Let us remember that in Michelangelo Antonioni's matrix film, Blow-Up (1966), a photographer records the signs of a crime that he only notices after developing the images. The analysis a posteriori of the enlarged photos makes it emerge – in the residual form of a “stain”, or what Roland Barthes would call point[I] – something that, however, had not caught the photographer’s eye during the immediate experience of the event. Perception is delayed and becomes dependent on a mediating device. The crime only appears in the image, in the photograph, in the representation, with all the shadow of doubt entailed by the perceptual decalation and the phenomenological reduction of reality to the two-dimensional surface of the photographic image.

Brian De Palma embodied the “syndrome Blow-Up" from Greetings (1968), which recreated the scene of photographic enlargement with an undisguised caricature tone and treated in a satirical way the theme of political conspiracy and paranoia – then in vogue, especially in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kenedy and his shocking record in the most famous amateur film in history, the super-8 filming of Abraham Zapruder.

Then in A shot in the night (Blow Out, 1981), the plot becomes a serious topic and the dialogue with Blow-Up is improved: Brian De Palma reinvents the hermeneutic vertigo of Antonioni's film through the exhaustive anamnesis of an event also recorded as a sound recording, and not just as an image – the reflection on the gaze-frame and the point of view unfolds into an investigation about subjective sound and the point of listening.

So much Blow-Up , the A shot in the night they speak of a reality that is inaccessible, or that can only be reached later, with the help of materials recorded in image or sound. The number of apparatus, devices and supports needed to obtain the desired information multiplies from one film to the next, demonstrating that the mediation of perception by technology has become gradually more complex in the fifteen years that separate them.

In his book about Brian De Palma, French critic Luc Lagier observes that the multiplication of mediating instruments allows the director to emphasize the cinematographically constructed character of the plot's interpretation. To understand what “really” happened in the accident he witnessed and recorded, the protagonist of A shot in the night he subjects his recording to a series of manipulations and, in the end, what remains is no longer reality, but its fictional reconstruction. "In A shot in the night, De Palma shows that every element taken from reality, reconsidered in another context, is transformed”.[ii]

Once faced with the possibility of discovering a plot capable of giving coherence to the chain of signifiers that conforms reality to an unconvincing narrative – the ability to sew the open and ambiguous meaning of the world into a closed scheme is characteristic of the paranoid's hermeneutics – , the sound technician played by John Travolta enters a tireless investigative spiral, whose infernal machine only stops turning when he finally repeats the tragedy as farce, in the heady sequence in which his companion, who embarked on the detective venture with him, is murdered while the Fireworks light up the sky over Philadelphia during Independence Day celebrations.

The Fabelmans reaches similar conclusions about the power of transforming reality through cinematic manipulation, but the consequences of this change of point of view, in Spielberg's universe, are totally different from those we would see if it were a Brian De Palma film. In The Fabelmans, the discovery of betrayal brings mother and son closer together, creates complicity between them, and reinforces the emotional bond that unites them. The intimate catastrophe is transformed into the renewal of the parental contract. And the fact witnessed in the film is never in doubt: what was filmed really happened, with this belief in the cinematographic image as a revelation of truth being the inescapable condition for reconciliation on the plane of reality to become possible.

In Brian De Palma's cinema, it would be the exact opposite: the image would not give access to the revelation of truth, but to another image, which would, in turn, rest on another. Fitting of doubles, vertigo of copies (no original to back them up). There is no longer transparency, but rather “masked opacity”, a lapidary formula that guides this book. The “syndrome Blow-Up”, in De Palma, always adds to the “effect Vertigo” – the other axis of the Depalmian Mannerist gear –, to the obfuscating power of an image that, as in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, a body that falls (Vertigo, 1958), causes visual deception not because it hides something, but because it displays it in excess.

