David Brooke, AIPT!
3 takeaways from De Palma & De Niro: The Early Films

Given how these films are a bit long, paced oddly at times, and can lose your interest it’s actually quite impressive how good the cinematography and editing is in these movies. DePalma plays around with speeding up films, jump-cutting mid-conversation, and playing around with perspective. The opening of Greetings is a good example of this showing a skyscraper with different apartments and then cutting in footage of different rooms over the windows. It’s an effect that I’m sure at the time was painstaking and difficult, but it looks seamless. The use of light and contrast works wonderfully in The Wedding Party thanks to it being in black and white.

Story-wise each film has its merits. The Wedding Party has the feel of something modern, post-2000, but was made so long ago it’s a marvel. It’s a conversational film not unlike Clerks although it’s far less controversial. Greetings tackles the Vietnam War in ways nobody was doing at the time. Its comedy can sometimes hit the mark, and it’s certainly controversial in how it uses language. It’s a black comedy that works in bits. Hi, Mom!, which serves as a sequel to Greetings, has an excellent first act involving DeNiro’s character selling a porno businessman on voyeurism films. Unfortunately for him he falls for one of the girls he’s peeping on. The film devolves a bit after this into a film within a film, but it’s compelling here and there.

One of the most shocking elements in watching all three of these films is how raw they are. DeNiro has yet to discover the psychotic in Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle or the gangster that defined his career. He’s generally speaking playing a normal guy in his 20s. In fact, The Wedding Party was shot when he was 20 years, if my math adds up, and is his first on film work. He’s not bad in the role-playing an average guy and it makes you wonder if he carried on doing comedies or standard dramas if he’d be as popular today.

DePalma’s directing is incredible considering this is where he started. There are definite signs he’s playing around and learning as he went, but much of these films hold up and are watchable.

Greetings, from 1968, established De Palma as a rising star of Greenwich Village’s alternative film scene and is known for its anti-Vietnam draft stance. Viewed cold in 2019, its lo-fi, sub-Jean-Luc Godard narrative jumble soon becomes tiresome as we follow three pals chatting about Vietnam avoidance techniques, wandering around New York, and “computer dating”. It’s a dated mash-up of counterculture and titillation, half arthouse, half grindhouse, summed up by a sequence where one of the protagonists, obsessed with Kennedy assassination conspiracies, uses a nude woman to illustrate where the bullets hit.

What Greetings did give us, however, is De Niro’s creepy character, Jon Rubin, a peeping Tom who’s the only one to end up in Vietnam (where he’s given the film’s best lines). Rubin was resurrected for 1970’s Hi, Mom!, a fascinating film in a different class from the other two. It’s still very much in thrall to Godard but with a dynamic energy and originality all De Palma’s own.

Rubin is now a filmmaker who touts to a porn producer the idea of voyeuristic footage shot through apartment windows. The first half of the film is concerned with that and De Niro’s wooing Jennifer Salt’s Judy to comic effect, but the second half expands dramatically on a sub-plot, shot in black and white with a raw funky soundtrack, wherein an Afro-American theatre troupe offers an encompassing theatrical experience for white people called Be Black Baby. These sequences are superbly conceived, gripping, visceral and shocking, and alone worth watching the film for; brilliant satirical film-making.

The other aspect that makes Hi, Mom! vital viewing is that Jon Rubin is essentially Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, right down to the way he dresses, a disturbed Vietnam vet with a porn habit who’s psychologically/psychotically confused by the counterculture’s values. There are Be Black Baby sequences in which De Niro plays a cop that are a direct dry run for some of Taxi Driver’s most famous scenes (“You talkin’ to me?”). Martin Scorcese simply took Rubin from Hi, Mom!, distilled him, and wiped away all the satirical comedy

De Palma is well-known for his use of split screen and though there is no actual use of the technique present in Hi, Mom!, there is a terrific scene when De Niro, as Rubin, describes his idea of filming ordinary lives through his window to a woman he wants to be a part of the film. They are standing in the street to the left of the screen. As De Niro describes a fictional woman coming into her apartment, on the right side of the screen, a light is switched on and viewers see a young woman enter a room and watch as she mirrors the action described by De Niro. It’s a simple yet brilliant way to use split screen without resorting to expensive opticals yet subtle enough that it took a second viewing for my brain to realize just what De Palma had done and how well-planned the scene was.

