Blow Out (1981)

QFS No. 148 - The invitation for August 14, 2024
Brian Da Palma is one of the great polarizing filmmakers of our time, I think I can safely say. He has made some of classic films – Carrie (1976), Obsession (1976), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), the first Mission: Impossible (1996) – but has also made several bombs. Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) was a legendary box-office disaster and Mission to Mars (2000) is a truly terrible film and I dare you to convince me otherwise. But it’s not the financial failures that have made him polarizing.

His thrillers are dark psychological affairs with often erotic storylines, disturbing imagery, and bloody violence. Dressed to Kill (1980) ignited protests over the portrayal of a transgendered person as a deviant psychopathic murderer. Body Double (1984) upset his studio so much that they ended his multi-picture deal. Scarface (1983) was criticized for its brutal violence and glorification of drug use. His admirers are legion, but his critics point to misogynistic tendencies in his films, in particular his thrillers. (Speaking of misogyny, he's been accused – or praised, depending on your perspective – of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock a little too liberally.)

But De Palma never made the same film twice and his filmography is impossible to characterize or really fathom. His work includes: a Stephen King-horror film, a violent immigrant gangster opus, a slick Chicago-set period piece with an homage to a Russian silent film, the launching of a major movie franchise, a war film, science fiction, musical, comedy, thrillers. It’s really astonishing the breadth of films De Palma made, especially for an auteur. The sheer fact that the studio system rewarded De Palma in the 1980s is fascinating, and a sign of the times perhaps. It’s harder to imagine a De Palma-type succeeding now.  

Still, you could make the argument that Quentin Tarantino – who is De Palma Fan #1 – did do just that in the 1990s. Tarantino and De Palma are two filmmakers who have a committed and deep following, in almost a cult-like manner. It’s safe to say that many of his films are indeed being rediscovered as cult classics these days.

This week’s Blow Out is a film that has endured, at least for many cinephiles. Perhaps in part for John Travolta, as he was near the apex of the first half of his career and this is another early star turn for him. Whatever the case may be, this has been on my list of films to see for some time now, so I’m looking forward to finally adding a De Palma film to the QFS List.

Blow Out (1981) Directed by Brian De Palma

Reactions and Analyses:
Early in Blow Out (1981), Jack (John Travolta) is on a bridge recording sounds as part of his work as a sound engineer for a movie production company. It’s a scene that becomes the inciting incident of the film, but at first it simply shows the character’s particular skill and expertise as Jack scans with his shotgun microphone through the night over the river. The scene also serves to show Brian De Palma at his best, putting his directing genius on display. If there’s one sequence I’d show someone from this (or any) film on what it means to tell a story visually, this might be it.

Jack (John Travlota) listening in on a couple while out field recording for his day job, from Blow Out (1981).

We first hear a couple talking near a bridge, in a wide shot while Jack is in the distance who’s listening in. The sound then trails to something mysterious, only to be revealed as a frog croaking. We hear some sort of clicking but don’t yet know what it is, but it leads to the owl hooting. The owl turns its attention, as we the viewer does and Jack does, to the sound of an approaching car. A pop – was it a gunshot or just a blow out?! – and the car spins out of control and goes over the bridge, which sparks the entire narrative journey of the film.

Jack hears the owl.

Hears something else, and a car approaching.

What De Palma does, and what Alfred Hitchcock also did so well, was to bring out attention to whatever the director wanted us to see. He puts the owl in close up, with Jack small in the frame behind him. We see the frog in foreground, but small and little, almost invisible the way it was to Jack but for hearing it. When we need to pay attention to something, De Palma puts it front and center.

Jack sees the car, then hears the blow out - or is it a gunshot?

Then, when the “accident” happens, we’re far away and don’t have all the details – which is exactly how Jack is experiencing it. This is textbook filmmaking, a sequence that should be mandatory for directors to show how to accurately direct the audience’s attention and to show first-person perspective in filmmaking.

Jack sees the car launch from the bridge. 

