Brian De Palma

In Blow Out, a sound man out recording effects for a slasher picture happens to tape a car going off a bridge, and what he has on the reel turns out to be a killing. De Palma builds whole films from the machinery of looking: a house-sitter with a telescope watching a woman dance in a window in Body Double, a journalist in Sisters who sees a murder through her own window and cannot get the police to believe it happened. Split screens, split diopters and long unbroken takes carry the structure, and Hitchcock is quoted without embarrassment. The filmography is genuinely uneven, and the good ones are a thrill to be trapped inside.

Signature

• Split diopter and split screen used structurally.
• Set pieces engineered as self-contained suspense machines.
• Hitchcock quoted openly and without apology.
• Watching used as method and as theme.