Among the great American film-lovers of his generation (Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg…), Brian De Palma is the one whose relationship to image is the most complex. Working from pre-existing images to create his own, he himself has dissected the films of his masters, starting with Hitchcock of course, whose sequences, narratives and motifs (visual, sound, musical) come back tirelessly in his work, like obsessions that haunt him and give it all its depth and originality. Here, the image is more than a simple reference, and the filmmaker never ceases to reaffirm its cogency, its powers, its potentialities (aesthetic, political, moral). The image for De Palma is a source of pleasure, but also of horror. It is vital, but funeral. Luminous, or twilight. Obsession, Phantom of the Paradise, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Carlito's Way, Mission: Impossible ... films populated by ghosts and dead on borrowed time. The hero, in De Palma, is a tightrope walker ready to fall into the void at any moment, like the young Vietnamese girl from Casualties of War, whose tortured body could single-handedly embody the tragic dimension of her cinema. Casualties of War and the representation of the war at De Palma will be at the heart of this retrospective with a day hosted by Nathan Réra, on the occasion of the release at Rouge Profond of his book, "Outrages, from Daniel Lang to Brian De Palma".

The Lumière retrospective includes most of De Palma's films from Hi, Mom! on, and while it includes The Bonfire Of The Vanities, it does not include the comedies Get To Know Your Rabbit, Home Movies, and Wise Guys. And although Redacted is included in the series, other recent films, for whatever reason, are missing in action: Mission To Mars, Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia, and Passion.

Three months after David Hockney’s swimming pool canvas sold for $90 million, the art world is gathering around an actual pool the British artist painted at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

Hockney decorated the pool’s bottom with blue swirls in 1987, almost six decades after the historic Los Angeles building hosted the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. This week, the surrounding cabanas will exhibit works by local and international artists as part of a new art fair called Felix.

The event, co-founded by former Walt Disney Co. executive Dean Valentine, is among at least six art fairs taking place as the city vies to become an art-market epicenter, something that has eluded Los Angeles despite being home to major artists, patrons, art schools and institutions. Frieze, which hosts art fairs in London and New York, will debut this week at Paramount Pictures.

“Los Angeles has always had the artists,” said Valentine, 63, rattling off legends such as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari and Chris Burden. “Now there’s more art market infrastructure here. It’s firing on all cylinders.”

International players including Hauser & Wirth and Sprueth Magers joined L.A.’s vibrant, but decentralized, gallery scene in recent years, though some upstarts have since closed. Billionaire Eli Broad and the brothers behind Guess jeans, Maurice and Paul Marciano, opened private museums.

Southern California collectors used to head to New York and Basel to buy art, but now “collectors from all over the world are coming here because the art scene is so exciting,” said Jeffrey Deitch, a dealer and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In September, Deitch opened a local gallery because he “saw an international market.”

Frieze will emphasize Los Angeles by giving prominent space to local galleries and offering VIPs a program that includes visits to studios as well as conversations with artists and collectors living in the area.

“We know that L.A. likes to tell stories about itself,” said Bettina Korek, executive director of Frieze Los Angeles, which will host 70 galleries.

At Blum & Poe’s booth, Dave Muller will create a site-specific mural, titled “Oh Hollywood.” David Kordansky will have a solo presentation of Kathryn Andrews, whose works feature film props and sleek surfaces, a hybrid of Pop art and minimalism. Landscapes and cityscapes of California by 98-year-old Wayne Thiebaud, as well as his iconic pastry images, will be the focus of New York’s Acquavella Galleries, with prices ranging from $350,000 to $5 million. Deitch will present abstract works by Judy Chicago, painted during her L.A. sojourn. Hauser & Wirth will stage the U.S. debut of “Unisex Love Nest,” a 1999 installation by Mike Kelley, a South Pasadena-based artist who died in 2012. The asking price is $1.8 million.

At Felix, 41 galleries will present paintings, sculptures and video art in hotel rooms and around the Hockney pool. The setting draws inspiration from an earlier era of art fairs: in 1994, the Armory Show took place at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York and the Chateau Marmont in L.A.

“It was amazing,” Valentine said, recalling works by Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Thomas Schutte. “You walked from room to room, bumped into other collectors in the hallways and then had a drink at the bar.”

Some say that sense of discovery, fun and intimacy is largely absent from the relentless art fair circuit these days.

“It’s become this mega shopping experience,” Valentine said. “I find it hard to get into.” Felix is an attempt “to replicate the things that are missing from the art world,” he said. “More intimate, conversational and fun. Less hyper-capitalistic.”