All three films, The Wedding Party, Greetings, and Hi, Mom!, represent De Palma’s earliest work and allows film historians to understand De Palma’s influences much earlier than his more famous films like Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie, Blow Out, and Dressed to Kill. For viewers who only know De Palma as a horror director, these films also allow one to view De Palma doing some high quality comedy. Viewing De Niro as a 20-year-old, first-time actor is also fairly amazing. Already confident in his abilities, one can see from these films that he was obviously going places.

It’s not easy to get Brian DePalma out to a screening of anything, or to a reception in honor of a new film. But there was the reclusive director of “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Body Double,” “The Untouchables,” “Mission Impossible” and so on at painter-director Julian Schnabel’s incredible home and studio Saturday night for “At Eternity’s Gate.”

Many of us went first to the screening at the Crosby Street Hotel of Schnabel’s new movie which features a tour de force performance by Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh. CBS Films is pushing “Eternity” and they’re right– if Dafoe isn’t nominated, something is wrong.

Also from the movie came actor Rupert Friend, who plays Theo van Gogh, very moving as the put upon brother, and Schnabel’s actress daughter Stella who’s terrific as a maid in the Arles estate where van Gogh painted his most famous works.

But that wasn’t the end of the A-list in attendance: director Barry Levinson, actresses Ellen Burstyn and Carol Kane, playwright Israel Horovitz, actors Steve Buscemi and Tony LoBianco, producer Jean Doumanian, and 95 year old indie film legend director (and famed poet) Jonas Mekas not only came to see the movie but stayed at Schnabel’s for a scintillating Q&A moderated by Kent Jones. People stood, sat on the floor, took up every seat in one of Schnabel’s huge painting studios to hear all about the making of “At Eternity’s Gate.”

All these people came to see the movie on a Saturday night– a frigid one, too. Why a Saturday? It was Dafoe’s day off from shooting a Disney movie in Calgary, Alberta, Canada called “Togo.” He literally flew in for the gathering and a little press, then flies back tonight. “Lucky for me, there’s a Canadian holiday,” he told me, “so it bought me a day.”

We learned a lot about this amazing movie: Schnabel, obviously a famed artist, painted all the “van Goghs” in the movie. Now they are in his tri-level West Village studio complex. He painted Van Gogh, and Dafoe as Van Gogh. A huge central Schnabel made of chopped up plates and pottery — portrait of Van Gogh– was so stunning everyone wanted to pose with it!

Formed by a compilation of the material, property of the private collector Jordi Batet, the exhibition will exhibit, among other things, posters of all the director's films, photographs of shooting, costumes, figures of some of his characters, vinyl of his soundtracks, and the novels on which some of his films have been based. The visitor can also enjoy an audiovisual montage created for the occasion.

Exhibition 'Brian De Palma. The unfolded look ': October 26 to November 25 in Ca n'Ametller de Molins de Rei

During the period of the exhibition, several lectures will be held about the work of Brian De Palma and a commemorative book will be presented that explores the keys of his filmography. The celebration of this exhibition is part of the activities organized by the Terror Film Festival of Molins de Rei, whose next edition has as leitmotiv the great filmmaker, under the concept of De Palma Vs. De Palma.

Previously:
De Palma vs De Palma - Book & Fest in Spain, Nov 9-18; Book includes forward by Keith Gordon

July 9
Sisters (1972, 93’, 35mm) - De Palma’s Beginnings: Art, Music and the Counter-Culture
Carlito's Way (1993, 144', 35mm) - Introduction by Adrian Martin & Cristina Álvarez López

July 10
Dressed To Kill (1980, 105', 35mm) - The Hitchcockian Model and its Variations

July 11
Blow Out (1981, 107’, 35mm) - Vision and Sound: The Complex Machine

July 12
Raising Cain (1992, 92', 35mm) - Story, Identity and Point-of-View

July 13
Femme Fatale (2002, 115', 35mm) — The Dream-Film: De Palma’s Testament

July 14
Passion (2012, 102', 35mm) — The Langian Model: Narrative and Society as Trap
Scarface (1983, 169’, 35mm)

