and you can only make them after you have some kind of success. And they sort of will not prevent you from making something that you think is important to be produced. Somehow because you’ve made a successful movie, they think you’re a charmed director, and you can make a success out of anything.
This is the Turner channel? I watch this channel a lot!
Of the Luna works I know, I'm most partial to his English-language horror film Anguish (1987) because a large section of it takes place in a movie theater. It's comparable to Brian De Palma's work in its over-the-top suspense set pieces and its hall-of-mirrors plot. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend saving the rest of this post until you do. You'll have to rent it, though, as I doubt if any theater will revive it soon, for reasons I'll explain below.
Anguish begins as a quasi-spoof of psycho-killer movies, in which a timid optometrist (Michael Lerner, an actor I've always enjoyed for his resemblance to Randy Newman) murders people and plucks out their eyes while acting under the telepathic control of his overbearing mother (Zelda Rubinstein, best known as psychic Tangina Barrons in the Poltergeist movies). I say "quasi-spoof" because the scary sequences really deliver the goods. Like De Palma, Luna deconstructs the mechanics of suspense filmmaking without sacrificing suspense, acknowledging that sometimes it's just fun to be scared.
Scorsese explained that movies such as Tales of Hoffman or 1947's exotic nunnery saga Black Narcissus were typically shown in heavily abridged versions, broken up by commercials. "I would ring up other aspiring film-makers like [Brian] De Palma or [Steven] Spielberg and say, 'I just saw this incredible film about nuns in the Himalayas.' But we had to go searching for these movies. We couldn't read anything about them. I thought [the film-makers' names] were pseudonyms."
By the time Scorsese met Powell, in 1975, the British director had fallen on hard times and was largely ignored by the UK film establishment. Powell subsequently relocated to the US, where he married Schoonmaker, Scorsese's regular editor.
"Martin Scorsese infected me with the love of these films when we were working together on Raging Bull," Schoonmaker said. "Then later he introduced me to Michael Powell, which was another great blessing in my life." Powell died in 1990 at the age of 84.
And while Winthrow is disappointed by Mission To Mars, Pountain, ranking the film at number nine, feels that it is "in serious need of reappraisal." Pountain writes, "A film giddy off the wonders of life, Mission To Mars is an absorbing tribute to man’s potential for self-discovery through outward exploration. It’s also a testament to one man’s ability to take a Hollywood hack job with a corny script and turn it into a personal project with truly kick-ass results."
Another film they disagree on is The Black Dahlia. Winthrow calls it "one of the worst films everyone involved has been a part of. The plot is needlessly complicated, the execution of the story is puzzlingly clunky, and the acting is universally stiff." Meanwhile, Pountain, who generally seems more in tune with and more enthusuastic about De Palma's cinema, mentions The Black Dahlia as a "pretty great noir fever dream."
Pountain is also passionate about De Palma's latest, Passion, a film Winthrow feels is "too frenzied for its own good." As a remake of Love Crime, Pountain contrasts it with Kimberly Peirce's Carrie remake. "It isn’t just a film directed by Brian De Palma," writes Pountain. "It’s A Brian De Palma Film. This is evident in its formal detachment, its intense Pino Donaggio score, its indulgence in his pet themes such as voyeurism and sexual obsession, its inspired use of split screen, its playful references, its lack of true closure, its disorienting use of dreams and also, unfortunately, in its financial failure."
WEDNESDAYS, JANUARY 8 THROUGH MARCH 12
The University of Chicago's Doc Films will host a Brian De Palma retrospective on Wednesdays, beginning January 8 with Scarface, and concluding on March 12 with Femme Fatale. Most of the films will be screened from 35mm prints, but Phantom Of The Paradise and Body Double will each be screened in DCP. The series includes an intriguing choice at its halfway point: on February 12th, it will screen Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura.
Dan Wang, who programmed the retrospective, writes in its introduction, "When Brian De Palma was to give a Q&A at Lincoln Center in Manhattan this summer (on the occasion of the wider release of his latest film, Passion), I asked the guy at the ticket office if he expected a long line. He doubted it. 'De Palma isn't really relevant anymore,' he said. I ended up sitting on the floor at the back of the hall behind a concrete pillar, despite showing up an hour and a half early; half the line was turned away.
"One can see what he means. De Palma's favorite themes--dangerously erotic women, voyeurism, psychological horror--seem like the titillations of faded era. Compounding these obsessions is his insistence on an extremely smooth, controlled and virtuosic style that's hopelessly far from current anti-formalist vogues. Recent hits like Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010 ) and Soderbergh's Side Effects (2014 ) tell De Palmian stories but dress them up in camera and video production styles currently in fashion (i.e. on YouTube ) ;hence the rejection of De Palma's importance is also the rejection of a particular, classical way of making films.
"De Palma is still relevant because his films remind us of the exhuberant joy of intelligent filmmaking--of an attitude to film worlds that Godard called, in reference to Hitchcock, the 'control of the universe.' Even his worst films have moments that leave one gasping at their beauty; his best ones feel like a confirmation of everything movies ought to be. In this partial retrospective (De Palma has an output that sprawls in genre and ambition of some thirty films ), we feature a mix of De Palmas: movies of psychological horror (Sisters, Raising Cain), gangster films (Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way), a musical (Phantom of the Paradise) and, of course, classic, pervy, Hitchcockian, joyous De Palma (Hi, Mom!, Body Double, Femme Fatale)."
And here is the retrospective's description of the L'Avventura screening: "Before Blow-Up moved De Palma, L'Avventura won a prize at Cannes. People saw something new: framing a shot like composing a painting; objects as well as characters telling a story and provoking a mood; spontaneous, even random, dialogue. One can be impatient. One can also let go of expectations of quick excitement and tidy plot resolution, absorb the imagery and the sadness of the characters, turn inward, and reflect on a different movie experience."
Those listing De Palma as one of their twelve favotite filmmakers are Hamid Shams Javi, Kamyar Kordestani, Adrian Martin, Michael Koresky, and David Del Valle. Check out the lists here.
(Thanks to Chris!)