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Cinema as an art of pictures and ruptures, declares Brian De Palma, the ground-level camera looks up a woman's dress until a razor is introduced to literalize the "cut" of editing (cf. Scorsese's The Big Shave). The callow artist (Jared Martin) has plenty of hidden lenses but no illusions, people want "none of that arty junk, just lots of girls with big boobs taking it off," he toils in nudie drivel with titles like I Dreamt I Was Joan of Arc in My Maidenform Bra. The killing of the ingénue (Margo Norton) is the main event, rewound and reviewed from the vantage points of the snooping friend (Andra Akers) and the spastic prankster (William Finley). A roll in the atelier and a prowl through the cemetery, it ends back in the projection booth. "What kind of film is this, anyway?" Doubles and opposites, voyeurs and attackers, ketchup and blood, jokey prop and murder weapon. The apparatus is from Powell's Peeping Tom (the crosshairs of the whirring orb on disrobing lasses), the tonal kinship is to Corman's A Bucket of Blood and perhaps Smight's No Way to Treat a Lady. The freeze-frame that becomes a photograph, the studio illumination that turns atomic, "a chance to learn the trade" after all. Frantically exploring the medium's lecherous-Gothic-inquisitive possibilities, De Palma is already the cunning Svengali coaxing half-dressed starlets and the keen nightmare investigator who values an alert viewer. ("Your mind is now an acrobat," Finley warbles in his Transylvania-via-Greenwich Village tenor.) An embryonic revue, jumbled but alive to the reflexive impudence of the collision between icepick and eyeball. With John Quinn, Ken Burrows, and Jennifer Salt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |