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Essays (book reviews) |
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Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses |
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This
is a new kind of film book – fittingly enough, in that it dares to grandiosely
assert the “birth of a new cinema and a new eye” (p. 62) in the work of its
subject, Brian De Palma. Fully assuming what I have elsewhere called the Philosophic
Turn in film studies, (1) it is not, in any conventional sense, the analysis of
a director’s work – indeed, I would somewhat hesitate (in contrast to the back
cover blurb) to describe it as a film book at all.
Eyal Peretz’s frequently stimulating, occasionally baffling
exploration of “De Palma’s cinematic education of the senses” (the book’s subtitle)
looks not at the entire œuvre – not even a standard
approximation of the entire oeuvre (for many major works do not rate a mention)
– but mainly three key films, Carrie (1976), The Fury (1978) and Blow Out (1981), with a Coda devoted to Femme Fatale (2002). Within those films, it looks at very few,
usually short passages (from Carrie,
for example, hardly the first two minutes). De Palma is consistently conjured,
in a manner that surpasses even the most excessive auteurism,
as a kind of Godhead – a visionary, indeed – in that the book eschews any
information about the films’ production circumstances, and fails to
meaningfully discuss any of his contributors from either cast or crew.
Apart
from a brief note on paranoid cinema and an obligatory (but original)
consideration of the Alfred Hitchcock legacy, Peretz does not compare De Palma’s films with other films of their time, or with films
by other directors. In terms of its dialogue with the traditions of film
criticism – in particular, the many hundreds of articles, in many languages,
devoted to De Palma – the book is a startling tabula rasa: in 55 pages – 55
pages! – of densely detailed notes, there is not a single reference to any
previous writing on the director.
What
takes up those 55 pages – and most of the 164 that precede it, as well as
Stanley Cavell’s Foreword (which began as a reader’s report for the publisher,
and perhaps should have remained so) – is an in-depth summary, questioning,
elaboration and extension of certain ideas mined (often ingeniously) from
Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, and Plato. A passage chosen
virtually at random can give the flavour:
What can this mean, how are we to
understand the concept of a slice, or a fragment, without a totality? This has
to mean three basic things: (1) The slice or the frame, instead of giving us
the fragment of a totality, reveals to us that there are only frames or
fragments. But if there are only frames, what would the Other be to the frame,
the absolute outside? Nothing but the principle of non-totality. The Other, the absolute outside, means first
that there is no totality or, in Deleuze’s words,
no whole given in advance. (p. 92)
It
would be easy – it has already become a reflex in recent, disenchanted cinephile commentaries on the occasional writings on film
by contemporary continental philosophers – to complain that Becoming Visionary has seemingly not
much to do with the films it discusses, or (a worse charge) that it simply
lines up some choice illustrative or allegorical moments from them in order to
cue a heavy bout of philosophising. However – once I got past the defensive Cavellian moment on page 6, listing De Palma (after the
Great Philosopher roll-call) as the “unlikely hero” of this adventure – I found
I was (almost despite myself) very engaged with this book; the successful
diversion of a reader’s preconception is the mark of a good and interesting
critical/theoretical work. Why read something that merely confirms what I already
think I know about De Palma, in the language that has already confirmed it?
If,
as I believe, something of the significance and force of De Palma’s work is
relatable to its resonance with a particular moment in the film theory and
analysis of the 1970s and ‘80s, Peretz does us a
great service by tracking back (via his philosopher-heroes, and a little suture
theory) to those garage days when every instant of a film was brimming with
heterogeneity and disequilibrium, haunted eternally by off-spaces and the
fractions of darkness (which, confusingly, Peretz calls a white blankness) between each frame – when a painting glimpsed on a
wall in Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941)
or the central plot clue panned over with feigned indifference in a De Palma
movie seemed to hold the juicy frame-by-frame secrets of Cinema itself, whether
classical-narrative or avant-garde.
To Peretz, nothing that happens in a De Palma film – no
gesture, line of dialogue, bit of behaviour, camera angle or scene transition –
is natural, obvious or common-sensical; on the
contrary, all is “strange”, bizarre, in urgent need of interpretation. The word strange appears multiple times on
many pages; indeed, this book could have been subtitled (with a nod to Raymond Durgnat) The Strange
Case of Brian De Palma. Becoming
Visionary launches itself from where the best De Palma criticism wisely
begins: from the sense that everything in these films is grandly unreal,
illogical, unbelievable, risible, grotesque, a live-action cartoon.
