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Domino is
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straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
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but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
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De Palma/Lehman
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in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
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"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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Tuesday, April 8, 2014


Posted by Geoff at 6:49 PM CDT
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Thursday, March 20, 2014
'PASSION' TIED FOR #42 ON 2013 MURIEL AWARDS LIST
AWARDS ARE VOTED ON BY 'A RAGTAG BAND OF SCATTERED CINEPHILES'
Brian De Palma's Passion has made yet another list of the best films of 2013, this one from a "ragtag band of scattered cinephiles" that strives to "recognize noteworthy achievements from the previous year in cinema, unswayed by awards-season hype." Together, they vote for the Muriel Awards. The 2013 list features several ties, including Passion, tied with Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives at number 42. Each of the films had three votes. The Golden Muriel for 2013 went to Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, with 32 votes.

Posted by Geoff at 12:02 AM CDT
Updated: Thursday, March 20, 2014 12:04 AM CDT
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Sunday, March 16, 2014


Posted by Geoff at 11:09 AM CDT
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Tuesday, March 4, 2014


Posted by Geoff at 1:24 AM CST
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Friday, February 28, 2014
'PASSION' IN NEW YORK, TONIGHT & SUNDAY

Posted by Geoff at 6:12 PM CST
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'PASSION' INCLUDED IN SEOUL UNDERRATED SERIES
'PARALLAX' SERIES RUNS MARCH 11- APRIL 13 AT SEOUL ART CINEMA, HONG KONG
Brian De Palma's Passion will be included as part of a film series at the Seoul Art Cinema. According to the Korea Herald's Claire Lee, the series is called "Parallax", and runs March 11 through April 13. Lee's Herald article states, "Seoul Art Cinema will screen 22 modern films it thinks are important or severely underrated. The featured filmmakers include Brian De Palma, Nanni Moretti, Abbas Kiarostami and Takashi Miike." Other filmmaker names in the series include Olivier Assayas and Bruno Dumont.

Posted by Geoff at 12:57 AM CST
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Thursday, February 27, 2014
'PASSION' COMPARED WITH 'TWIXT'
BRAD STEVENS: "IDENTITY, SEXUALITY & MORALITY HAVE ALL BECOME PROVISIONAL"
Sight & Sound's Brad Stevens reviews Brian De Palma's Passion, linking it with Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt, both of which have been recently released in the U.K. as straight-to-video titles. "For many years," Stevens states, "the phrase ‘straight to video’ had the force of an insult, generally being used to describe ‘B’ movies not good enough for theatrical distribution. Yet, at least in the UK, ‘straight to video’ initially meant something quite different, often referring to films considered too quirky for mainstream audiences." Stevens writes that as DVD took over from VHS, in the U.K., more and more of those unique films not getting theatrical distribution would simply receieve "no UK distribution whatsoever."

Stevens continues, "In recent months, however, the situation appears to have changed, with two works by important American directors – Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt (2011) and Brian De Palma’s Passion (2013) – making their UK debuts on DVD (thanks to Metrodome). The fortuitous juxtaposition of these titles underlines how much they have in common, both being concerned with the ways in which modern communications technology has obscured the distinction between reality and fantasy. Their endings, in which the protagonists appear to dream or imagine their own murders before awaking into a reality which may itself be a fantasy, are strikingly similar.

"I have written about Coppola’s film in more detail for Video Watchdog but De Palma’s is perhaps the more distinguished of the pair, if only because that cynicism which so frequently permeates his work ends up giving Passion greater thematic coherence – something which, for better and worse, is lacking from Twixt, Coppola’s optimism preventing him taking De Palma’s final leap into despair."

Stevens somewhat echoes Sara Freeman's essay on Passion, in which she suggests that the advertising businesswomen involved in the film's drama are each "living inside her very own Facebook profile or twitter account." But Stevens seems to delve even further into this idea-- here is another excerpt:

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De Palma has of course been dealing with the impact of imagery on both those who create it and those who consume it throughout his career. Hi, Mom! (1969) in particular now seems remarkably prescient in its portrait of a society wherein we record our everyday activities and end up staging them for the camera’s benefit. Passion updates this concern to the era of Skype, email and mobile phones, all of which De Palma sees as providing new opportunities for deception (including self-deception) and misrepresentation.

The plot involves a rivalry between two women working for a German advertising agency, the seemingly introverted Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) and her extrovert boss Christine (Rachel McAdams). Although the film is told mostly from Isabelle’s viewpoint, we learn almost nothing about her. Her sexuality, friendships, familial relationships, past life and nationality are all mysterious; as Christine tells her, “I don’t even know where you’re from or what you want.” Isabelle is the product of a social-media culture, creating herself through various manipulations and technological transactions, existing only to the extent that desires can be projected onto her by the people she encounters, ultimately disappearing into a state of uncertainty wherein everything is (or might as well be) a dream.

Stylistically, the film is divided into two parts. The first half is lit and framed like an episode of a television series about backstabbing among the jetset (Dallas, perhaps) while the second half is much lusher visually, with the kind of excessive mise en scène typical of this director. It is here that Isabelle abandons her former passivity and takes decisive action, successfully carrying out a complex scheme to destroy Christine. Essentially, she retreats into an ‘online’ world in which her fantasies can be realised without fear of exposure, and De Palma implies that this entire section is Isabelle’s dream.

