Past Screenings + Seminars:
The Responsive Eye: A Brian De Palma Retrospective
May 5 - 27, 2001
Program Introduction
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Saturday, May 5
1:00 p.m.
GREETINGS | Program
Notes
Sigma III, 1968, 88 mins. With Robert De Niro, Jonathan Warden. Preceded
by WOTAN'S WAKE 1962, 30 mins. The 1960's Greenwich Village time capsule
Greetings is a counterculture satire about Vietnam, draft dodging, the
Kennedy assassination, filmmaking, and voyeurism. De Niro plays a would-be
documentarian whose political concerns give way to his attempts to film
naked women. Made for $43,000 and rated X when released, GREETINGS was
a surprise indie hit, earning over a million dollars.
3:15 p.m.
SCREENING AND PANEL DISCUSSION
BLOW OUT | Program
Notes
Filmways, 1981, 108 mins. With John Travolta. Preceded by a panel discussion
with Amy Taubin (The Village Voice), Charles Taylor (Salon),
and Armond White (NY Press). In his masterpiece to date, De Palma
reworks Antonioni's BLOW-UP as a meta-cinematic political thriller, with
Travolta as a sound recordist who stumbles onto a mysterious car accident
involving a would-be presidential candidate. The panel will explore De
Palma's turbulent and provocative career.
Sunday, May 6 —
DE PALMA IN 70mm
2:00 p.m.
CASUALTIES OF WAR | Program
Notes
Columbia, 1989, 120 mins. With Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Thuy Thu Lee,
John C. Reilly. Although overshadowed by PLATOON and FULL METAL JACKET,
which came out a few years earlier, this gripping and hyper-real Vietnam
drama about the rape of a young woman by a crazed sergeant is one of De
Palma's most compelling and accomplished films. The film's emotional intensity
is bolstered by David Rabe's searing screenplay and by an outstanding
ensemble cast.
4:30 p.m.
THE UNTOUCHABLES | Program
Notes
Paramount, 1987, 119 mins. With Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De
Niro. De Palma explores some favorite themes—corruption and violence—in
this lavish Hollywood blockbuster. The Prohibition-era battle between
lawman Eliot Ness (a star-making role for Kevin Costner) and gangster
Al Capone (De Niro at his menacing best) is brought to life with a David
Mamet screenplay, stunning production design by Patrizia von Brandenstein,
music by Ennio Morricone—and costumes by Giorgio Armani.
Saturday, May 12
12:00 p.m. + 2:00 p.m.
SISTERS | Program
Notes
American International Picures, 1973, 92 mins. With Margot Kidder, Jennifer
Salt. After a reporter gets a rear-window view of a murder, she discovers
that the woman she saw commit the crime has a Siamese twin (now separated)
who may be the guilty one. Innovative split-screen photography, a score
by Bernard Herrmann that strengthens the film's links to PSYCHO, and a
dizzying blend of satire and shocking violence, make this a classic contemporary
horror film.
New DVD restoration. Screenings in the Nam June Paik Video Viewing
Room.
2:00 p.m.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE | Program
Notes
1996, 110 mins. Directed by Brian De Palma. With Tom Cruise, Jon Voight,
Emanuelle Béart.
4:00 p.m.
RAISING CAIN | Program
Notes
Universal, 1992, 95 mins. With John Lithgow, Lolita Davidovich. This psychological
thriller about twin brothers, kidnapping, and murder, is De Palma's most
baroque movie, something like a Hitchcock film directed by Raul Ruiz.
Hallucinations, flashbacks, dreams, and shifting viewpoints purposely
complicate a disorienting study of schizophrenia and delusional behavior.
Following the debacle of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, this was a brilliant
return by De Palma to the thriller genre.
Sunday, May 13
2:00 p.m.
CARRIE | Program
Notes
United Artists, 1976, 97 mins. With Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving.
Setting the standard for all teen comedy/horror films to follow, CARRIE
was De Palma's first big commercial hit, and the first Stephen King adaptation.
Sissy Spacek is a shy teenage girl repressed by her mother and tormented
by her classmates, until her telekinetic powers give her a spectacular
form of revenge.
4:00 p.m.
HI MOM! | Program
Notes
Sigma III, 1970, 87 mins. With Robert De Niro. The worlds of New York
underground theater and hard-core filmmaking are among the targets of
this pleasantly scattershot satire starring De Niro as a Vietnam vet trying
to make it in Greenwich Village under the mentorship of a porno director
played by Allen Garfield. The film, which has obvious references to REAR
WINDOW, was also released as CONFESSIONS OF A PEEPING JOHN.
Saturday, May 19
2:00 p.m.
OBSESSION | Program
Notes
Columbia, 1976, 98 mins. With Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John
Lithgow. With a mesmerizingly romantic Bernard Herrmann score to emphasize
its homage to Vertigo, Obsession tells the story of a New Orleans man
obsessed with the memory of his lost wife. Vilmos Zsigmond's moody cinematography
perfectly captures the dreamlike quality of the film's New Orleans and
Florence locations. Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay.
4:00 p.m.
BODY DOUBLE | Program
Notes
Columbia, 1984, 109 mins. With Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith. With its
sleaze-filled story unfolding in the sunny Hollywood hills, BODY DOUBLE
is an arch thriller by De Palma, who pokes fun at his well-known obsession
with both REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO. A second-rate actor is lured by the
beauty of a woman who undresses nightly in front of her unshaded window;
Melanie Griffith plays a porn star hired as the eponymous body double.
Sunday, May 20
2:00 p.m.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE | Program
Notes
Twentieth Century Fox, 1974, 91 mins. With Paul Williams, Jessica Harper.
De Palma transports THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and elements of Faust into
the world of glam rock while telling the story of a songwriter who seeks
revenge on a malicious music mogul. Displaying unbridled inventiveness,
De Palma uses gimmick-filled photography to wild effect as he gleefully
spoofs the corporate world of the recording industry.
4:00 p.m.
DRESSED TO KILL | Program
Notes
Filmways, 1980, 105 mins. With Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen.
The controversies about De Palma's alleged misogyny, his sensationalistic
style, and his reliance on Hitchcock, were crystallized by this dazzling,
disturbing, and operatic thriller. Starting out as the story of an affluent,
erotically bored housewife, the film enters unexpected terrain as it focuses
on the story of a computer whiz and a call girl attempting to thwart a
serial killer.
Saturday, May 26
2:00 p.m.
THE FURY | Program
Notes
Twentieth Century Fox, 1978, 118 mins. With Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes,
Amy Irving. Building upon CARRIE's connection between telekinesis and
adolescent turmoil, De Palma created this engrossing blend of horror and
science fiction, about a psychically gifted high school girl (Amy Irving)
drawn into a plot involving geopolitical terrorism. "Its intensity is
both awesome and hilarious," wrote critic Armond White, "To this date,
THE FURY has the greatest ending in the history of movies."
4:15 p.m.
MISSION TO MARS | Program
Notes
Buena
Vista, 2000, 113 mins. With Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, Don Cheadle. Dividing
critics—or more accurately, alienating most while enchanting a discerning
few—MISSION TO MARS was one of last year's most unjustly maligned
films. Evoking the elegant poetic style of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, De Palma
turns its space adventure into a deeply felt story about love and loss
among the crew members of an ill-fated mission.
Sunday, May 27
2:00 p.m.
SCARFACE | Program
Notes
Universal, 1983, 170 mins. With Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer.
Updating Howard Hawks' gangster classic to modern-day Miami's teeming
Cuban-American underworld, SCARFACE is an equally grungy and electrifying
epic with an all-out performance by Pacino as cocaine godfather Tony Montana.
Oliver Stone's screenplay is a portrait of megalomania that revels in
its main character's excessive behavior, yet De Palma's staging is remarkably
controlled and atmospheric, with moments of surprising beauty.
5:30 p.m.
CARLITO'S WAY | Program
Notes
Universal,
1993, 141 mins. With Al Pacino, Sean Penn. Pacino plays Carlito a drug
boss trying to go straight, after his release from prison. Of course,
his good intentions are doomed, mainly by his "friends"—including
a crooked lawyer played by Penn. Although marketed as a follow-up to SCARFACE,
CARLITO'S WAY is a very different film, suffused with an elegiac, world-weary
tone. Cahiers du Cinéma proclaimed it the best movie of the 1990's.
