• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • HOME
  • NEWS+OPINIONS
    • NEWS TO US
    • COLUMNS
      • APPARENT HORIZON
      • DEAR READER
      • Close
    • LONGFORM FEATURES
    • OPINIONS
    • EDITORIAL
    • Close
  • ARTS+ENTERTAINMENT
    • FILM
    • MUSIC
    • COMEDY
    • PERFORMING ARTS
    • VISUAL ARTS
    • Close
  • DINING+DRINKING
    • EATS
    • SIPS
    • BOSTON BETTER BEER BUREAU
    • Close
  • LIFESTYLE
    • CANNABIS
      • TALKING JOINTS MEMO
      • Close
    • WELLNESS
    • GTFO
    • Close
  • STUFF TO DO
  • TICKETS
  • ABOUT US
    • ABOUT
    • MASTHEAD
    • ADVERTISE
    • Close
  • BECOME A MEMBER

Dig Bos

The Dig - Greater Boston's Alternative News Source

TALKING SHOP: ON DE PALMA, HITCHCOCK, “DE PALMA,” AND “HITCHCOCK”

Written by JAKE MULLIGAN Posted June 10, 2016 Filed Under: A+E, Film

 

FM_DePalma_728

When you read film criticism—especially when you’re reading it online in 2016—it typically comes from one of two angles. The first one is the artistic expression approach—“what did that movie mean?” The second one is the social value approach—“is that meaning agreeable in political and ideological terms?” Occasionally you get the auteurist approach—“what did one creative personality do to give that meaning some distinction?” Much rarer are discussions centered around the craft of making movies—“what techniques were used to create that meaning?” And rarest of all is the business angle—“why was this movie made?”—because the answer to that question is almost always the same: Movies are made to create revenue and to advance careers. That’s why it’s so instructive for obsessive filmgoers to hear directors speak about their craft. When we talk about movies, we talk about art. But when they talk about movies, they’re talking business. We’re the watchers. They’re the workers.

 

This week, two overlapping retrospectives—one is a series of films, the other is one of the films themselves—help to honor such a worker. The Independent Film Festival Boston and the Somerville Theatre will present screenings of films by Brian De Palma in the form of The Untouchables (6/13) and Scarface (6/14). That duo will be punctuated by an advance screening of De Palma (6/15), a nonfiction interview film directed by Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) and Jake Paltrow (Young Ones). It’s likely safe to assume that the two younger directors conducted the interviews personally. But the only thing you see during De Palma is the man himself and the images he created: De Palma faces the frame and talks through his career from stem to stern, offering comments on each of his films and projects—not just Carrie and Mission: Impossible and the ones you know, but also Home Movies and Wise Guys and the ones you never saw. This project seems to have developed out of interviews that Baumbach conducted with De Palma for the Criterion Collection, which are available on the Blu-ray releases of Blow Out and Dressed to Kill. Those were presented in a conversational format. De Palma is different. The film has been edited—by Matt Mayer and Lauren Minnerath—into the form of a one-man show. They’ve made the director’s recollections into a feature-length monologue, interrupted only by visual evidence from his own films. It’s a deposition.

 

The obvious response is to call De Palma a feature-length DVD bonus feature. But we’ve seen those, and they’re deliberately heady talks—film-nerd stuff, with Baumbach questioning De Palma on his use of space (magnificent) or his taste in composers (same). De Palma is a more candid experience. It’s not exactly Hollywood Babylon, but De Palma (who’s now 76 years old and hasn’t directed a film within the Hollywood studio system for over 10 years) has no need to temper his expression. He speaks openly about the way one of his films was upended by a lousy lead performance (Obsession). Or about the way a studio capsized another picture by cutting out the director’s preferred finale (Snake Eyes). His candor applies to his own shortcomings, as well, like when he details his inability to handle a mega-budget (Mission to Mars). Past that, most of the conversations are technical. It’s shop talk. One segment has De Palma explaining how he searched for the right amount of split screen to use during the finale of Carrie (it was modulated exclusively for the sake of audience coherence, with no considerations given to, say, “expression.”) Another segment details arguments surrounding the finale of Impossible, with its numerous collaborators split on which finish would bring the biggest profit. So even the craft of filmmaking is often presented as a means to a business’ ends—which is to say that the workers are speaking honestly. Sure, there’s some “Criterion Collection” in De Palma. But there’s also Variety and American Cinematographer.

 

One text looms largest over De Palma. It’s called “Hitchcock.” His influence has been well documented, and that continues here: De Palma talks about Hitchcock the way that you suspect an apprentice painter may have spoken of the elderly Titian. He sees Hitchcock’s explicitly omniscient aesthetic as being the peak of the cinematic form, and admits dedicating himself to the creation of modernized facsimiles. The editing of De Palma centers that spectatorial apprenticeship as being integral, and a key to all De Palma films—both the blatant Hitchcock riffs (Obsession and Body Double, et al.) and the rest. But it’s not just the-director-Hitchcock who casts his shadow. It’s also the text. “Hitchcock”—a book-length record of interviews conducted between the Master of Suspense and the French filmmaker François Truffaut, first published in 1966 and reprinted ever since—is De Palma’s godfather.

