Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [79]
De Palma made the act of watching transparent with send-ups of other movies and joking winks at the audience. His 1965 documentary The Responsive Eye chronicles the 1965 exhibit of art using optical illusions at the Museum of Modern Art, but instead of the conventional strategy of concentrating on the walls, De Palma had two cameras focused on the patrons. The museum also happened to be one of De Palma’s favorite New York pickup spots. Martin explains that De Palma, analytical even about girls, had a theory “about better yield potential at MoMA than someone met huddling under a park bench in a rainstorm.” Their excursions inspired the famous silent seduction scene in Dressed to Kill where Angie Dickinson follows a man in a gallery, a pursuit that leads to her murder.
From the beginning, De Palma placed details of his life quite explicitly in his movies. Murder à la Mod—a 1968 movie that was De Palma’s first to get a theatrical release, albeit a brief one at the Gate Theater in New York—is a racy movie funded by an exploitation company about the making of a racy exploitation movie. Its producer, Ken Burrows, plays the producer. De Palma, the director, plays the offscreen voice of a director who told models that they needed to take their clothes off because that’s what got the film made. There’s a reference to the woman who funded an early movie of De Palma’s, The Wedding Party, and the production company of the film within a film is Ondine Films.
Its intricate plot moves backward in time, constantly shifting point of view and style, showing a murder first as a kind of soap opera, then as a Hitchcockian suspense, and finally as a silent comedy. Every new scene reveals the deceptions of the previous one. Despite all its formal tricks, at its heart is a story about a young director trying to make serious and commercial work by any means necessary who tells his girlfriend he’s ashamed to be making an exploitation film. “I was reflecting the people who were making the circumstances that I was working under, like Contempt,” De Palma says about Jean-Luc Godard’s move into commercial filmmaking in 1963. “If the [producer] asks to see Bardot’s ass, that’s all you show.”
By the late sixties, he was no longer a novice, but he wasn’t a Hollywood success either. His most abrasive, accomplished work was a fake documentary inside his comedy Hi Mom! (starring Robert De Niro in one of his first film roles) that satirized angry political art of the blossoming Off-Off Broadway movement. Unlike the rest of the movie, which was in color, this was shot on sober 16mm black-and-white. De Palma regularly attended happenings and fourth-wall-breaking shows at Judson Memorial Church and La Mama Experimental Theater. In the show within a movie within a movie, African American actors teach white audiences about oppression by painting them with blackface, stealing their belongings, and even raping one woman. Having barely survived the show, the patrons rave about it on their way back to their taxis. In an interview before the movie came out, De Palma revealed his almost nihilistic point of view: “It’s a film that says that the only way to deal with the white middle class is to blow it up.”
This play was also built on experience from his life, since he had just finished making a documentary of the Performance Group’s landmark environmental theater piece Dionysus in 69. When he saw the modern