But the earlier scenes take place in a world which is just as ‘unreal’, just as heavily marked by wish-fulfilment fantasies and stylish surfaces: Christine claims to have both a twin sister and a childhood trauma but may have invented both, and at times is so harshly lit that her face appears to be as white as the mask of herself she makes her lovers wear. This mask is eventually donned by Isabelle (who thus ‘becomes’ Christine) during a murder scene that might be a fantasy (but also might not). In a world where so many of our relationships are conducted via the internet, it makes little difference whether we are on or offline, awake or dreaming, guilty or innocent. Identity, sexuality and morality have all become provisional, subject to constant revision. As with Mitt Romney’s Etch A Sketch presidential campaign, it is always possible to hit the reset button and start again.

Monte Hellman’s Road to Nowhere (2010) shares many of these concerns and so far has not received any UK exposure. A few months ago, I wrote about a group of 80s films that critiqued American cinema’s dominant trends. These recent works by De Palma, Coppola and Hellman suggest the emergence of a new oppositional movement, one which challenges those hermetic CGI entertainments wherein the erasure of physical reality serves as a guarantee that we can leave our troubles at the door, that nothing will be permitted to disturb our involvement in corporate-controlled fantasies.

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(Thanks to Rado!)

Posted by Geoff at 1:57 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, February 27, 2014 1:58 AM CST
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Friday, February 14, 2014


Posted by Geoff at 7:37 PM CST
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Thursday, February 6, 2014
TWO MORE TOP TENS FOR 'PASSION'
AND IT LANDS AT #46 ON FILM COMMENT'S 2013 CRITICS POLL


Apparently, I'm really late on this, as it was posted back on December 16th, but the Film Comment 2013 critics poll finds Brian De Palma's Passion landing at number 46. Joel & Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis was voted film of the year. Inside the magazine's January/February issue are the personal bests of individual Film Comment editors and fellow critics, with Passion included on two of them:

Violet Lucca
(Film Comment's Digital Editor)

1. Upstream Color
2. A Touch Of Sin
(Then alphabetical)
The Act Of Killing
Bastards
Emperor Visits The Hell
No
Passion
Spring Breakers
12 Years A Slave
Wadjda

Nathan Lee
(Contributing Editor to Film Comment)

1. Le Pont du Nord
2. "Slumber Party Alien Abduction"
(from V/H/S/2)
3. Gravity
4. Faust
5. Spring Breakers
6. The Lords Of Salem
7. Stranger By The Lake
8. The Grandmaster
9. Passion
10. Dark Skies

Previously: 'PASSION' - 2013 YEAR-END LISTS AND MENTIONS

See also: 'PASSION' ON MORE TOP 10 LISTS FROM 2013


Posted by Geoff at 6:18 PM CST
Updated: Monday, February 16, 2015 12:29 AM CST
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Monday, February 3, 2014
SHAVIRO: 'HER' IS THE INVERSE OF 'PASSION'
DE PALMA'S "MASTERPIECE" SHOWS "ACTUALITY OF NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY"


Cultural critic Steven Shaviro, who in recent years has articulated the current post-cinematic atmosphere (in which cinema is no longer a cultural dominant) by way of what he calls "Post-Cinematic Affect" (flows of new media forms in confluence with digital technologies and postmodern capitalism), recently wrote on his blog that he "was quite impressed" with Spike Jonze's Her, "though I didn’t really like it very much. For me, it is more interesting to think about than it actually was to watch." Shaviro suspects that Jonze was attempting to tap into the deep sadness of his previous film, Where The Wild Things Are, "but despite considerable formal inventiveness, he doesn’t quite achieve it this time."

Shaviro continues, "But Jonze does sort of (inadvertently?) display the hollowness of the aching sincerity that has come to prominence in our recent (white, liberal, well-meaning) culture as an impotent reaction formation against the hyper-cynicism of official Capitalist Realism. I vastly prefer the 'post-irony' of films like Joseph Kahn’s Detention to the non-ironic sincerity of Her; but they are both reactions against the same thing, the way that hip irony, or what Sloterdijk long ago called 'cynical reason', is the 'official' affect, as it were, of 'there-is-no-alternative' neoliberal capitalism."

Shaviro concludes, "Ultimately, Her is the exact inverse, or the flip side, of a much better film — Brian De Palma’s recent masterpiece Passion. De Palma shows the actuality of neoliberal subjectivity, in which everything is vicious competition in the service of self-entrepreneurship, with female sexuality as the linchpin of the whole structure. In contrast, Jonze shows neoliberal subjectivity’s self-deluding idealization of itself as total sincerity, maintaing this emotional nakedness and yearning within the parameters of a world in which 'sincerity' can itself only be a commodity, or a form of human capital to bring on the market. And the punchline is that even this self-congratulatory idealization is a weak and unsustainable facade. It is ultimately too hollow and sad to serve even its ideological function. Most self-delusions are self-congratulatory and even megalomaniacal; but Theodore’s self-delusion, which is also that of all the other human beings he meets (or for whom he works, writing 'handwritten' personal letters for other people) is lame, vapid, and devoid of true imaginativeness. Her — rather than The Matrix — is really the film whose motto should be, 'welcome to the desert of the real.'”


Posted by Geoff at 2:05 AM CST
Updated: Monday, February 3, 2014 2:07 AM CST
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