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De Palma, |
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Co-author: Cristina
Álvarez López
When
people draw up their lofty pantheons of the eternally great directors, Brian De
Palma (born 1940, turned 80 in 2020) frequently disappears early in the cull.
Of course, he has his fervent fans all over the world – more visibly and
vocally now in the Internet age, with numerous, extravagant, idolatory
websites. And there has always been a steady trickle of intensely detailed
analyses from a more microscopic perspective. (1) But, when push comes to
shove, few are likely to rate De Palma alongside names like Carl Dreyer,
Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles or Jean Renoir.
What
is this resistance to valuing De Palma? Partly, it is a matter of the kind of
films he makes: not exactly humanist – and humanism remains, despite all
protestations to the contrary, the supreme criterion for the majority of moviegoers,
professional or otherwise: films centred on three-dimensional, richly
personalised characters, or themes in
the traditional literary or theatrical sense (love, death, struggle, hope …).
And,
despite his own claim that he moved a little more toward “character-driven”
stories at the time of Casualties of War (1989) and Carlito’s Way (1993), De Palma, it seems, is forever fated to be included in the legion of
filmmakers deemed variously cold, mechanical, calculating, even “cruel and
indifferent” (as David Thomson called him) – turning people into puppets or
ciphers for his formalistic games. And when those games involve the spectacular
depiction of sex and/or violence, as is frequently the case, we are faced with
a decidedly impure cinema on the
cultural level.
The
filmmaker himself sees the matter entirely differently – and he has expressed
himself on this point many times, in numerous interviews and in the feature
documentary De Palma (Noah Baumbach
& Jake Paltrow, 2015). For him, by contrast, what he creates is pure cinema – exploiting to the hilt
what it is that cinema, and cinema alone, can do, engineer and create:
movement, spectacle, action, intrigue, suspense, catastrophe … a constant,
finely balanced dance between the opposing energies of chaos and control. (2)
However,
there is one clear and present danger in attending too closely to De Palma’s
interviews and other public statements. He is one of the many filmmakers who do
not really enjoy speaking or theorising about their own work. De Palma has
reluctantly crafted a persona for the
public – a well-rehearsed story to tell about himself and his life that he
unfailingly repeats, without variation, from one platform to the next. Finally
(and this is again true of many directors, as well as artists in general), this
story is more a mask than a confession. As any psychoanalyst could tell you,
the tale that is confidently repeated verbatim the moment that a patient hits
the couch is a defence mechanism rather than a genuine self-exploration. In De
Palma’s personal case, the public biography both highlights and obscures
something essential about his trajectory as a cinematic creator.
De
Palma is a product of the 1960s – of its counter-cultural currents, and its
political upheavals. The two, interconnected films that first brought him a
measure of public attention – Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970), both
starring a young Robert De Niro in his pre-Martin Scorsese phase – embodied the
director’s stated dream: “If I could be the American Godard, that would be
great”. (3) They are low-budget, anarchic, scattershot, semi-improvised films
that “act out”, in comical-grotesque terms, the various obsessions, anxieties
and liberations of those years as De Palma experienced and internalised them.
Some version of Women’s Liberation jostles with paranoiac fears over vast
government conspiracies and cover-ups; the sudden intermixing of racially white
and black cultures on home turf intersects with the war in Vietnam.
At
the same time, the 1960s were, for the USA and other Western countries, a
period when mass media exploded – and seemed to truly mediate and distort all
lived experience, whether through the TV window of the nightly news, or the big
screen fantasies of Hollywood movie entertainment. De Palma’s earliest shorts
reflect his wide-eyed immersion in both popular and art cinema traditions (Wotan’s Wake, 1962); his commissioned
documentaries explore new “modes of vision” in technology and art (The Responsive Eye, 1966); and his
collaboration with avant-garde theatre guru Richard Schechner’s The Performance
Group in Dionysus in 69 (1970) captured
– across a split-screen – the heady dream to “break on through to the other
side” of all inhibiting social codes and conventions, even to the point of
shattering and fleeing the screen-spectacle itself.
None
of these formative experiences in 1960s counterculture ever entirely leave De
Palma, even at the most seemingly mainstream moments of his career, such as Mission:
Impossible (1996). Some of the actors from his earliest efforts keep
popping up, such as De Niro and especially the ultra-stylised William Finley
(1940-2012). Experimenting with “expanded vision” (for instance, with split or
multiple screens) remains an enduring passion. The confrontational politics do
not disappear, either, as Redacted (2007), his fierce anti-war pamphlet for the Internet age, proves. Even the
dream of ultimately “breaking out” of society’s status quo returns – now in
cosmic or apocalyptic terms – in, respectively, Mission to Mars (2000) and Snake Eyes (1998), the latter of which was originally to conclude with a giant tidal wave
washing the whole mess of Atlantic City down the drain.
