De Palma Museum Sequence

post from Digital Poetics on 15 May 2008 07:53:00 PM. © Digital Poetics

The first time seeing this, thinking: a mistake. Someone forgot to edit. 1980. Reagan. The New Era. Morning in America. De Palma. You wondered (being from the mid west of the United States of America) about what it meant it be sophisticated. To live in New York City and visit museums. The slow, syrup-like camera movement meant something to you. What did it mean? It meant a space for thinking. You loved Dressed to Kill because it was a genre film, not despite it. Later, in graduate school and beyond, you would read Carol Clover and all about the Final Girl. But that first time, at age 15, you were a De Palma virgin. No wait. You had seen Carrie, but the split screens did not mean as much to you, then, at age 11, when the world itself was split screen.

There are movies now--like Russian Ark--that surpass De Palma's long takes, but they mean less to you because they are self-consciously Art Films. Of course Art Films are supposed to be experimental: so what? But in De Palma there was something different. A slasher film. A psychological thriller or whatever. And these tremendous sequences of avant-garde cinema. Strangely and stupidly, this sequence has shaped you forever. In some ways, your life, your career has modeled itself on that sequence. The inevitable movement through rooms and passageways. Some day, you would like to thank De Palma for making a map of your future.

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