 

“Hitchcock,” often stylized as “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” is almost spartan in its workmanlike appraisal of the filmmaking apparatus. Screenshots and storyboards are included to help illustrate the way that the famed director organized his filmmaking in a way that would hope to create a unified audience reaction. Hitchcock’s comments emphasize the approach. He describes elements of the craft in terms of their ability to affect the audience, and rarely in terms of their ability to facilitate artistic expression. And when he does get personal, he often asks Truffaut to turn the recorders off.  De Palma and De Palma are just as businesslike. And true to the tradition, the elder director proves testy whenever he’s pushed on personal matters. Maybe you’d call this a spiritual successor. The connections do run deep. De Palma is a lifelong Hitchcockian, with whole films to show as receipts. And Baumbach, the technical maestro’s more gentle admirer—the François to his Alfred—has been lifting score music from Truffaut movies for use in his own films for years now. It’s likely an intentional allusion, but you can feel these two trying to stake their own adjacent places in cinema history. They’re chasing ghosts.

 

They’re doomed to fall short. But at least they’re running in the right direction. Last year saw the premiere of Hitchcock/Truffaut, director Kent Jones’ feature-length nonfiction appreciation of the eponymous text. That documentary saw an all-star team of semi-establishment directors—David Fincher, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Richard Linklater, and Martin Scorsese among them—speak about the profound influence they found in the Hitchcock book. It’s an enjoyable watch, marked by an emotive appreciation of Vertigo by Scorsese. But De Palma better captures the workaday pragmatism and technical expertise extolled in Truffaut’s most famous text. It’s a better adaptation, even if it’s an unofficial one. The people featured in Jones’ film spoke with reverence and awe. But the stories and conversations that are recorded and presented in De Palma? They’re direct from the set, and unembellished by any semblances of self-importance. De Palma is a great artist, but the greatest pleasure of De Palma is that he never speaks like one.

 


THE UNTOUCHABLES. MON 6.13. RATED R. SOMERVILLE THEATRE. 55 DAVIS SQ., SOMERVILLE. 7:30PM. 70MM. $15.

 

SCARFACE. TUE 6.14. RATED R. SOMERVILLE THEATRE. 7:30PM. 35MM. $10.

 

DE PALMA. THU 6.16. RATED R. SOMERVILLE THEATRE. 7:30PM. TICKETS ARE FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVE AND REQUIRE A PASS FROM IFFBOSTON.ORG

 

JAKE MULLIGAN
+ posts
  • JAKE MULLIGAN
    https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/
    INTERVIEW: FREDERICK WISEMAN

Filed Under: A+E, Film Tagged With: Brian De Palma, De Palma, iffboston, Scarface, somerville theatre, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Untouchables

WHAT’S NEW

State Wire: Funds Aim To Support Municipalities With Expanded Mail Voting

State Wire: Funds Aim To Support Municipalities With Expanded Mail Voting

Parks & Checks: Wasteful, Opaque Bookkeeping At Two City Of Boston Nonprofit Arms

Parks & Checks: Wasteful, Opaque Bookkeeping At Two City Of Boston Nonprofit Arms

Surf’s Upcycled: Meet The Bay State Surfers Conserving The Oceans Where They Ride

Surf’s Upcycled: Meet The Bay State Surfers Conserving The Oceans Where They Ride

State Wire: Public Supports Changes To High-Stakes Testing For Mass Students

State Wire: Public Supports Changes To High-Stakes Testing For Mass Students

State Wire: White Supremacist Gatherings, Incidents Hit All-Time High In New England

State Wire: White Supremacist Gatherings, Incidents Hit All-Time High In New England

State Wire: Protests, Construction Continue at East Boston Substation

State Wire: Protests, Construction Continue at East Boston Substation

Primary Sidebar

LOCAL EVENTS

AAN Wire


Most Popular

  • Does Massachusetts Underestimate Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions?
  • The Most Expensive Massachusetts City For Car Insurance (No, It’s Not Boston)
  • If You Find A Mini Felted Animal Around Boston, This Is Where It Came From
  • Photo Dispatch: “Ukraine Day” Rally In Boston’s Copley Square
  • As Prices Soar, Fossil Fuel Industry Looks After Its Interests On Beacon Hill

Footer

Social Buttons

DigBoston facebook DigBoston Twitter DigBoston Instagram

Masthead

About

Advertise

Customer Service

About Us

DigBoston is a one-stop nexus for everything worth doing or knowing in the Boston area. It's an alt-weekly, it's a website, it's an email blast, it's a twitter account, it's that cool party that you were at last night ... hey, you're reading it, so it's gotta be good. For advertising inquiries: sales@digboston.com To reach editorial (and for inquiries about internship opportunities): editorial@digboston.com