De
Palma’s oft-repeated account of his wild 1960s ride, however, concludes with a
nasty sting in the tale. At the time of Greetings or Hi, Mom!, he appeared on a
television talk show. As he recalls it, he took the opportunity to extoll the
virtues of personal freedom and political revolution. But at a certain point,
the host politely interrupted – in order to cut to an advertisement selling
some banal consumer product. It was a primal scene of disillusionment in the
Life of Brian: he had been swallowed up by the dominant capitalistic, media
system; he had become just another entertaining diversion, a sideshow in the
carnival of America’s self-propagation. So many of his films – from Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), on which
he lost creative control, to Redacted and beyond, will re-tell some version, duly transposed, of this “formative
experience” that bred life-long wariness and cynicism in him. Qualities of
character that (as, for example, producer Art Linson’s affectionate portrait of
the director in A Pound of Flesh makes clear) have no doubt helped him navigate the regularly treacherous waters
of commercial filmmaking.
# #
The
De Palma with which most filmgoers and specialist cinephiles are familiar does
not really begin, however, with Wotan’s
Wake or his first, modest feature, a comedy of manners titled The Wedding Party (1964). It starts with Sisters in 1973 – where he took the Alfred Hitchcock inspiration initially declared in Murder à la Mod (1967) and applied it to
the genre of the modern thriller. It is the “royal road” of productions leading
from Sisters to Body Double (1984) that cemented De Palma’s post-countercultural
persona in the public eye – for better and for worse, in terms of the
rise-and-fall vicissitudes of his entire career.
This
crystallisation of De Palma in the industrial marketplace as a thriller/horror
specialist almost meant (again, for better and for worse) that certain genres
became off-limits for him: his comedies (such as Wise Guys [1986] and The Bonfire of the Vanities [1990]) registered
as professional low-points; and his love of rock music and its culture –
energetically brandished in Phantom of
the Paradise (1974), but unable to find fulfilment in a Jim Morrison (of
The Doors) biopic starring John Travolta – passed into the distant background.
It
is far too easy to reduce De Palma’s work since Sisters (and even before it) to a parade of clearly recurring
thematic situations: voyeurism, confinement, doppelgängers, transgression, spying,
psychological blockage, failed revolt, and so on. Here, too, De Palma’s public re-treading
over his colourful autobiographical experiences – such as photographically
spying on his father’s adulterous affairs – only serves to confirm and
reinforce this reductive tendency. We need a different way to approach De Palma’s
cinema.
Some
suggestive remarks by the scholar Thomas Elsaesser can give us a hand here. He once
wrote of the director Samuel Fuller (Shock
Corridor, 1963), within and at the edge of the Hollywood studio system in
the 1950s:
Fuller’s particular genius cannot be
adequately gauged by a strictly thematic analysis, although such an analysis
clearly belongs to the homework of any conscientious critic. Nevertheless, it
is not a director’s themes that make his work important but what he makes of
them … Talking about “themes” often becomes a shorthand way of talking about a
director’s vision, his style and his artistic or moral concerns. (4)
This
lesson in mise en scène criticism is
a good one, and it still holds good for De Palma today. As Elsaesser commented
of Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959), “The stress is on a-symmetry, centrifugal forces, with the plot full of
red herrings, dramatic non-sequiturs, and an editing technique that makes both
narrative and space progress in fits and starts”. (5)
De
Palma was blessed with some remarkably prescient critical commentaries relatively
early in his career, when that decade-long run of strong films from Sisters to Body Double established his reputation. For example, the
French-American critic Michael Henry Wilson (later a collaborator with Scorsese)
defined, with striking precision, the kind of cinema that De Palma does make, as distinct from the kind he
does not make:
Unlike Martin Scorsese, De Palma belongs to a breed of artists who do not
create to express themselves, but express themselves to create. His primary
interest lies in the handling of signs and figures, in subverting codes and
their conventions, in the dialectics of objective and subjective shots, in the
intricate alchemy through which fiction comes into existence. (6)
Wilson’s
formulation here is spot-on. De Palma, beginning with Sisters, became a narrative filmmaker par excellence. Yet, while immersing us in the necessary thrills
and twists of a plot, he also stands outside the fiction-machine, showing us
how its pieces, levels and elements come together – and also how they fly apart.
Intriguingly, this deep but spontaneously reflexive or deconstructive tendency
takes us all the way back to De Palma’s roots in aspects of the 1960s
avant-garde. Because,
The tour de force split-screen sequence
at the climax of Passion (2012), for
example, marks an unexpected rendezvous between De Palma’s cinema and contemporary
multi-media, installation art (Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Isaac Julien,
Godard) – where filmmakers sometimes disassemble and reassemble their existing filmic
works, spreading them across multiple screens in the gallery space. In this
scenario, De Palma could be seen as providing the pure cinema that current digital
media art abstracts, complexifies and plays with further.
