SISTERS
Many people have bought into the idea that Brian DePalma is a comedic film-maker. New Yorker film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael started this rumor in writing about--of all things--DePalma's filmCarrie. While I agree that the man's motion pictures have their humorous touches, I can't help thinking that speaking of DePalma as a comedic movie-maker is like claiming Charlie Chaplin as a great tragedian. It might be technically correct, but it so misses the point that whoever says it loses a certain credibility, at least with people such as myself, unaccustomed to literal-ism in any form as we are. I'll grant the opposing side the humor in the first five minutes of Blow Out, the parody of Antonioni in Greetings, the fast motion tuxedo scene in Carrie, the murder clean-up segment in Sisters and even the title of Hi, Mom! But DePalma, like his influences, is not primarily any one kind of a film-maker at all, unless frequently brilliant is a new classification.
As the above concessionary examples indicate, Brian DePalma is capable of making audiences laugh, although he typically evokes this visceral response in the midst of some wicked camera work alongside a mess of other emotional complexities. Sisters, released in 1973 and generally considered his breakout film, exploits influences from Tod Browning to Alfred Hitchcock (and it is a long journey from Freaks to Rear Window) while announcing the new director as the master of the split-screen scene. The difficulty in doing the split-screen technique is in resolving the dissonance created in the viewer's mind once the viewer is reminded by what he sees on the screen that this is a motion picture. Flashy technical tricks such as revolving shots, long continuous follow-throughs, multiple-perspective imagery and that type of thing generally announces to the audience: Hey! This is a movie! Good luck suspending your disbelief! But the sophistication DePalma brings toSisters--a sophistication which the passage of almost forty years has done nothing to diminish--instead declares that we are in the presence of a master and had best behave ourselves if we want to get out alive.
Even DePalma's superior use of visual techniques could be challenged as purely self-serving were it not that they add unspoken commentary to the story. Sisters, the story of Danielle and Dominique, severed Siamese twins, utilizes all of the aforementioned techniques, as well as a scene with English subtitles for a French-spoken sequence where the speaker(s) is off-camera and the dual role is segregated into regular font and italics.
The director's recurring themes are well established in this film. We have the presumed freakish nature of the asylum, the lack of personality in the early victim, multiple personalities in the villains, hard-boiled policemen, human neuroses, multi-dimensional voyerism, and, yes, satire. Sisters is so rife with satire that the film comes close to becoming a self-parody. Early on, we watch a scene where a man is in a room. A woman enters. She appears to be blind. Unaware that the man is in the room, she begins to disrobe. The camera reveals the set-up to be a TV game show where the contestants must predict the man's behavior, just as the theatrical viewing audience does throughout the film that is in process. This type of varicolored psychological work-out makes the large cinema screen a monster in and of itself, a hyperactive iguana that slams its images into us because we are taught from the opening instants that we cannot trust the things we see, just as Jennifer Salt cannot trust what she sees Margot Kidder do. (The rumor is that DePamla, who was a neighbor of roommates Kidder and Salt, gave the women a copy of the script as a Christmas present.)
None of this should be taken to suggest that the morality of the film will parallel that of the viewer. Indeed, there are touches of very vile attitudes in many of DePalma's films, and Sisters is no exception. What are we to make, after all, of the presentation of police as rational cynics, of women as sexualized victims, of people with mental problems as evolutionarily lower than the rest of humanity, of "freaks" being fit for the ridicule they receive? I have never known quite what to make of these things, probably because I have never thought of myself as fitting into any of those categories and chances are I have a lot of gall defending people who don't need me to speak up for them. But if the answer to my question is as simple as saying the director is trying to lull us into hating the victim, how then do we explain the scene near the end of Sisters of the photographers taking pictures of the twins? The scene is staged to the sympathy of the conjoined girls and to the revulsion of the circus-attendees, so whose side are we to be on? Is the film-maker presenting all the different points of view or is he himself simply noncommittal?
