Brian De Palma: The Split-Screen Provocateur
A man is being watched by another man, who is being watched by a camera that spins 360 degrees around them both while the frame itself splits in two, showing both perspectives at once. This is not an isolated flourish in Brian De Palma's filmography; it is close to his signature. Across nearly sixty years he has built some of American cinema's most technically audacious thrillers, drawn some of its harshest reviews for violence and misogyny, and, more than once, been rediscovered a decade later as a misunderstood formalist.
From Physics to Film
De Palma was born September 11, 1940, in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of three sons of an orthopedic surgeon father and a mother who separated when he was a teenager—an event De Palma later said shaped his fascination with voyeurism and surveillance on screen. Raised largely in Philadelphia and educated at Friends' Central School, he entered Columbia University as a physics major, only to be redirected toward filmmaking after seeing Orson Welles's *Citizen Kane* and Alfred Hitchcock's *Vertigo*. He earned a master's in theater at Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, one of the school's first male students, studying under drama teacher Wilford Leach and absorbing the influence of the Maysles brothers, Antonioni, Godard and Warhol.
New Hollywood's Odd Man Out
De Palma emerged alongside Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas as part of the New Hollywood generation, but his early work looked nothing like theirs. His documentaries *The Responsive Eye* (1966) and *Dionysus in '69* (1969) and his scrappy comedies *Greetings* (1968, which won a Silver Bear in Berlin) and *Hi, Mom!* (1970) launched Robert De Niro's screen career and marked De Palma as an experimental, countercultural filmmaker rather than a mainstream one. He shifted decisively toward the thriller with *Sisters* (1972), *Phantom of the Paradise* (1974) and *Obsession* (1976), all steeped in Hitchcockian technique.
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*Carrie* (1976), his adaptation of Stephen King's first novel, was his breakout hit, earning Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie and a later place in the National Film Registry. It opened a run of stylistically extreme, critically divisive thrillers—*Dressed to Kill* (1980), which drew both acclaim and protest over its portrayal of a transgender killer, and *Blow Out* (1981), his variation on Antonioni's *Blowup* starring John Travolta, which Pauline Kael praised as a film in which "genre is transcended." Quentin Tarantino has named *Blow Out* an all-time favorite and cast Travolta in *Pulp Fiction* partly on the strength of it.
Scarface, The Untouchables, and Commercial Peak
De Palma's 1983 remake of *Scarface*, starring Al Pacino, was received coolly on release and is now a cult and hip-hop touchstone. *The Untouchables* (1987), his Prohibition-era gangster picture with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, won Connery a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and remains De Palma's biggest unambiguous critical and commercial success, complete with a shootout sequence openly modeled on Eisenstein's Odessa Steps. *Casualties of War* (1989) earned praise despite poor box office; *The Bonfire of the Vanities* (1990) was a costly, much-mocked failure. He rebounded commercially with *Carlito's Way* (1993) and then, in 1996, directed *Mission: Impossible*, his highest-grossing film and the launch of a long-running franchise he himself never returned to.
A Harder Later Career
Subsequent decades brought diminishing studio support: *Snake Eyes* (1998) and *Mission to Mars* (2000) were poorly received on release, though *Femme Fatale* (2002) has since gained a cult following. *The Black Dahlia* (2006) was his last studio-backed feature; *Redacted* (2007), an Iraq War drama, generated political controversy on a budget under $5 million and barely recouped a fraction of it. *Passion* (2012) competed at Venice, and *Domino* (2019), released direct-to-video after a troubled production, drew disowning reviews from De Palma himself, who called it "horrible." He has continued developing new projects into his mid-eighties, including a film inspired by the Harvey Weinstein reporting, while also publishing two co-written novels and a screenplay collection.
The Case for and Against
Critics have argued about De Palma for decades on two fronts at once. Roger Ebert repeatedly praised his technical command; Pauline Kael championed him as an artist working within and beyond genre. Detractors accused him of gratuitous violence and misogyny—a charge De Palma has answered flatly: "I'm making suspense movies!" More recent scholarship, including work described by film scholar James Kenney calling him "one of cinema's most complicated feminists," has reread films like *Dressed to Kill* and *Body Double* through a queer and feminist lens, while De Palma himself has expressed regret about the earlier film's portrayal of its transgender character.
Why Brian Is Called a Genius
The claim made for De Palma is a craftsman's claim before it is an intellectual one: he is one of American cinema's most technically virtuosic stylists, someone who thinks in pure camera mechanics—split-screen storytelling, split-diopter shots holding foreground and background in simultaneous focus, unbroken 360-degree pans, extended Steadicam takes choreographed like ballet. Pauline Kael's praise that in his best work "genre is transcended" is the closest a major critic came to using genius-level language about him, and it was earned by specific sequences, not a body of ideas. The honest counter-case is substantial: De Palma is, by his own account and his critics', an imitator and elaborator of Hitchcock more than an originator of new form, his films have repeatedly been accused of trading in shock and misogyny rather than insight, and his box-office record over five decades is wildly uneven, with as many costly failures as triumphs. What is not in dispute is the skill itself—a mastery of visual mechanics, camera choreography and suspense construction that younger directors, from Tarantino to Nacho Vigalondo, have studied and borrowed from directly.
Legacy
De Palma's influence lives less in a school of thought than in a toolkit: filmmakers still reach for the split-diopter shot, the extended unbroken suspense sequence, the Hitchcock homage rendered in his particular, more explicit register. The 2015 documentary *De Palma*, built from hours of his own recollections, cemented a critical reassessment already underway, treating a director once dismissed as a violent imitator as one of the most rigorous visual technicians of his generation.
Achievements
- Notable work: The Untouchables
- Notable work: Body Double
- Notable work: Mission: Impossible
- Educated at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College
- Worked as film director, screenwriter and producer
