Hello and welcome to the unofficial Brian De Palma website. Here is the latest news: |
---|
E-mail
Geoffsongs@aol.com
-------------
Recent Headlines
a la Mod:
Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online
De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes
De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry
De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"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
-------------
Exclusive Passion
Interviews:
Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario
------------
------------
« | April 2014 | » | ||||
S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
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
"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:
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.
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
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.'”