But
is Passion pure cinema, while modern
media art is impure cinema? Maybe De Palma himself thinks so, ambivalently: his
films are filled with every new computer technology, but he insists (whenever
he can) on shooting glamorous 35 millimetre with old-school cinematographers
such as José Luis Alcaine. Ultimately, the force and ingenuity of De Palma’s
cinema comes from the fact that he has always embraced a mixed-media impurity. From
the grubby traces of Jack Smith-style theatrics in Wotan’s Wake to the mobile phone video transmissions of Passion, De Palma loves to make cinema
from what is not-cinema.
# #
So
De Palma incites consideration of a great (and often undervalued) tradition in
cinema, a specific aesthetic and cultural context – alongside other masters
including Sergio Leone, Jerry Lewis, Kathryn Bigelow, Dario Argento, Joe Dante,
Bigas Luna and George Miller, all the way up to Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges
Clouzot, Vera Chytilová, Fritz Lang and Akira Kurosawa. That is to say, the
masters of pure cinema, at the very least in a certain sensational tradition. (7) But we also wonder, with impurity, whether
there is a more properly sentimental approach to the experience of De Palma’s movies that is just as important and
valid.
It
can sometimes be suspected that certain directors are important not so much (or
not only) for the intrinsic richness of their art, as for their significance at
a particular moment in a moviegoer’s life. Some filmmakers open up something
crucial for us as cinephiles, a way of seeing, understanding and (let’s not
forget) enjoying the medium of cinema.
This process is not bound by cinema history, but rather is keyed to the
vicissitudes of personal history – it doesn’t matter whether you paid your
ticket to Carrie (1976) as an adult
in the ‘70s or whether you stumbled upon Femme
Fatale (2002) as a teenager in the new online millennium – the same kick,
the same flash of discovery can apply. Whatever the time or place, for over 55
years now, the revelation of De Palma’s work has been there, lying in wait for
you.
And
this, after all, is not simply a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Just as
theories of psychological development teach us that no layer of an individual –
as a baby, a child, an adolescent, etc. – ever completely disappears, and always
co-exists (sometimes in friction) alongside the subsequent layers, so too the
discovery of De Palma is something we can always re-live, with each major new
film of his that we encounter. That thrill is inexhaustible …
There
is a De Palma Age in the autobiographies of many of us – just as there is an
Anaïs Nin Age or a David Bowie Age. Are we thereby suggesting that the appeal
of De Palma’s art is essentially adolescent – if not nerdish – and that its
ideal spectator is something like the wide-eyed teenager played by Keith Gordon
in Dressed to Kill (1980), turned on
by the gee-whiz mechanics of audio-visual devices? Not exactly: that would be
to play into the hands of the smug humanists once again, placing De Palma at a
low level of the aesthetic and cultural hierarchy. Rather, there is a dare to spectators from De Palma: to
take the pure with the impure, and to interrelate them in our minds as
ingeniously as he himself does in cinematic language.
Right
now, we can imagine a budding young filmmaker or critic discovering a De Palma
movie for the first time, soaking up its elaborate formal conceits, and having
his or her eyes and ears opened by all the amazing, boundlessly clever tricks
with time, space, narrative and perspective. We cannot today imagine the cinema
– or life as a cinephile – without the dazzling, virtuosic, mind-boggling games
that De Palma has opened up for us, and that he explores at the height of his
inventiveness.
2.
For an intriguing (if excessively abstracted) account of De Palma’s place in a strictly
defined pure cinema tradition, see Bruce Isaacs, The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (London: Oxford
University Press, 2020). back
3.
See interview in Joseph Gelmis, The Film
Director as Superstar (Penguin, 1970), p. 61. back
4.
Thomas Elsaesser, The Persistence of
Hollywood (Routledge, 2012), p. 59. back
5.
Ibid. back
6.
Michael Henry Wilson, “Brian De Palma”, in Jean-Pierre Coursodon (ed.), American Directors Volume II (McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 86. back
7.
Pure cinema is, ultimately, many things (and this would be where we depart from
Bruce Isaacs’ argument – see note 2). If pure cinema, as a term or an idea,
cannot encompass the formalist comedy of Ernst Lubitsch or Frank Tashlin, the
melodrama of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger or Douglas Sirk, the
impassioned minimalism of Chantal Akerman or Michael Snow, the baroque visions
of Josef von Sternberg, the paroxysmic fragmentation of Godard and John
Cassavetes or the frenetic vitalism of Boris Barnet – not just the reflexive
shocks, games and abstractions of the thriller/horror/action genre – what use
is it, finally? Hitchcock (among others) named it, but he doesn’t own it! back
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin April/May 2018 |
