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The camera has telescope and mirror sides, what's cinéma vérité got to do with it is what Brian De Palma would like to know. "I'm lookin' at you, from far away..." A lesson in POV and reverse-shot introduces the callow nudnik (Robert De Niro) in the Manhattan slum, later on his purchase of peeping-tom apparatus is captured by a fellow voyeur who's just learning about focus and zooms. Neighbors across the courtyard scamper around for "life on little screens," among them is the lonely ingénue (Jennifer Salt), the hero dozes off like Keaton's projectionist and leaps to her dreamy rescue. (Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love benefits from the lambent sequence of gags.) Seduction is a meticulously constructed scenario thrown off by the unknowing starlet's horny improvisations, plus a bit of unlucky camerawork—the recorder slips and instead films the militant bloke (Gerrit Graham), who applies paintbrush to genitalia to the displeasure of the smut impresario (Allen Garfield). "You know, tragedy is a funny thing." A revue, a manifesto: In flurries of shaggy improv, De Palma lays out an astounding array of stylistic strategies and ideas, culminating in the masterpiece that is the "Be Black, Baby" sketch. "La sincerité et la violence" of Godard's theater of youth (La Chinoise) for the shake-up of the National Intellectual Television centerpiece, the best way for white audiences to experience "what it's like to be black in America" is with shoe polish and soul food, beatings and rapes. (The escalating confrontational horrors dissolve into radical chic as soon as the bloodied bourgeoisie steps outside, "it makes you stop and think, really.") Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Boorman's Leo the Last are concurrent comrades, Taxi Driver above all absorbs the urban guerrilla with dynamite in the washing machine and a punchline-salute for the motherland. With Charles Durning, Lara Parker, Paul Bartel, and Rutanya Alda.
--- Fernando F. Croce |