RICHARD BRODY ON 'SISTERS' - NEW YORKER
This is a couple of weeks late, but
Richard Brody previewed this month's
Brian De Palma retrospective at the Metrograph by writing about
Sisters for
The New Yorker. "De Palma weaves his own obsession with movies into the dramatic fabric of
Sisters," states Brody, "by means of a scene involving a documentary about the twins that Grace views in the offices of Life magazine; this film-within-a-film becomes embedded in her unconscious mind and threatens to warp her consciousness as well. Though De Palma’s own images can’t rival Hitchcock’s in shot-by-shot psychological power, the intricate multiple-perspective split-screen sequences of
Sisters offer a dense and elaborate counterpoint that conjures a sense of psychological dislocation and information overload belonging to De Palma’s own generation and times. De Palma’s cinephilic devotion, to the works of Hitchcock and others (such as
Stanley Kubrick and
Michelangelo Antonioni), is conflicted and cautionary—he sees movies as a source of hidden truths that risk becoming traps and delusions."
Brody wrote another piece on De Palma for The New Yorker last week that I'll link to in a round-up later today.