Past
Screenings + Seminars:
The Responsive Eye:
A Brian De Palma Retrospective
May 5 - 27, 2001
Program Introduction
Toward the beginning
of Brian De Palma's erotic thriller DRESSED TO KILL is a masterful ten-minute
sequence that crystallizes the film's concern with the relationship between
looking and longing. A beautiful, affluent, and clearly restless woman
(played by Angie Dickinson), is walking through the galleries of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. As she jots notes in her appointment book, and looks at
the paintings and at several hand-holding couples who are also whiling
away the afternoon, she is being followed by a man who will ultimately
seduce her and (apparently) kill her. As staged by De Palma, the scene
is a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game, with the vantage point shifting between
the watcher and the watched. The camera gracefully glides through the
galleries, with the director (and by extension the audience) hovering
as a detached but omniscient observer. The art hanging on the walls forms
another layer of commentary, with paintings serving as counterpoint to
De Palma's own images. In De Palma's early screenplay drafts, this scene,
which takes up 107 shots and nearly ten percent of the completed film,
is described in just two sentences:
After her visit with Dr. Bellnap, Kate still his time to kill before
lunch and decides to visit the art museum. There she meets a handsome
MAN who returns her lost glove and offers her a ride home in his cab.
It was only during the production of
the film that De Palma expanded this sequence into what is virtually a
short film about the nature of cinema itself. Throughout his career, De
Palma has continually examined the intense power of the medium, and the
relationship between its mechanics and its meaning, all while making entertaining
movies designed for mass consumption.
Although DRESSED TO KILL was a commercial
success, critical reaction was violently split. Pauline Kael wrote in
The New Yorker "DRESSED TO KILL seems to have merged De Palma's
two sides: he has created a vehicle in which he can unify his ominous
neo-Hitchcock lyricism with the shaggy comedy of his late-1960's GREETINGS
days…in his hands, the thriller form is capable of expressing almost everything—comedy,
satire, sex fantasies, primal emotions." The film's detractors, however,
were more vocal. Enraged women's groups staged highly publicized protests
against the film's portrayal of sexual violence. The film was attacked
on aesthetic grounds as a rip-off of Hitchcock's PSYCHO, because of the
unexpected murder of one of its stars towards the beginning of the movie.
Other critics complained that De Palma was engaging in sheer excess—an
operatic, indulgent style. "De Palma's eye is cut off from conscience
or compassion," wrote David Thomson. "He has contempt for his characters
and his audience alike, and I suspect that he despises even his own immaculate
skill."
Without the sentimental optimism of
Steven Spielberg, or the highbrow ambition of Martin Scorsese, De Palma
has occupied a precarious, unsteady critical standing throughout his career.
After starting as a maverick independent director of counter-culture satires,
De Palma has been working within the Hollywood system since the 1970's,
bringing his personal vision to such popular genres as the thriller, science
fiction, teen movie, gangster film. Yet he has continued to express a
world view that can be deeply unsettling. "I have a certain corrosive
vision of society which seems to not be very commercial," he has acknowledged.
"I try not to let my vision corrode the movies to the extent that they
become so dark that nobody wants to see them…"
De Palma's exaggerated reputation as
a cinematic stylist interested in gimmicky effects for their own sake
ignores, for one thing, a strong layer of social commentary that runs
through his work. His greatest film, BLOW OUT, may seem at first glance
to be a Hollywood remake of Antonioni's BLOW UP. However, its story about
a film technician who stumbles onto a murder is part of a paranoia-laced
view of American politics that evokes the Kennedy assassinations, Chappaquidick,
and Watergate. The film was released in 1981, at the beginning of the
Reagan era, and audiences quickly rejected its bitter view.
Many of DePalma's films incorporate social satire into genre
trappings. Behind CARRIE's Grand Guignol vision of teen alienation is
also an emotionally accurate depiction of the social caste system found
in most high schools. The thoroughly entertaining rock comedy PHANTOM
OF THE PARADISE contains a scathing attack on the commercialism of the
recording industry. The Vietnam drama CASUALTIES OF WAR has a stronger
sense of moral outrage than APOCALYPSE NOW, FULL METAL JACKET, or PLATOON.
De Palma has often been attacked for
his extensive homages to Hitchcock—specifically to REAR WINDOW and
VERTIGO. Indeed, elements of these über-texts by Hitchcock appear
in many of De Palma's films. Yet the references are neither gratuitous
nor shallow. De Palma's movies are, at their deepest level, about what
it means to see and be seen, about what happens when one's subjective
vision of reality encounters the supposedly objective "real" world…which
partly explains his longstanding interest in telepathy. In THE FURY, Amy
Irving's character Gillian is told, "Imagine that you are in front of
a blank movie screen…" What it means to fill in this blank screen, for
the director, for the characters in the story, and more importantly, for
the audience, is De Palma's ultimate subject.
Series organized by David Schwartz, Chief Curator of Film. Special
thanks to Columbia Pictures Repertory, Criterion Films, EmGee Film Library,
MGM/UA, Touchstone Pictures, Universal Pictures.
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