Summer Film School Rotterdam

July 18 — De Palma’s Beginnings: Art, Music and the Counter-Culture
Phantom of the Paradise (1974, 92’, DCP)
July 19 — The Hitchcockian Model and its Variations
Obsession (1976, 98’, DCP)
July 20 — Vision and Sound: The Complex Machine
Carrie (1976, 98’, DCP)
July 21 — Story, Identity and Point-of-View
Body Double (1984, 114’, DCP)
July 22 — The Langian Model: Narrative and Society as Trap
The Black Dahlia (2006, 121’, 35mm) 

Jennifer Fox isn’t new to Hollywood—the accomplished documentarian has directed and produced many of her own docs and supported others work as well. She can count Hollywood legends like director Brian De Palma and Oren Moverman as friends and mentors. (Both of whom were more than willing to call up Laura Dern on her behalf.) Though many would be apprehensive to divulge their personal histories on film, Fox was excited to do so with The Tale.

Premiering on HBO this Friday, May 26, The Tale tells the true story of Fox’s own childhood. When Fox (played by Dern) was 13, she wrote a short story documenting her relationship with an older man. When her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn) discovers the story decades later, Fox is forced to take a hard look at her childhood sexual abuse and the memories she twisted and repressed.

The Tale is gut-wrenching and tough to watch, but with Fox’s deft hand as a documentarian and a towering performance from Dern (who De Palma told Fox was the only actress to have the guts to take this role), it is a complex and unflinching look at the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

Based on Fox’s own life—Dern and Nélisse play Jennifer Fox at different ages—The Tale deals with the moment, years after the fact, that Fox was forced to grapple with the memories of her first sexual encounter aged 13. “It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that what I called a relationship, all of a sudden I realized was abuse,” she noted.

Fox, whose storied work in documentary film includes the highly personal series Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, turned to narrative film for the first time to construct a wholly unique portrait of the way memories can shift and rewrite themselves in our minds. It is with the rediscovery of an essay written when she was 13 that the older Jennifer Fox, played by Dern, is forced to confront the 13-year-old version of herself (Nélisse), who framed her relationship with a much older running coach in the language of first love and unforced desire.

“It took me years to write [the film] because it was such a complicated telling, and it’s really more about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and why we need to tell ourselves stories,” the filmmaker explained. “There are so many things that are too heavy to deal with when you’re younger, that it takes until maturity to be able to face.”

Dern’s journey with The Tale stemmed from a conversation with filmmaker Brian De Palma, an important mentor to Fox. Dern recalled De Palma’s powerful and compelling brief: “[He] said, ‘You’re going to receive a script that is difficult and painful and brave…But take it seriously. It’s so radical, it’s so brave, and you should go on this journey.'”

For Dern, “What’s extraordinary about this time is that we all are considering together how we’ve normalized behavior, to ourselves, as a community, as a culture. It has been a reckoning for many of us individually, to see how we said things like, ‘Well, it was the ‘70s,’ or ‘I looked very mature for my age.’ We took the blame, and we were silenced by our own cultural shaming.”

It was a welcome, if unexpected, climate in which to launch the film, she said, noting the conversations about taking on this story began many years ago. “This zeitgeist has said that there is restorative justice here,” Dern said. “There is reward in being a witness to something and sharing your voice, and that has really changed the conversation. There is therefore less fear, through a piece of art that you make, to all have conversations together, and hopefully, allow it be the groundbreaking time we all so desperately need.“

Fox noted the particular courage shown by Jason Ritter in taking on the role of her abuser Bill. “I think, Jason, you’re the most courageous, actually, of all of us,” she said. “We know from statistics that 93% of perpetrators are known by the children who they abuse. That means that they don’t look evil; they’re part of communities; they’re successful, they’re loved. Jason really embodied the kindness and the complexity of what I wanted to bring to this telling.”

But by the time he’d read it, he insisted, “there had already been so many incredible acts of courage that led up to this moment—Jennifer writing it, people coming on board. If I was going to be the coward to back out at the end, I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself. The truth was that I read the script and I thought it was so profound and incredibly honest, and I felt like I was opening doors in my mind that I hadn’t even cared to open, looking at this experience and getting a deeper understanding of what this can be like.”

When filmmaker Jennifer Fox was 13, she wrote a story for English class about a young girl who is coerced into a sexual relationship with her 40-year-old running coach.

Little did her teacher know, the story was true.

