The legendary director Brian De Palma labelled “pretty hokey”
The world of directing is a cutthroat business. Having to negotiate through the cinematic landscape to even be considered to lead a feature film is hard enough; to then become a prolific and profitable auteur is another level of difficulty altogether. It means that, on the whole, directors are extremely competitive, and that might go some way to explain why Brian De Palma was so disparaging of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
De Palma’s position in the pantheon of modern cinema is confirmed. Despite being a deliberately artistically focused filmmaker, shunning the chances to take on blockbuster movies in favour of telling stories he truly believes in, his name is heralded as one of the golden-gilded scriptures in Hollywood.
With generation-defining pictures such as Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, and so many more, there aren’t many filmmakers able to dwarf De Palma’s contribution to cinema. But if there is one man who is capable of doing so, then the esteemed career of Alfred Hitchcock is certainly one of them. The down-turned face of Hitchcock is one that has sneered down over Hollywood for decades.
With good reason, too. His role as one of the front-running auteurs in cinema is unimpeachable. Hitchcock was not only the first director to truly captivate both critics and cinema-goers in equal measure but perhaps the first to have his style be branded its own way of making movies. Hitchcockian is a phrase that is ubiquitous to film students, as are the words ‘lights, camera, and action’.
However, for De Palma, as close to cinema’s answer to punk as possible, this tradition made Hitchcock a target for his comparative derision: “Well, he came from an old studio system in which you can get away with some of that stuff, but when he got into the ’60s and the ’70s. the rear projection started to look pretty hokey.”
The traditional set-up of studio pictures was quickly being usurped by location shooting, as real-life scenes were preferred to painted canvases and colour film, which made the urgency for vibrancy in movies all the more prevalent. It’s something De Palma believes Hitchcock suffered from: “You know, the painted backdrops in Marnie, that street in Philadelphia with the painted backdrop,” he said. “It’s all because of the tradition that he made films in. And maybe it worked in black and white, but it really doesn’t work in colour, and in those last movies he did, there’s back projection and in the cars you start to notice the seams showing.”
The truth is, the legendary director was so intrinsically connected to a style so firmly rooted in the past that as technology and art advanced into the future, for De Palma, Hitchcock was left behind: “No, no. [Hitchcock] grew up with a certain way of doing things, and I don’t think he quite saw that it wasn’t working any more,” he commented. “They used to shoot everything in the studio. The Warner Brothers street, the MGM street—you saw them in movie after movie and everybody kind of accepted it. But when the French New Wave people started to see the films [in Europe], you certainly couldn’t do that anymore.”
De Palma’s comments move to highlight two facets of filmmaking. Firstly, technology will always advance the art form. Looking back today at the special effects of only a few decades ago is like enjoying a shared joke at the expense of the picture. Secondly, any filmmaker of the past is up for debate, decision, and, ultimately, destruction as any other; Hollywood is a cruel place, and a legacy is a structure rarely left standing for too long.
