Blow Out
Let’s get one thing out of the way, this movie is a masterpiece.
Someone once said that what makes a good director is knowing where to set the camera, when to move it, what to shoot, and how to proper capture what is of relevance and forget about what is not.
That is Brian DePalma summed up for you.
One of the few masters and geniuses to shoot a movie and tell a story through moving pictures in a very unique, yet powerful, way.
In his movies, not a single camera shot is wasted, and all of them tell us something of tremendous importance - whether it’d be about a character’s psych or the story itself - while also pushing the narrative forward.
His cinematography - above all else -, but also his sound design, aswell as every aspect of filmmaking in his movies, knows exactly how to build tension at the proper moments, and when to slow things down.
In Blow Out, particularly, he creates a sense of urgency, in the telling of a political crime conspiracy of national proportions, while also shooting an intimate and constrained love story - achieving a perfect balance between those two very differently proportioned sides.
Through his production design, he surrounds his protagonists in red and blue - whether it is by having them talk in a room with those color patterns as wallpaper or trough fireworks reflecting those tones in their faces - which suggests that their particular, personal and love lives is now completely enrolled by this conspiracy plot of American political crime, just as much as their fate is deeply entangled with the fate of the nation itself.
This perfect balance between big scale crime events and small time lives that sees your ordinary character become an unlikely hero, is only ever seen done this perfectly throughout Alfred Hitchcock’s career.
Hitchcock who, by the way, seems to shadow above this movie - just as much as in almost every other DePalma flick - as an influence and inspiration. So much so that we have our typical archetype of Hitchcockian cinema when DePalma seems to shoot love scenes as murder ones, and murder scenes as love ones.
And, although Hitchcock serves as a clear inspiration to DePalma, to the point that we feel as if the British master would have shot some of those scenes precisely in the same manner, we still feel very clearly that DePalma prints his very own voice to this movie.
All the while, he still investigates - in a most meta tone - the nature of movie making itself, by looking directly at our obscene voyeuristic obsession, and how movie technicians and workers manipulate the natural and real world - staging a make believe one - to attract our attention and grab us by the throat.
In a most Hicthcockian way, he is almost holding up a mirror to the audience’s face and mocking our condemnable interest in other people’s tragedies.
And by the end, a nihilistic ending, offers us a very bleak view of DePalma’s America.
PS: to use his own words, De Palma makes a Brechtian movie, here. He shows us what he is doing, while he is doing it. He shows us how a movie is made and how it plays with our perception of reality and images and sound, while playing with our perceptions of reality, images and sound.