Felix joins two established L.A. fairs, Art Los Angeles Contemporary (now in its 10th year) and stARTup (hosting its fourth L.A. fair), as well as heavy-hitting newcomer Frieze, the influential London-based fair that is seen as the linchpin of what is sure to be the city's most robust arts week ever (all four fairs wrap on Feb. 17).

Valentine, a board member of the Hammer Museum, says the choice of the hotel format is meant to evoke the storied but short-lived Gramercy International Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont in the mid-1990s, considered by some gallerists and collectors to be a key inflection point in L.A.'s emergence as an art city. The Roosevelt also has its own associations: It was the site of the first Academy Awards in 1929. And many rooms, including those being put to use by Felix, overlook the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theater. Valentine hopes the varied spaces and presentations at the hotel will give visitors “the surprise of turning a corner” and finding an unexpected object, moment or connection with another art lover.

The name "Felix" came in part from one of Valentine's favorite cartoon characters, Felix the Cat; it's also a nod to a favorite painting, Paul Signac's seminal portrait of the 19th-century art critic and anarchist Felix Feneon. The allusion to anarchy may be apt because Felix is being produced somewhat on the fly, especially compared to Frieze, which has spent years laying a foundation for its expansion to Southern California and has a well-oiled, well-heeled and market-savvy operation (as well as majority owner Endeavor) behind its presentation of 60 galleries.

“A complex series of seductions and murders — that’s not something you see a woman do.” This line, spoken early (by a man, of course) in Bob Rafelson’s Black Widow (1987) — which features Theresa Russell as a beautiful psychopath who marries wealthy magnates only to poison them — sets a clean template for erotic thrillers to work against. The often-maligned genre, which flourished in the ’80s and ’90s and functions as an intriguing amalgam of film noir, sexy music video, and pure id, is the subject of “Crimes of Passion: The Erotic Thriller,” a luxuriously sprawling 24-film series running this month at the Quad Cinema. With Valentine’s Day around the corner, the rep house is bringing seduction and murder to the forefront. But it’s worth remembering, amid the enjoyable screen hysterics, that the erotic thriller would be nothing without its femmes fatales. To watch them rebuff the Black Widow line, again and again, is a reliable pleasure.

In addition to glossy genre icons like Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) and Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), the Quad’s program also offers up some films that haven’t traditionally been described as erotic thrillers. But even more surprisingly, while surveying the canvas of titles on display, is the second connective thread that emerges: “Crimes of Passion” is, in a sense, a short seminar on the femme fatale. The stock character, as old as cinema itself, endures for a reason: Within a society that expects women to be docile, passive figures, the spectacle of a woman behaving badly ignites both lust and a perverse wish fulfillment. It’s a nuanced appeal that reaches beyond the male gaze.

Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder’s 1944 noir classic, is the oldest work in the series; Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal, in that movie, of a married woman who seduces an insurance salesman into a murderous scheme stands as a template for the genre. Her deviousness would be scandalous in any era. She’s also an obvious inspiration for Kathleen Turner’s character in Body Heat (1981), an early pioneer in heaping horniness onto the handsome noir template and beginning to codify the erotic thriller as a newly steamy genre of its own.

The genre also owes a debt to Alfred Hitchcock. Vertigo (1958), with Kim Novak as a provocative woman who takes on two distinct identities, is one of the great cinematic examples of femininity spiraling into something confusing and sinister. And a particularly ardent Hitchcock follower, Brian De Palma, may well be the auteur of the erotic thriller. With three films, he’s the most-represented director in the series; each of them — Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), Femme Fatale (2002) — prominently features crime, plot twists, and babely blondes. It takes some moxie to literally title an erotic thriller “femme fatale,” but De Palma’s the rare director who could actually pull it off. Though he has long had charges of sexism leveled against him, the women in his films project power and know how to use their sexuality to influence those around them. Femme Fatale doesn’t just gawk at its model-turned-actress star, Rebecca Romijn. It builds a head-spinning world of double crosses around her — and, ultimately, gives her the last laugh.

The Torino Fest site adds, "From his early works in the sixties to the masterpieces that made him one of the key directors of contemporary cinema, Emanuela Martini (curator of the retrospective and the director of the Turin Film Festival) will lead us to a rediscovery of the author that has had a fundamental influence on Cinema history." The 35th Torino Film Festival, which is held in Turin, Italy, will run November 24th through December 2nd.