De Palma, however, tops this by returning to the sequence and scene of the accident when Jack finally has a moment in a motel room with Sally (Nancy Allen) passed out on the bed after returning from the hospital. Jack listens to his recording and we return to the scene, hearing it and seeing it through Jack’s eyes. But now, we’re in different points of view, a fleshing out of the scene. The couple on the bridge is now seen from Jack’s perspective. The frog is clearly visible, now from a new angle. The owl, in close up, looks right at us and turns to the car approaching – but a new angle.

Then, the terrific shot of a flash in the bushes, the tire exploding – all with Jack and his headphones superimposed on the action, as if we’re in his head seeing and hearing it happen. It’s extraordinary – the stakes of this scene are high, this is what is setting up the central tension of the film. Jack has proof it wasn’t an accident, but an assassination attempt. Will anyone believe him?

Jack "hearing" the gunshot and hitting the tire while we see it - the shot is one of De Palma's masterstrokes in Blow Out.

Throughout Blow Out, De Palma’s work with cinematographer Vilmos Zigmond brings an elevated artistry to a suspense thriller, much as Hitchcock did a generation earlier. De Palma and Zigmond seem to know always where to put the camera to tell the story in the most compelling way possible. Take the opening sequence. In what feels like it could very well be the actual opening sequence of the film – a tawdry Halloween-esque opening that explores into a sorority house – is actually the film-within-the-film that Jack is working on. The scene goes on past what we expect for such a misdirect and it goes on for quite some time, finally revealed after a woman is about to be stabbed in the shower where her scream defies credulity and the images freezes. We’re now in the sound mixing room with Jack and his co-workers.

The sequence is itself a work of technical mastery – as much De Palma’s and Zigmond’s fine construction as it is Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, who executes the vision with his new device with perfection. Without having seen Blow Out before, I truly thought this was the beginning of the story. And what is serves to do (other than perhaps a comment on De Palma’s overt misogynistic tendencies, which we’ll get to) is to introduce us to Jack, his area of expertise, and also that he’s living in a sort of trashy B-movie world. The scream is a bit that will be returned to again and pays off at the end.

Film-within-a-film opening sequence ends in the mixing room.

Introduction to Jack and his line of work.

But before Blow Out ends, we’re treated to De Palma’s masterful attention to detail. For three quarters of the movie, roughly, De Palma’s attention to extreme detail is exacting, the way it is for Jack. We see close ups of the photos of the crash, frame by frame, as an editor would have to do. We watch all the practical and technical manipulation of the esoteric machines that shoot animation cells or string audio tape through a splicer, with chalk marks on the frames for reference. It’s tactile, the way filmmaking was, with physical levers and tapes that can be demagnetized. For a filmmaker who is part of what is likely the last generation to be trained in both analog and digital formats, all of this warmed my heart to see and that of several of us in the QFS discussion group.

The tools of sound and filmmaking.

Jack studies the stills of the car crash.

Jack cuts sound the old fashioned way.

Speaking of old-time filmmaking – Travolta portrays a sound engineer with utmost accuracy. Having known and worked with several, I can say that Travolta doesn’t feel like an actor playing a sound engineer, he somehow brings an authenticity to the role with his clear love of careful listening and focus. He fits perfectly into the role of Jack and I would’ve bought all the Travolta stock I could after this film – which is only funny in retrospect considering the following nosedive his career suffered until his resurgence in 1994 with Pulp Fiction (directed by De Palma Fan #1 Quentin Tarantino). But here in Blow Out, Jack is compelled to do something, anything he can, with the knowledge he has. He can’t believe how no one belives him and encounters forces out there, unseen, that are dangerous and are trying to manipulate our world.

This post-Watergate paranoia remains a fascination of mine. It was in the air - something or someone is manipulating you; you are being watched; no one can be trusted - and maybe not even your own eyes. Not too long ago we selected Klute (1971, QFS No. 128), one of Alan J Pakula’s paranoia films of the era or even Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful The Conversation (1974). Blow Out fits right in. But the conspirators here are almost comically incompetent. They hire a … hitman? Or maybe just a psychopath in Burke (John Lithgow). Looking at the entire picture, Burke reveals himself to be utterly terrible at his job. He’s supposed to disable the car with the presidential candidate, but instead he kills him. (The plan, of course, was pretty faulty from the start.) Then he kills the wrong woman who he thinks is Sally. And then – he does kill Sally but gets killed in the end too. That’s not to mention that Burke, for no apparent reason, kills a prostitute in the train station just for fun! This is not the “professional” you should hire when attempting to commit political violence.

