Series Afterwards the cinema is an opportunity to celebrate the 7e art by revisiting key titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
Over the decades, much, often contradictory, has been written about Brian De Palma, director of Carrieof Blow Out (Burst)of scarface (the scarred) and of Carlito’s Way(In the manner of Carlito). Colleagues, such as friend Martin Scorsese or even Park Chan-wook and Quentin Tarantino, are claimed admirers. French critics are fond of it. The fact remains that “Hitchcock plagiarist” remains the favorite shortcut to talk about him. De Palma, however, has never hidden his inspiration from Hitchcock. Hence the interest of revisiting Sisters (blood sisters), released in New York 50 years ago, in November 1972, and constituting the very first foray of the young wolf from New Hollywood into the world of the Master of Suspense.
From the opening credits, the filmmaker displays his influences as the terrifying music of Bernard Herrmann, composer of many of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, resounds, including rear window (Courtyard window), Vertigo (Cold sweat) and psychology (Psychosis). De Palma will reunite with Herrmann for Obsessiona nice rereading of Vertigo starring Geneviève Bujold. Vertigo which, according to De Palma, is the film that prompted him to become a director:
“A film that I saw in 1958 and which made an incredible impression on me, long before I became interested in cinema. There was something in the way of telling the story and in the cinematographic language used that touched me even though, at that time, I was studying to become an engineer, “he confided, in 2016, to NPR. .
Past the agonizing musical intro, then, things seem set to take a romantic turn as Danielle (Margot Kidder) takes Philip (Lisle Wilson) home. This, to the chagrin of Dominique, Danielle’s twin, who protests from the next room.
Learning that it’s the twins’ birthday, Philip goes out to buy them a cake. When he returns, he is stabbed by Dominique. Unexpected, shocking, the scene is spied on by Grace (Jennifer Salt), who lives in the building opposite. A determined journalist, she will spend the film investigating this murder, which no one believes took place. Also involved is a disturbing doctor (William Finley).
In the long term, opinion of spoiler, it turns out that Danielle and Dominique, Siamese sisters at their birth in Quebec (!), are only one, the first having developed a personality disorder at the death of the second after an operation to separate them would have failed.
Between friends
When he got down to Sisters, Brian De Palma had just broken his teeth in Hollywood. Based on the success of Greetings and of Hi Mom!independent satirical comedies and anti-establishment toured in New York with a newbie named Robert De Niro, Warner Bros had indeed offered him to direct Orson Welles and Tom Smothers (of the Smothers Brothers) in the whimsical comedy Get to Know Your Rabbit.
“They took my film, re-edited it and finished it without me. I was fired, it’s as simple as that, “says the filmmaker about this” devastating “experience in the book. The Thousand Eyes of Brian De Palmaby Luc Lagier.
It should be noted that the filmmaker will always maintain a love-hate relationship with the major studios and authority figures, the latter being systematically deceitful in his films. But in short, Sisters marked, for De Palma, a return to New York, in addition to being an opportunity to tour with friends: what better way to heal his professional wounds?
Brian De Palma’s friend since college, Jennifer Salt lived with Margot Kidder (future Lois Lane in Superman). She was the filmmaker’s lover, who had come to live with them. One Christmas morning, he handed them each a copy of the script for Sisters as a gift. William Finley, star of Phantom of the Paradise (The Ghost of Paradise), De Palma’s next film, was the director’s roommate during their studies.
“Brian knows exactly who he is and what he wants,” says Jennifer Salt, in an interview produced by Arrow Video. He has a very specific vision long before he met you. It’s all in his head. It’s very complex and he doesn’t like to talk about it. He is one with the process. »
grammar master
To return to Hitchcock, we will have seen the specter of two of his key works looming in the summary of Sisters: Danielle adopts the persona of her late twin as Norman Bates personifies his dead mother in psychology; Grace knows her neighbor across the street is a killer like Jeffries knows his is a killer in rear window…
Speaking of rear windowwhich is based on a dynamic of voyeurism that metaphorically echoes the status of the spectator, it is certainly Hitchcock’s other film that most influenced De Palma: the theme of voyeurism, metaphor included, but satirical charge in addition , is since his first films underground at the center of his cinema.
“De Palma has developed an almost surreal poetic voyeurism — the stylized expression of a delightfully twisted mind. He does not use art for voyeuristic purposes; he uses voyeurism as a strategy and a theme to fuel his satirical art. It highlights the fact that voyeurism is an integral part of the nature of films”, noted in the New Yorker the influential Pauline Kael, one of the rare American critics to have praised De Palma, in an essay on Dressed to Kill (Drive), a variation of psychology looking like giallo.
When approaching Sisters in the collection of interviews Brian DePalmathe filmmaker explained to Laurent Vachaud and Samuel Blumenfeld:
“Hitchcock is the master of cinematic grammar, and if you have any interest in form—which I do—who else do you turn to if not him? […] He had a very Victorian sensibility and a haunting guilt, inherited from his Catholic upbringing. There is nothing like it with me. I learned Hitchcock’s vocabulary, but I developed many other things on my own. »
The filmmaker mentions slow motion and split screen (split-screen), techniques he loves, to which we will add the bifocal lens (split diopter).
“These borrowings that I am criticized for so much are just a way of collecting vocabulary to then write my own sentences. »
Context question
In an essay published in 2018 in the New York TimesJ. Hoberman brought similar nuances and insisted on the importance of the historical context:
“Assuming the viewer knows psychology, Sisters looks like a jaded, politicized remake, reflecting post-1960 disillusionment. Film pundit Chris Dumas notes that De Palma’s substitutions are crucial. Her psychotic killer is a white woman and, rather than the ambivalent adulterous wife of psychologythe victim is a black man […] The only witness to the murder is an aspiring reporter for a neighborhood weekly, treated with disbelief by investigators largely because of her stories about police brutality. »
This reading is all the more convincing when we know the protesting nature of De Palma’s first New York comedies. Precisely, one can wonder why, after a series of satires with experimental accents, the scenario writer suddenly decided to carry out a Hitchcockian suspense. Because there is a very clear break there.
To understand, perhaps it is enough to go back to the reason that pushed De Palma to return to New York.
Thus, after the trauma suffered on Get to know Your Rabbit, Sisters was not only an opportunity for De Palma to “shoot with friends”, but also to immerse himself again – even to take refuge – in the universe of the one who had instilled in him the love of cinema: Hitchcock. In short, one could say that Brian De Palma turned Sisters in order to regain confidence in one’s abilities, or even rediscover a taste for cinema.
The film “Sisters» is available on the Criterion Channel platform and on iTunes.