Unlike what happens in Spielberg's cinema, in Brian De Palma it is necessary to distrust the image, never truly believe in it in the way of a child amazed at the appearance of a flying saucer. Vision as a tool of knowledge has failed, without the fable-man (Fabelman) being able to come to help or redeem it through the “magic of cinema” combined with faith in good feelings. The obsession with the image now leads to the abyss and tragedy, or rather, the tragedy of mise en abyme.[iii]

Or just frustration, as Brian De Palma learned early on, even before becoming a filmmaker. Wellington Sari describes, in an account similar to a cinematic script, the scene in which a young and inexperienced Brian De Palma perches in the top of a tree armed with a camera with which he intends to record his father's supposed adultery: “Through the viewfinder , the boy sees a man and a woman, framed by the window frame. Click. Click. There is an ellipse. When developing the photographs, a disappointment: is it a kiss? A warm hug? A little secret told in the ear? No, it's just an illusion caused by perspective. A complicit look? Embalmed by photographic rigidity, the gesture is lost in ambiguity. Mission not accomplished: the young man was unable to obtain images that prove that his father, an orthopedic surgeon, is having an extramarital affair with one of the nurses at the hospital. Jefferson Medical College. Nor did the tape recorder, installed by the boy on his father's telephone, provide irrefutable proof.”

The “mother scene”, thus, gives rise to the birth of the “watchman protagonist”, another prodigious expression with which Wellington Sari clarifies the modus operandi of Brian De Palma's cinema, in which the panoptic regime of vision, as the director almost didactically explains in Serpent eyes (Snake Eyes, 1998) e Femme Fatale (2002), it is less the guarantee of total transparency than the entanglement in a myriad of simulacra. The vigilant eye sees everything except what it was looking for. It's the police survey of “The Stolen Letter”, a story by Edgar Allan Poe discussed at the beginning of the book, when we comment on this paradox of vision that scrutinizes every millimeter of space, but misses the elementary, perhaps the trivial, invisible because too visible.

An excerpt from the book, words by Wellington Sari, via Google Translate:

...As in other witnesses of shocking images, such as Nancy Allen's character in Dressed to Kill, the eyes seem to act as diaphragms that need to open wider to receive the light of the unusual event that unfolds before them.

Let us also remember that excess light, or seeing too much, is problematic. Let us rescue the grains in Greetings (Lloyd finds the image of JFK's assassin in the abstract shaded area of ​​a photograph) or the ricochet of the light beam in Femme Fatale, a 2002 film (to really be able to see, in a world overflowing with images, Laure needs to close her eyes and dive into herself) as manifestations thought up by De Palma that serve to draw attention to the fallibility of vision. Here is another aspect of the masked opacity exercised by the filmmaker: every time the light of truth shines, a shadowy zone appears.

Gillian's illuminated eyes in The Fury are, in fact, symptoms of a dark, destructive power (which ends up exploding John Cassavetes' character). But in Domino (2019), already in the final sprint of his career, the director addresses head-on, and not through analogy, the issue of the fabrication of images as a terrorist act.

4.1. The great witness

The unusual Brazilian title for Roy Baker's film, Only God as a witness, is tempting: if the original A Night to Remember suggests an inner gaze in a literal translation, "a night to remember" would evoke the act of scrutinizing memory in the flow of time, the version chosen for our market aims at the opposite, at the definitive external point of view, that of the Creator. It is prudent not to get too attached to this delirious version, but to embrace its new analogy, at least for a moment: the title takes away from the lookout Fleet and his companion on the topsail their very reason for being. If they are the eyes of the ship and are excluded from the condition of witnesses, then they are nothing.

Or, to be more fair with the possible intentions of those responsible for the version, it adds a religious aspect to the shipwreck. 50. God, to the incomprehension of human beings, only observes the great tragedy. In other words, the effects of his own design. The divine point of view is the gaze of the Creator, but in cinematic jargon it is also the technical name for a camera angle (elevated, in extreme low-angle). De Palma's use of this resource should not seem, at this point, like anything new.

The constant presence of the eye that sees from the sky is a relevant access key to the creative thought articulated by the filmmaker. It is his mastermind certificate, a constituent element of the masked opacity.

The configuration composed of the protagonist-watchman figure and that of the Creator, who watches his own machinations with great wisdom and omniscience, is a cinematic situation, analogous to the director's position. It can be found both in the imaginary conjured up from the Brazilian version of A Night to Remember and in virtually any film that uses a camera (excluding from the equation, of course, the term protagonist-watchman, which we developed thinking specifically about De Palma's style). The simple recurrence of the use of God's point of view, as can be seen in the images selected from Body Double and Passion, could already be enough for the effect to draw attention to itself.