Sally dies before Jack can arrive with fireworks from Liberty Day igniting above them. The conspiracy wins.

In the end, the unseen forces win. Not only did they eliminate the candidate from the contest, but they’ve essentially eliminated all trace back to the conspiracy. Only Jack knows, but he has no proof and is haunted by the burden of being the only one with the truth.

The QFS group mostly agreed that the film would be an unqualified masterpiece had De Palma was able to stick the landing. The final quarter of the film is something of a disaster, which lead us to speculate whether De Palma felt the need to amp up the action given the larger budget he received when casting Travolta in the lead role. For some reason, Jack drives directly through the Liberty Day parade to get to the subway exit to where Burke is heading with the captured Sally. In an attempt to save one person, Jack nearly kills hundreds before crashing into a wall, getting knocked out, an ambulance comes (off screen) and when he comes to, he escapes the ambulance and gets to Sally too late. It’s preposterous and in many ways doesn’t fit the tight thriller that De Palma crafted leading up to it.

Jack's "superpower" is his attention to detail and sound.

The film showed Jack as an intelligent artistic type with a “superpower,” for lack of a better term – to be able to discern specific sounds. The story is setting up for him using this skill to solve the puzzle or to save the day – perhaps by hearing the clicking sound of Burke’s watch garrote, or by being able to hear Sally’s whereabouts more readily. Instead, De Palma focuses on Jack having to overcome past demons by wiring Sally – something he did in the past before he got one of his undercover informants killed. That haunts Jack, and so the story focuses on overcoming that part of his past. He fails with Sally, just as he did before, which led one of us in the group to conclude that the moral of the story is: don’t let Travolta put a wire on you because you’ll end up dead.

It's one of a number of plot and logic holes, including loose ends that never are addressed. The news guy (Curt May), is he on the up-and-up? How did he know all that about Jack? We’ll never know because that doesn’t pay off. How could Jack possibly be left unguarded in the ambulance after nearly running over people in his Jeep and crashing into a department store display? Why would it matter about the dead man’s reputation now that he’s dead? Just to protect his family? And why didn’t the people who were trying to embarrass the candidate simply just go with the usual plan Sally and Manny (Dennis Franz) do all the time – burst through a room and take pictures of the candidate in bed with Sally? Did Sally kill Manny or just knock him out? And so on.

Despite all of the above – including the questionable third act of the story – the film remains an essential piece of filmmaking. The sequence on the bridge alone is worth the price of admission. When Jack discovers all his tape has been demagnetized, De Palma has the camera spinning steadily on its access, panning around the room as Jack gets into a panic, heightening the anxiety. It’s incredibly effective and I found myself feeling the same thing the character felt - which is exactly the goal of a director in telling a story cinematically and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done quite as well as it’s done here. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, it would be gimmicky. But here, it’s perfect.

The shot after the continually panning shot is this overhead that shows all the mess left after Jack's frantic attempt to see if any of his tapes still work.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up one particular aspect of Blow Up that’s dogged De Palma in much of his work, and that is his misogynistic tendencies. First of all, Sally is portrayed as an utterly clueless ditz, incapable of fighting for herself and seemingly out of it the entire time. She is so thinly portrayed and not even given a moment on screen for her to grasp that she almost died if it wasn’t for Jack saving her. In the only scene in which Sally shows any depth comes as she’s sharing with Jack her dreams of being a makeup artist in the film business. To which Jack blows her off as unserious and childish. The opening itself, the salacious POV through the women’s dorm ending in the shower, is fun for teenage boys and of course is evocative of those types of slasher pics De Palma may be lampooning, but is definitely on the gratuitous side.

