AND NETFLIX TWEETS LESSONS IN SPLIT DIOPTERS, SEVERAL EXAMPLES FROM DE PALMA
Richard Shepard's The Perfection hit Netflix yesterday amidst highly positive reviews, and many people saying not to read anything about the film, "just go watch it." However, a week prior to the film's premiere date on Netflix, Shepard began tweeting a 7-day countdown, starting with the image seen here, from Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. "7 days til The Perfection drops on @netflix," Shepard stated in the tweet. "In anticipation, I’m tweeting 7 films that influenced my movie starting with Brian De Palma’s extraordinary Dressed To Kill. An amazing B movie with A movie attitude. Stylish, sexy, vicious and oh, those beautiful split-diopter shots."
Continuing the countdown all last week, the other movies Shepard listed are: Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin, John McNaughton's Wild Things, Takeshi Miike's Audition, and Park's The Handmaiden.
Meanwhile, yesterday, Netflix tweeted a mini-class thread about split diopter shots and how they're used in The Perfection, using images from other films to illustrate the technique and its effects. "But we can’t talk about split diopter shots without talking about Brian De Palma," the thread states at one point, "whose use of the technique has been a hallmark of his career. You’ll spot these shots in Blow Out, Carrie, Obsession, Mission: Impossible, Scarface… the list goes on."
Also included in the thread is a 43-second bit from the Baumbach/Paltrow documentary, in which De Palma explains how his ideas for the use of split diopter shots grew from his split-screen editing of Dionysus In '69. "I mean, I edited Dionysus, so I was constantly putting two images against each other. And I thought, 'Well, how can I do this in a regular movie?'"