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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
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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
Very few directors have been as polarizing as Brian De Palma is, you either end up hating him totally, or adoring him. It does not help that his output has been truly inconsistent, great movies, followed by equally dud movies. Maybe this is the reason, why among the movie brats of the 70s he is not as highly regarded as a Scorsese or Copolla, nor has been as popular as a Spielberg. But personally, he remains among my favorite directors. He is one of the best when it comes to shooting action sequences, be it the Odessa steps one in The Untouchables, the pool room shootout in Carlito’s Way or the ending of Scarface.
One thing for sure, subtlety is never the strong point of Brian De Palma, his movies are right in your face, often over the top, absolutely gory. But they crackle with a sort of raw energy and intensity, that keeps you hooked. And this is one director, who has made great movies across all genres, horror( Carrie), gangster( Untouchables, Carlito’s Way, Scarface), war ( Casualties of War), thriller( Blow Out). So after a long time, doing a blogathon in tribute to Brian De Palma. It would start from September 11( his birthday) to September 21st. You could contribute to the blogathon, with posts on his movies, or his directorial style, anything related to him.
In Woton’s Wake: Un conte d’un sculpteur et d’un cinéaste, Li-chen Kuo looks at how De Palma constructed a film about the cinema via the myth of a sculptor. Kuo notes the opening shot, which shows a bookshelf full of film books, with one title, "Woton's Wake," in flames and leaning against them, signalling a film about cinema. "The idea to animate the inanimable has been linked to cinema from the moment of its invention," Kuo states, "and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea had also been staged in 1898 by Georges Méliès. The film attempts to fix the figures by placing them in another medium and sets motion to the image. Cinema fixes them in their 'life', and thus declares the desire for movement. In sculptural art is also this transformation into 'real', into 'life.' These two arts, film and sculpture, attach themselves to common desires: the desire to see and touch." Kuo links De Palma to the sculptor played by William Finley, the latter creating a woman out of metal trinkets, the former "sculpting a film" out of several types of material, physical or conceptual. "How would you define the act of Brian De Palma in this film?" asks Kuo. "Close to his character, the filmmaker collects fragments of images, movie scenes, diegetic motifs, by cutting the film reel, sticking them back together, and ultimately shaping a new form." Kuo adds that this early short from De Palma "does not explicitly explore the question of point of view." As Luc Lagier has pointed out, Kuo writes, Woton's Wake was made in 1962, prior to JFK's assassination, and "could thus be considered a work still 'innocent'."
In D’envol en chute : ce qui hantera toujours De Palma, Sidy Sakho states that "All De Palma is indeed a history of vertigo, that of a man - often a woman - haunted by an image, a unique sound. The line of nearly all his stories is that of the absolute abandonment of heroes and an ideal that is forever elusive." Sakho further states that the resolution of the puzzle in a De Palma film is "above all a false movement, already dead" (or a stalemate). Sakho elaborates on this by describing the bombastic fanfare of the opening shot (sequence) of Snake Eyes as, cruelly, also being a swan song for Nick Santoro, as well as for the viewer. Sakho suggests that the gaze in De Palma's cinema is, like Ethan Hunt dangling just above the Langley floor in Mission: Impossible, forever caught "between the fall and impact, when fear of death and the hope of a recovery question one another."
In Cils conducteurs, Claire Allouche suggests that Chris Marclay's Up And Out, which presents the moving image of Antonioni's Blow-Up against the sound from De Palma's Blow Out, allows us to see the latter's images again, despite the sound being dissociated from its images. This puts the viewer of Up And out in a similar position to Blow Out's soundman protagonist, Jack. "In this sense," writes Allouche, "the plot of Blow Up could pass for a 'film location scouting' and that of Blow Out for 'film postproduction.'" Allouche further notes that Blow-Up is longer than Blow Out by five minutes, leaving the Marclay film to end in silence. "We do not know the meaning ascribed to Thomas," writes Allouche, "and yet our lost gaze is directed towards the imaginary game of tennis. Up and Out ends in a world where reality does not provide anything more to see and hear. The dark room is an anechoic chamber, a heart beating intensely as at the beginning of the De Palma film. Between terrifying scream and spellbinding silence, Up and Out takes one last breath. The 'blow' reasserts itself. But this time, it is ours."
And finally, in William Finley, fantôme dionysiaque, Laurent Husson offers up a tribute to Finley as an important figure who "decisively contributed to forging the subversive tone of the De Palma cinema."
In Brian Does Hollywood, Chloé Beaumont notes that De Palma's Body Double is "much more than a reading of Vertigo, but is "primarily a work of the actor." Where the hero of Vertigo has the job of the voyeur, the spy/detective, the hero of Body Double's job as an actor gets turned on its head as he is fired and becomes voyeur. The weapon of the voyeur, the "viewer", becomes the remote control, allowing him to dissect the images. Meanwhile, the villain of the film has no trouble playing his part, being the director as well as the actor. Beaumont also explores the two ends of the tunnel in which Jake has a bout of claustrophobia, with the white, glowing "movie screen" behind the Indian at one end, and the unattainable femme fatale at the other. "It is by meeting and saving the pornographic actress Holly, the inverse of Gloria, that the illusions of his own milieu vanish."
In Brian De Palma et le bonheur, Rémy Russotto suggests that despite all the wrangling with paranoid or fragmentary perspectives of his protagonists, De Palma's cinema produces solid images that fill in the holes: "a complete answer to the questions posed by the films." (This reminds of the working title for Armond White's never completed De Palma study, "Total Illumination.") Russotto looks at the endings of De Palma's recent films, noting of Femme Fatale that, "Against all odds, the film ends well. We go from black to white." And following the flash of the corpse on the front lawn at the end of The Black Dahlia, Scarlett Johansson is the mother figure that asks the hero to "come inside." Writes Russotto, "She closes the door. The end. All corpses are left outside, disappeared."
I'll post summaries of the other essays tomorrow or the next day.
The De Palma Thriller: CARRIE - Tuesday, September 7 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and additional insights from critic Armond White
The De Palma Thriller: DRESSED TO KILL - Wednesday, September 8 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, actor Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto
The De Palma Thriller: BLOW OUT - Thursday, September 9 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and producer George Litto, with additional insights from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
The De Palma Thriller: RAISING CAIN - Friday, September 10 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir and editor Paul Hirsch
Keep up to date at Movie Geeks United!.
(Thanks to Jamey!)
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