“Seeing this film is like experiencing the body of De Palma’s work and seeing it in a new way. Genre techniques are circuitry; in going beyond genre, De Palma is taking some terrifying first steps. He is investing his work with a different kind of meaning,” so says Pauline Kael of American director Brian De Palma’s 1981 film Blow Out. The same can be said of Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s new documentary De Palma. It pushes past mere documentary, though it’s not necessarily transcendent. The premise is simple, low-concept; it’s essentially De Palma on De Palma. The “directors” here, who serve more as compilers (some on that later), aren’t interested in typical profile fare. They don’t gush. They don’t let others gush. Instead, we are given a conversation of sorts between a man and his images. As the thing plays, De Palma is quite literally investing his work with a different kind of meaning.
Baumbach and Paltrow obviously didn’t want to over-shape the portrait of this still-living genius but let the psychology of the man speak for himself. The fun of De Palma is that it’s a cinephile’s dream playing in front of you. Working with only previously-recorded visual and audio footage, the filmmakers intercut De Palma’s audio narrative with scenes from his films or with old family photos or home videos (one even filmed by Steven Spielberg). The man’s own creations become the film’s circuitry. It’s a self-portraiture by proxy, his images repurposed by another. As if each is a separate entity, they are edited in to comment, react, guffaw, laugh, support, or belie the man himself. Baum-trow (that’s fun, right?) create a collaged conversation between creator and creation, and in doing so create a simple yet deeply psychological portrait of one of modern cinema’s masters.
The author-as-subject usurps the directors-as-authors here, so the viewer’s perception of the man isn’t from external perspectives pressed upon a figure. No, De Palma’s words lead the vision. The only new footage in the film is of De Palma speaking in front of a camera. He’s placed on a set: foregrounding a dark teal mantle and fireplace. He wears all blue, a jacket over a buttoned shirt. His attire is economic and matter-of-fact. His pasty skin and white, thinning beard stick out from the subdued, static palette, an enigmatic figure like an apparition. And when he speaks, his voice seems to emanate from his spine. His vision of the world is conjured from his backbone. The whole time he never really looks at the camera, the object which he usually sits behind. But somehow, even in the act of being filmed, cinema’s greatest voyeur remains just that. I’d say that Baum-trow give him the room to take authorial precedent, but it’s probably more accurate that De Palma’s aura just naturally commandeers authorial vision.
The two filmmakers couldn’t be more willing to give him the voice here. I can imagine the wish-fulfillment this project was for the two young directors. Getting to go back and watch some of the best, most influential American films of the postmodern age, ones they most likely caught as youngsters in the cinema, is a cinephile’s dream. They have clearly created a film of their own out of some of their most favorite films. What’s actually directed here is that conversation with the subject’s psyche. De Palma speaks and his images, his past, his memories retort. De Palma sits on the screen like the Freudian triptych: the man the superego, his words the ego, and the images his id.
The real filmmaking magic here is in the editing. The fact that editors Matt Mayer and Lauren Minnerath are able to cast a coherent pace is a tribute to their keen listening. Brian De Palma is a subject well-studied. And their effort shows in the arc of the film, a structure which follows the trajectory of a retrospective. De Palma is a natural storyteller, so the film starts where he does. We hear his beginnings in the film industry, in the thick of the “New Hollywood” alongside other American greats like Coppola, Spielberg, and Scorsese, and his poignant reflections on the present-day. Things today are a bit more complicated. His last handful of films barely caused a flutter, even garnering some of the worst reviews of his career. Yet the man still teems with vitality. It’s easy to chart a career, it’s harder to be placed in the thick of it, where we are forced to consider the work anew.
De Palma comes off as a natural conversation full of humor, pathos, poignancy, and introspection. It’s no doubt that just listening to the man speak would’ve been intriguing enough – there’s a sincere homeliness about him that screams “grandpa” over “primo voyeur of the 20th century.” But it is strange to consider the films which have come from this sagely, almost grandfatherly, man. The film highlights that disparity. He has made salacious, erotic material, often denigrated as surface, meaningless, or lazy. He’s constantly been accused of forgery, especially of Hitchcock. Yet he is a supreme artist who has created out of the language of cinema’s past his own way of speaking. There’s wisdom in his films; he just begs you to press into his surfaces. Since those Kael-deemed “first steps” of Blow Out, De Palma has blossomed into a master.
We are only halfway into the current year, yet it’s been one that has forced the public to reckon with its artists. In 2016, De Palma plays like a plea. This man’s legacy is still in the making, yet already solidified. It might be odd to have a filmic profile of him while he’s still alive, but in our ever-aware wariness it’s best to acknowledge our greatest minds while they are still here. The drive of this documentary is a simple yet profound call upon audiences – De Palma’s devotees and negative critics – to not allow our eyes to look past him. In the film he mentions how a film or artist is always critiqued against the fashion of the day. Let’s not let the fashions force us to look past those who shape fashion itself. De Palma begs you to behold the man.