Appreciated for his elaborate camera movements, Brian De Palma, one of the most gifted directors of his generation, constantly engages in dialogue with other filmmakers through his films (Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Michael Powell or Buñuel).

De Palma's universe frequently immerses us in bizarre, fast-paced stories with an unstoppable thread of cunning, irony, criticism, humour, horror and a highly refined technique.

Journey with award-winning documentarian and author Laurent Bouzereau through acclaimed director Brian De Palma’s renowned—and controversial—horror and thriller films that redefined cinema in the 1970s and early 80s with new interviews and fresh takes.

Among a crop of fresh filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola in the 70s, Brian De Palma—a director from Philadelphia with a few small comedies under his belt—charted a cinematic path unlike any of his peers. At times he was unfairly dismissed as a Hitchcock copycat; other times he was misunderstood for his peculiar mix of sexuality, humor, music, and violence. But, over the course of ten years, he created a new cinematic language, melding his signature themes with specific filmmaking techniques that are now synonymous with his name.

Drawing from his lifelong love of De Palma, years of research, and new interviews, acclaimed documentarian Laurent Bouzereau explores the seven films that came to define The De Palma Decade—Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out. He combines film analysis, detailed history of the films’ productions, and interviews with De Palma himself, his casts, and collaborators to present the definitive record on this unrivaled period of cinematic creativity and the emergence of an auteur who would continue to influence filmmaking in the decades that followed.

Bouzereau, whose previous books include The De Palma Cut, The Cutting Room Floor, Spielberg: The First Ten Years, and Hitchcock, Piece by Piece, among several others, has been making behind-the-scenes documentaries surrounding films by De Palma, Spielberg, and countless others for decades now. He is also working on a documentary about film composer John Williams.

The career-spanning Baumbach/Paltrow doc is terrific, of course, but if you really want to go in-depth with De Palma discussing his career, the Blumenfeld/Vachaud book is the go-to source. As we know, there are several great books about De Palma and his work -- this one fits in with something like Hitchcock/Truffaut, or Matt Zoller Seitz's comprehensive conversation books with Wes Anderson and Oliver Stone. There really should be an English-language translation -- hopefully someone will look into that and make it happen.

In addition, a book will be published ahead of the festival, also titled De Palma vs De Palma. El Terror Tiene Forma's Jesus Marti provides a nice rundown of the book:

El Festival de Cine de Terror de Molins de Rei (TerrorMolins) and Editorial Hermenaute collaborate for the third consecutive year in what will be its 37th edition with a book about the career of the North American director Brian De Palma. The veteran festival, which will be held from November 9 to 18, this year has as its central theme the director of Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise.

The book reviews the extensive film career of the director of Carrie and Carlito's Way among other essential films. It is a collective essay around the work of the great filmmaker, the great protagonist of the 2018 edition of the Terror Film Festival of Molins de Rei.

Under the title of De Palma vs. De Palma, the book explores many of the essential concepts of the work of De Palma from the personal vision of six authors, each of which focuses its individual analysis on one of these constants. Keith Gordon, actor in two films by Brian De Palma and American filmmaker, contributes with an emotional forward.

De Palma vs. De Palma is a book that deals with formal duality, split identity, aspects such as the split screen and the methodical amplification of Alfred Hitchcock's legacy. A book that avoids the hackneyed chronological analysis and offers an interesting discourse about the work of the New York based director in six complementary articles. De Palma vs De Palma gets, from the analysis of the filmography of the director of Dressed To Kill, make us rethink the discourse of his work and discover new theories. A book that vindicates the figure of one of the best and most controversial filmmakers in history; an essential essay for every movie buff and any curious reader interested in psychology, art, sociology and other fields intimately related to the seventh art, the thriller and the fantastic.

Coordinated by Albert Galera, the book has the signatures of Antonio José Navarro, Gerard Fossas, Jordi Batet, Jaume Claver, Ignasi Juliachs and the same Albert Galera, artistic director of TerrorMolins, writer and film historian.

Cover design: Marta Torres.