"I got an A," says Fox, now 58. "My teacher wrote on the back, 'If this is true, it's a travesty. But since you're so well-adjusted, it can't be.' "

Four decades later, Fox has adapted her account into a harrowing feature film, The Tale, which premieres on HBO Saturday (10 ET/PT). Two-time Oscar nominee Laura Dern plays an adult Jennifer — a successful documentarian and professor — as she confronts the truth that her childhood "romance" with Bill (Jason Ritter) was sexual abuse. With the support of her mother (Ellen Burstyn) and boyfriend (Common), she reconnects with people from her past in an effort to remember what happened after years of suppression.

"The film is about memory and the stories we tell ourselves to survive," says Dern, 51, who was brought the script by director Brian De Palma, Fox's friend and mentor. "I think we all find that relatable, not just people who have experienced sexual abuse or assault."

Dern identifies with Fox's story, having grown up as a teen actress on movie sets, where she experienced sexual harassment. She says she never recognized it for what it was until the Me Too movement started last fall, as women and men came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct and abuses of power.

"I didn't realize until recently that my experiences of harassment were harassment," Dern says. "For so many young girls and boys, behavior is justified because it's like, 'Well, they did that. Maybe that's normal.' We presume that's just the way it works in Hollywood."

Like her fictionalized character in The Tale, Fox didn't fully process her trauma until middle age, as she interviewed women around the world for her 2006 documentary Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman and began to hear similar stories. She's careful to make the distinction between sexual assault and abuse, when someone is manipulated into thinking "he or she is agreeing to something which is sexual, but it isn't often violent," Fox says. "It's different from rape."

Regarding Scarface, Nayman contrasts it with and favors it over The Untouchables, which is the movie ranked by the EMPIRE podcast the other day as De Palma's best:

In the 1980s, De Palma switched genres from stylized, Westernized giallos to muscular riffs on gangster pictures. The unofficial trilogy of Scarface, Wise Guys, and The Untouchables reached back to the classic crime films of the 1930s. Scarface was literally a remake of Howard Hawks’s veiled 1932 Al Capone biopic of the same name; working with screenwriter Oliver Stone, De Palma updated Hawks’s template for the vicious, me-first mentality of the Reagan era, reimagining the main character as a Cuban immigrant who begins the film by denouncing his country’s embrace of communism before turning into a ruthless, bloated, coked-out avatar of capitalistic excess. As usual with De Palma, it’s hard to tell how seriously we’re supposed to take this extravagantly violent film, its moralistic crime-pays-until-it-doesn’t messaging, or Al Pacino’s borderline-minstrel-show acting and accent. I’ve always felt that while the Stone(d) script meant every profane, Quaalude-driven word about the hypocritical futility of Captain Ron’s War on Drugs (as well as the revelation that the true holy trinity underneath the American Dream was not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but money, power, and women), De Palma was flat-out spoofing his antihero’s materialistic mentality—not to mention the idea of studio blockbusters, to the point that he actually got his old friend/industry overlord Steven Spielberg to direct part of the film’s cranked-up action climax. Reviled upon its release, Scarface has become one of the true cult-movie monoliths of its era, casting a long shadow over hip-hop culture and also its director’s subsequent work; a few years later, The Untouchables made more money and won Sean Connery an Oscar, but it can’t compare to its predecessor’s ugly, incandescent spectacle.

To the untrained eye, De Palma’s most recent effort—a remake of the disposable French trifle Love Crime starring Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as coworkers turned rivals—is a strained, ridiculous mess. And that’s what it looks like to the trained eye, too: At times, it’s as if Passion is a parody of a modestly sleazy direct-to-video thriller rather than a late work by a great stylist. But no less than Sisters (which is referenced in a mid-film revelation about identical twins), the film’s ripe cheesiness has a whiff of satire to it. From the appearance of the credit “written and directed by Brian De Palma” overlaid on the sleek outer casing of an Apple MacBook Pro to a shot of a car driving into and destroying a parking-lot Coca-Cola machine, there’s a through line of anticorporate humor that juxtaposes the ideas of “art” and “product”—never more so than in an amazing, extended split-screen scene in which footage of a ballet performance competes for our attention with a knowingly clichéd, Halloween-style slasher-on-the-loose set piece. In the end, Passion might not be much more than a glib, embittered bit of gamesmanship by somebody who’s pretty much been on the sidelines since the mid-’90s, but there’s something sort of sweet about seeing its maker continuing to play by his own rules.