But if you look more closely at this opening section – the final shot is of a naked woman in the shower, as mentioned above. The actress’ scream is inadequate and it’s Jack’s job to fix it. And he does in the final scene of the film – he uses Sally’s final moments of her life that he recorded and puts in the film. The only worth this woman, Sally, brings to the filmmakers is her sound, her primal cry out to the world. And it will live on as coming from the mouth of a naked woman in a shower. For someone like De Palma who delved into the deep psyche of humans and often has darkly sexual storylines, this feels like it’s no accident.

One of Sally's (Nancy Allen) final screams, eventually used in the trashy film Jack is working on.

A charitable way of looking at the ending is that this final sound of Sally will haunt Jack him, and will be his torment, and only he will know how she exists forever in this film. The less chartable way of looking at this is that all a woman is worth is to be seen on the screen as sex objects, to be used even in their final moments for entertainment and as a commodity. Perhaps there’s something in between, but it’s bleak nevertheless.

How do we square De Palma? I have trouble with him, to be honest. I love much of his work, but he revels in the profane, the salacious, and seems to be able to only make male characters fully human. (People level this latter critique against Hitchcock, too.) Yet, there is true artistry in his best films. He creates iconic images and uses the language of past filmmakers to his advantage, creating something new and indelible. Hitchcock’s legacy appears in most of his films, but there’s also of course Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966 for Blow Out), Sergei Eisenstein (from Battleship Potemkin, 1925, for The Untouchables, 1987) and others along the way. Tarantino, for his part, takes inspiration from De Palma and thus the circle of filmmaking continues.

It's hard to place De Palma in the pantheon of great American directors, but he must be among them. And it’s easy to argue that Blow Out is his finest work, warts and all. Perhaps like the filmmaker who crafted it.

Klute (1971)

QFS No. 127 - The invitation for November 15, 2023
Alan Pakula is one of the great workman filmmakers who seemingly gets overlooked in conversations about the best directors of an era. His films speak for themselves. All the President’s Men (1976) is just an utterly stellar film that really showcases an incredibly adept filmmaker at the top of his game. Throw in The Parallax View (1974), Sophie’s Choice (1982), Presumed Innocent (1990), The Pelican Brief (1993) along with Klute and that alone would be enough to call it a career. Add the fact that he produced To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) – really an amazing body of work. 

Klute along with The Parallax View and All the President’s Men is considered part of an unofficial “paranoia trilogy” – thrillers with that extra paranoid* edge that came to define a mood of the 1970s. I think it’s an excellent time to dip into this, don’t you? I haven’t yet seen Klute but I have heard good things and excited to watch.  

Pakula died in a tragic car accident when he was still a viable director, having directed Harrison Ford in The Devil’s Own (1997) a year earlier. Although he was 70, I’m sure we were robbed of a few more excellent films from a very skilled hand at the helm. Nevertheless, his mark on the American film landscape is indelible.

Klute features a great cast, including Jane Fonda who won an Oscar for this and with Donald Sutherland in the title role, a legendary cinematographer in Gordon Willis, and some probably terrifically outdated 1970s social mores. I’m looking forward to finally seeing this and discussing with you next week!

Klute (1971) Directed by Alan J. Pakula

Reactions and Analyses:
A scene early in Klute (1971) is perhaps its most subersive. A wide shot, flat, with women sitting beneath modern artwork. We soon hear the model talent scout, who is entirely off camera, face never clearly seen, talk about each woman as if they’re commodoties. It’s incredibly dehumanizing and, likely, accurate. This is the improbable introduction into Jane Fonda’s character “Bree” who is one of the women and, it turns out, has bad hands. She, and the other women, are treated in such a callous and disposable fashion we immediately sympathize with her even before we know much about her. She’s soon ushered out and the next group of models are brought in (and clearly the agency asked for “ethnic” choices because the next group are mostly Black - which is a really subtle but fine touch by the filmmaker).

Bree (Jane Fonda) treated as a commodity in Klute (1971) Directed by Alan J. Pakula.