So
much for the stuffy old business of character psychologies (and believable
performances), dramatic/comic themes and coherent, fictive-world meanings! Peretz is more riveted by the falling softball that
inaugurates the deepest action and logic of a story (in Carrie),
or the sudden apparition of a big toe (Bataillian, bien sûr – in The Fury) that is merely the first of a
string of breaks or interruptions (on every level of the cinematic apparatus)
which crack open the coherent shell of a diegesis and
open up to something else: an Outside or Beyond that, however, is not
metaphysical (that would be a kind of sin in Peretz’s argument), but somehow immanent – immanent to the filmic frame itself.
Still
with me? In the richly paradoxical turn of phrase common here – almost impossible
to summarise but fairly easy to follow from moment to moment, a bit like a De
Palma film at its most baroque – we arrive at something like this: that the
frame is a limitation but also an openness, an opening to the world and the
future as something yet to be decided, never given as whole in advance (an opening
that Peretz also calls “new thinking”); that the
opening in question is not to a Truth or a light (De Palma is not Spielberg)
but precisely a blankness, a blindness. Talk of vision and blindness leads the
author, logically, to a whole raft of fictive looks, gazes, attitudes and
postures: the look of the witness, the paranoid look, the look that sees its
grandest visions once the eyelids are closed …
On
this particular terrain, Peretz manages to say much
that will not be terribly familiar to students of le regard in cinema. The fine distinctions he makes, the diagrams
or relations he sketches in prose, are always arresting and thought-provoking –
even if they rarely lead to something we might recognise as close textual
analysis (the mixture of high philosophy and cinephilia,
here, is nothing like we find in, say, Jean-Baptiste Thoret,
a De Palma fanatic obsessed with frame reproduction and textual-cum-figural
analysis – and uncited in those 55 pages of notes). (2) But, at a meta-analytic
level, the emphasis on strangeness has an almost rhapsodic effect on the
reader: suddenly, I started to believe, all films should be regarded as weird
and cryptic, intricate demonstrations of some hyper-logic far beyond their
banal, visible reference points. Along this line of flight, Peretz is not quite William D. Routt, (3) but he is
inspiring all the same.
There
is an ambiguity or contradiction here – and in much writing that partakes of
the Philosophic Turn – that never quite breaks the calm surface of the
argument. As Peretz writes about cinema in the manner
of Deleuze or Jacques Rancière or Giorgio Agamben, there are only Great Directors:
the canonical list of usual suspects (Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, F.W. Murnau), to which he begs our indulgence to add De Palma.
That’s fair enough within its own frame (and I agree with the polemic, too).
But isn’t much that Peretz discusses – off-frames,
the interval between photograms – absolutely constitutive of cinema as a medium
or apparatus, and hence, logically, just as evident in the worst films ever made as in the best? Maybe even more evident there?
Naturally, Peretz keeps trying to persuade us that, in De Palma,
we get not just evidence of what is of philosophical import in cinema, but an
extreme, super-intelligent, rigorous (the word insists in his text) extension of or elaboration on it. But to
maintain this fragile logic necessitates (and Peretz dutifully obliges) cutting off De Palma’s films (especially the three-plus-one
he centrally discusses) from all those others they pillage and influence in a
fast, feedback loop: all those Italian horror movies, paranoid thrillers,
found-footage mash-ups … It’s easy to herald a new cinema and a new eye when
you have no competition.
Of
course, there are excesses in this book – how on earth could there not be,
given its willingness to embrace all that is strange? When Peretz glides past most considerations of identity or gender politics – apart from the
rhyming of Father and Frame in The Fury (but not Mother and Frame in Carrie?)
– in order to assert that the real meaning of an adolescent girl’s first
horrifying menstruation is that it reveals “the body as period” (p. 32), i.e.,
“the discovery of an exposed vulnerability that is the opening of language as
relation before any specific meaning” (p. 33), it is hard to keep one’s eyes
from rolling uncontrollably. Similarly, Peretz’s working definition of horror (no abject or return-of-repressed here, which is
no bad thing, really) – horror as the primal opening or openness to difference
or the Outside or somesuch – seems to touch too few
of the hair-raising or deliberately revolting affects in De Palma’s cinema.
But,
finally, so what? In psychoanalysis, only the exaggerations are true (Theodor Adorno said it, and Norman O. Brown remade it) (4) – and
that goes double for De Palma at his wildest, and triple for Becoming Visionary at its most earnest.
2.
See, for examples, the pertinent sections of Thoret’s remarkable 26 secondes, l’Amérique éclaboussée: l’assassinat de JFK et le cinéma américain (Rouge Profond,
2003). back
3. See William D. Routt, “Lois Weber, or the Exigency of Writing”, Screening the Past, no. 12 (March 2001). back
4.
See Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or
Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). back
© Adrian Martin June 2008 |