It is possible that DePalma never resolved these questions for himself or that he may have tired of asking them over and over. In later years he turned his formidable talents toward thrillers such asScarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Redacted (all of which having much to recommend about them, each in its own way being something more than mere "entertainment"), as well as the soon-to-be-released Passion. He makes movies, they do well, and we move on. But I hope I may be forgiven for missing the conflicting moralities of his pre-Scarface work, when he took the sensibilities and budget of an American International picture and imbued those same movies with the awareness of a genuine auteur and the presence of a giant laughing iguana on speed.
As the above concessionary examples indicate, Brian DePalma is capable of making audiences laugh, although he typically evokes this visceral response in the midst of some wicked camera work alongside a mess of other emotional complexities. Sisters, released in 1973 and generally considered his breakout film, exploits influences from Tod Browning to Alfred Hitchcock (and it is a long journey from Freaks to Rear Window) while announcing the new director as the master of the split-screen scene. The difficulty in doing the split-screen technique is in resolving the dissonance created in the viewer's mind once the viewer is reminded by what he sees on the screen that this is a motion picture. Flashy technical tricks such as revolving shots, long continuous follow-throughs, multiple-perspective imagery and that type of thing generally announces to the audience: Hey! This is a movie! Good luck suspending your disbelief! But the sophistication DePalma brings toSisters--a sophistication which the passage of almost forty years has done nothing to diminish--instead declares that we are in the presence of a master and had best behave ourselves if we want to get out alive.
Even DePalma's superior use of visual techniques could be challenged as purely self-serving were it not that they add unspoken commentary to the story. Sisters, the story of Danielle and Dominique, severed Siamese twins, utilizes all of the aforementioned techniques, as well as a scene with English subtitles for a French-spoken sequence where the speaker(s) is off-camera and the dual role is segregated into regular font and italics.
The director's recurring themes are well established in this film. We have the presumed freakish nature of the asylum, the lack of personality in the early victim, multiple personalities in the villains, hard-boiled policemen, human neuroses, multi-dimensional voyerism, and, yes, satire. Sisters is so rife with satire that the film comes close to becoming a self-parody. Early on, we watch a scene where a man is in a room. A woman enters. She appears to be blind. Unaware that the man is in the room, she begins to disrobe. The camera reveals the set-up to be a TV game show where the contestants must predict the man's behavior, just as the theatrical viewing audience does throughout the film that is in process. This type of varicolored psychological work-out makes the large cinema screen a monster in and of itself, a hyperactive iguana that slams its images into us because we are taught from the opening instants that we cannot trust the things we see, just as Jennifer Salt cannot trust what she sees Margot Kidder do. (The rumor is that DePamla, who was a neighbor of roommates Kidder and Salt, gave the women a copy of the script as a Christmas present.)
None of this should be taken to suggest that the morality of the film will parallel that of the viewer. Indeed, there are touches of very vile attitudes in many of DePalma's films, and Sisters is no exception. What are we to make, after all, of the presentation of police as rational cynics, of women as sexualized victims, of people with mental problems as evolutionarily lower than the rest of humanity, of "freaks" being fit for the ridicule they receive? I have never known quite what to make of these things, probably because I have never thought of myself as fitting into any of those categories and chances are I have a lot of gall defending people who don't need me to speak up for them. But if the answer to my question is as simple as saying the director is trying to lull us into hating the victim, how then do we explain the scene near the end of Sisters of the photographers taking pictures of the twins? The scene is staged to the sympathy of the conjoined girls and to the revulsion of the circus-attendees, so whose side are we to be on? Is the film-maker presenting all the different points of view or is he himself simply noncommittal?
It is possible that DePalma never resolved these questions for himself or that he may have tired of asking them over and over. In later years he turned his formidable talents toward thrillers such asScarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Redacted (all of which having much to recommend about them, each in its own way being something more than mere "entertainment"), as well as the soon-to-be-released Passion. He makes movies, they do well, and we move on. But I hope I may be forgiven for missing the conflicting moralities of his pre-Scarface work, when he took the sensibilities and budget of an American International picture and imbued those same movies with the awareness of a genuine auteur and the presence of a giant laughing iguana on speed.
