Friends,
Thanks for a great first class discussing Old and New Hollywood, Hitchcockian tropes, and the nature of homage vs rip offs. Note that, due to copyright restrictions, all texts are being distributed through the weekly email instead of public blog posts.
Next week, we begin our discussion of Hitchcock’s imitators with the most notorious one of the bunch: Brian De Palma. After the failure of his first Hollywood movie, a radically-inflected, Godard-inspired studio comedy, De Palma returned to New York City to cook up a new brand of Hitchcockian thriller with Sisters – one that mixed the formal precision of the Master’s 50s and early 60s fare with the political resonance of late 60s and 70s independent cinema. The types of thrillers would inform the next 45 years of De Palma’s filmmaking, but their critical value is still in dispute.
While often derided as pale imitations, De Palma’s films incorporate explicit politics and a self reflexive visual aesthetic that constitute a wholly distinct artistic point-of-view.
Required:
Brian De Palma, Sisters. (Film)
Dumas, Chris. “Cinema of Failed Revolt: Brian De Palma and the Death(s) of the Left” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 1-24 (PDF)
Optional:
Noam Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, De Palma. (Film)
Peretz, Eyal. “Carrie– Film and the Wounding of Representation” in Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses, pp. 23-45. (PDF)
Lindsey, Shelley Stamp. “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty” in Journal of Film and Video , Winter 1991, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 33-44. (PDF)
Pye, Michael and Linda Myles. The Movie Brats, pp. 141-169. (PDF)
Sisters was screened in the first class; be sure to try to watch the film prior to the start of the next class on Wednesday to get the most out of discussion if you opted to screen it in the comfort of your own homes! Available on the Criterion Channel or "Max"
In "Cinema of Failed Revolt: Brian De Palma and the Death(s) of the Left," Chris Dumas posits the unique position of Brian De Palma as an object that the discipline of Film Studies fails to consider properly. Dumas speculates on why De Palma occupies such a blind spot, considering his relationship to Hitchcock in the context of his relationship to Godard, as well as the overarching history of De Palma's early career. In addition to being a great primer on De Palma's filmography and aesthetic sensibility, this essay also offers a critical look at Film Studies as a discipline.
*optional* De Palma, directed by Jake Paltrow and famed Barbie screenwriter/executive producer Noah Baumbach, is a documentary that interviews De Palma himself regarding each of his films, and each phase of his career. While he's evasive about certain aspects of filmmaking, Brian makes a lot of space to discuss the influence of Hitchcock on his works. Light spoilers for some scenes in various films. Available on "Max"
*optional* For Plato course alums and other philosophically inclined folks, take a gander at a Peretz's chapter "Carrie-- Film and the Wounding of Representation" from his highly recommendable De Palma study. Here, Peretz establishes a few of the core concepts (problems with vision, witnessing, language as blood transmission) in his theory on De Palma which champions De Palma's filmography as a response to the conception of vision and truth in Platonic philosophy. This chapter summarizes Carrie on pages 23-24 but subsequently discusses the very first scene of Carrie, which means it doesn't really spoil anything, and also makes it a great example of academic close reading of film scenes.
*optional* "Horror, Femininity, and Carrie's Monstrous Puberty" by Shelley Stamp Lindsey offers a good version of the feminist case against certain De Palma films. While Sisters is arguably a feminist-lite re-orientation of a certain Hitchcockian sub-genre, later films (starting with Carrie and crescendoing with Body Double) earned De Palma criticism from some feminist writers. This one spoils Carrie.
*optional* The selection from The Movie Brats offers a neat biography of De Palma around the turn of the 1980s, and also a fun time capsule of where some people thought his career was headed at that time. The authors lightly suggest that De Palma has sold out to the 20th Century Fox studio establishment, when his partnership with the studio would actually end with The Fury, released slightly before the book was published.
