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De Palma’s Obsession he series of Hitchcockian thrillers directed by Brian De Palma from the early seventies to the mid-eighties, followed by intermittent returns to the genre, constitutes one of the most remarkable projects in the American cinema: an intertextual engagement with the work of one powerful director by another whose own cinematic sensibility emerges through imitation, parody, agonistic competition, and authorial empathy. De Palma ’s intertextual relationship to Hitchcock’s films is in deep need of revaluation. Long dismissed as derivative, schlocky, and opportunistic, or hailed as heartless postmodern riffs on cinematic tradition, De Palma’s Hitchcockian thrillers are precisely calibrated and scrupulous critiques of Hitchcock’s key films, extensions of both their own formal innovations and thematic preoccupations. De Palma’s Hitchcockian thrillers use imitation as a way of reconsidering Hitchcock and the nature of the cinematic medium at once; Hitchcock becomes a sign for cinema, a system that De Palma ruthlessly interrogates and takes to its most excessive formal and thematic levels. De Palma’s Hitchcock-centered films turn film viewing itself into the subject of filmmaking. A deconstructionist ahead of his time, De Palma focuses from his early films forward on the very nature of film aesthetics . But he brings a rapturous sensibility to his deconstructionist techniques; he C H A P T E R S E V E N T H E G E N D E R M U S E U M Dressed to Kill P S Y C H O S E X U A L 208 makes deconstruction disorientingly, disturbingly sensual. Little wonder he has been such a difficult filmmaker to peg, or, for many, to like, even though he is, in my view, the greatest director to have emerged from the riveting group of visionaries associated with the New Hollywood. De Palma’s relationship to Hitchcock, derided for so long, has longstanding precedents. Structurally and stylistically, his engagement with the genre of Hitchcockian suspense is analogous to the classical Roman tragedian Seneca’s revisionary reimagining of Greek tragedy. Seneca’s elaborate variations on Greek tragedy foreground and intensify the physical and emotional violence of the genre. New rivers of blood gush through Seneca’s revisionary tragedies, adding a corporeal intensity to their austerity that is analogous to De Palma’s blood-thriller versions of Hitchcock. Hitchcock has often, and rightly, been called the cinematic Shakespeare. In almost every one of De Palma’s thrillers, an image of a bloody hand—in torment, in protest, in suffering—rises up, a figure from tragedy in its Shakespearean as well as classical form. De Palma’s revisionary Hitchcock recalls as well the agon that antebellum American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville had with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Apollonian counterpoint to their Dionysian excessiveness. De Palma is an artist whose Dionysian sensibility —evident from Dionysius in ’69 (1970), his underground film version of The Bacchae, to his 2002 Hitchcockian thriller, Femme Fatale—combines the comic and the tragic, the controlled and the excessive. In the cinema, there are no equivalents for De Palma’s intertextual Hitchcock project, though Hitchcock has been endlessly imitated (by Chabrol, Truffaut, Chris Marker, many other New Hollywood directors such as Spielberg, John Carpenter , and others). No other director has ever been so committed to reproducing not only the thematic and generic but also the formal qualities of another director , and no other director has so nakedly exposed the inherently imitative and dependent process of art-making. De Palma’s imitation of Hitchcock, however, allows him to reimagine both the suspense genre and filmmaking technique. His use of the split-screen is unprecedented and unmatched in the American cinema, and represents most acutely the ways in which his own formal innovativeness makes him a singularly important director beyond his Hitchcock agon.1 De Palma reassembles Hitchcock tropes into new designs; he critiques them while repurposing them for new visions of the cinema and of genre. His technique , as Terence Rafferty once observed, resembles collage. De Palma’s collage cinema takes disparate strands from the works of other directors and weaves them into new patterns. He seeks to defy, parody, exceed, and radically re-envision the texts he repurposes. The point of the films, in my view, is not to pay homage to directors like Hitchcock, or to the numerous other directors De Palma cites, such as Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Godard, and even [3.138.125.2] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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