Aside from the character introduction, this is a scene that gives us a glimpse into Alan Pakula’s filmmaking. The dialogue, though only spoken by characters we don’t see or have their backs to us, has the feeling of natural conversation - overlapping, easy flowing, conversational and matter-of-fact. Bree, when revealed, is on the side of the frame, partially blocked by the talent scouts in the frame. The choice of shots are both cinematic and photojournalistic - the feeling we’re spying on something real.

This is Pakula’s particular genius, and one that comes out even more clearly in his masterpiece All the President’s Men (1976) - this style I would characterize as “cinematic realism.” It’s not pure realism or documentary style, though his style does make you feel like you’re witnessing something real, like you’re hiding in the room and watching. This is enhanced by the great Gordon Willis, who makes the lighting feel natural and real but uses shadows for creative and thematic effect. Hence the “cinematic” part of "cinematic realism.” There’s still very much the hand of the filmmakers present, with deliberate feeling choices throughout.

This is a style, for me, that I strive whenever I have a chance to make something original. Or, I should say, this is the style that most naturally comes to me. It is, I’d argue, one of the more difficult styles of filmmaking to pull off - to feel both invisible and visible as a filmmaker. To maniuplate the audience but also make it seem like you are not doing so overtly. Pakula shows his mastery of it throughout his work.

In Klute, most of us in the QFS group felt that the thriller aspects of the film to be vastly inferior to mood and themes of the film. The plot is not terribly straightforward, slightly convoluted, with a handful of gaping holes. But the plot is secondary to what the filmmakers are trying to explore about human relationships, about being a woman in a world where a woman has little to no power, about addiction and the human mind.

Bree can’t stop turning tricks, and in the narrative device of the confessional with the therapist, she shares why. She’s in control, she has power and agency. And we see it in the first scene where she has a john and convinces him to pay more. She treats him like he’s the only thing in the world but we, as the audience spying on this scene, see her check the time on her watch.

Donald Sutherland’s “John Klute” on the other hand is such a thinly constructed character of whom we know so little about. When Bree finally seduces him, several of us in the group felt that this was going to go in a familiar way - oh, he’s going to be obsessed about Bree and driven to madness. But the script does something unexpected - she actually falls in love with him. You see it in the fruit buying scene. It’s so subtle, but she wants to reach out and feel for him and it’s clear that she’s found stability or something like love and is unprepared for it. So much so she tries to go back to her old pimp (Roy Scheider’s “Frank”) and … gets high? Or just drunk? Something that requires Klute to help her recover.

Fonda won the Oscar for her role but said afterwards, “I'm not very happy about what the picture is saying to women, which is, if you get a good shrink and a good guy, everything will turn out all right, and I don't think that's true." And that is definitely a problematic takeaway from the film.

But the film’s lasting value is in its style. One OFSer pointed out that when Bree gets a call for a job, she steps into a shadow, literally stepping into the dark and away from the light. There are other really memorable uses of light and dar - when Klute watches Bree undress for the older fabric salesman he’s in the shadow; the silhouettes in the very first wide shot at dinner where the foreground diners are in shadow but the background ones against the window are lit; when Bree is talking to Peter Cable (played by Charles Cioffi), her face is lit but everything behind her is in shadow; in the basement when Klute is searching for an intruder and all we see is what the flashlight sees.

Basement chase scene, illuminated by only a flashlight (more or less) by the great Gordon Willis in Klute (1971).

The overall sense of watching from afar as a voyeur pervades the film in the shots through a window from across a street or from atop a building looking down at Bree and Klute entering through a doorway down blow - enhanced by the unsettling score by Michael Small. The performances and filmmaking are extraordinary throughout, despite the flaws in the plot and thematic elements.

Long shots from afar enhance the sense of being spied on or surveilled in Klute (1971).

Finally, it struck many of us that this is a film that could not be even pitched now. A medium-budgeted thriller with a terrible title (why is this film called “Klute” and not “Bree” when clearly it’s her story?) - seems more in line for a limited series on a middling streamer. Which is a shame. Klute reminds me once again that the 1970s is arguably the greatest decade of American filmmaking where directors were given the chance to explore, innovate and create.