Brian De Palma: the cinema that never learned to look away

Brian De Palma

Photo: Gorup de Besanez / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 11, 1940 Newark, New Jersey, USA
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Scarface, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible
Awards	Silver Lion · Silver Bear, Berlin International Film Festival (Greetings, 1968)

The question De Palma’s films have always asked — and that critics have never stopped answering for him — is whether the camera’s pleasure in watching is the same thing as the audience’s guilt in being watched. He made thrillers that were also essays on spectatorship, horror films that were also arguments about desire, crime pictures that were really studies in how institutions fail their victims by design. The technical brilliance was never an accident. Neither was the discomfort.

He grew up in Philadelphia, youngest of three sons of an orthopedic surgeon, a boy who built computers and won science fairs before a chance screening of Citizen Kane at Columbia University redirected everything. He went to study physics; he stayed to make films. The detour — from Welles to Hitchcock, from hard science to cinema — produced a filmmaker who approaches moviemaking with the rigor of a mathematician and the obsessions of a voyeur. At Sarah Lawrence in the early 1960s he made The Wedding Party, a semi-improvised comedy that gave a young Robert De Niro his first screen credit and gave De Palma the habit of working with actors he trusted before they were famous.

In New York in the middle of that decade, he found the form that would define his early voice: cheap, politically barbed films for the counterculture. Greetings and Hi Mom! were movies about being watched by the state, made by someone who had already decided that the camera was a political instrument. They taught De Palma what the big-budget films would later demonstrate — that to put an audience behind the lens is already to make them complicit in whatever the lens is pointed at.

Carrie, in 1976, announced a filmmaker who had absorbed Hitchcock the way a musician absorbs Bach — so thoroughly that variation becomes possible. Sissy Spacek’s telekinetic high schooler was De Palma’s declaration of method: the split screen, the extended slow motion, the Pino Donaggio score that moves between tenderness and dread. It frightened and moved audiences in the same moment, which is technically more difficult than it appears and which most filmmakers never manage.

The films that followed — Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, Body Double — arrived in a sustained creative eruption that produced his most celebrated sequences alongside his most lasting controversies. Blow Out in particular — John Travolta‘s sound technician recording what may be a political murder — is the film that Pauline Kael identified as transcending genre, a picture about the gap between evidence and truth that gains weight every decade. Scarface took longer to be understood. Three hours of Al Pacino as Tony Montana drew initial critical hostility that hardened, over the following decade, into one of the most durable cult objects American cinema produced in the 1980s.

The charge of misogyny attached itself to De Palma’s work through that decade and was not without basis. His films did place women in danger — at length, with close visual attention. What the charge consistently missed, and what feminist scholars including Carol Clover and Robin Wood argued with some persistence, was that the camera in De Palma’s films is never straightforwardly comfortable with what it watches. The voyeur is always implicated. The audience that watches Carrie humiliated at the prom is the same audience that flinches when the blood falls, and De Palma calculated that gap with precision. His detractors made him sound like a predator. His defenders suggested he was, more accurately, a mirror — held up at a particular, unflattering angle.

The Untouchables in 1987 brought commercial success his personal work had never attracted: David Mamet’s dialogue, Sean Connery’s Oscar-winning performance as Irish beat cop Jimmy Malone, and a baby-carriage set piece lifted from Eisenstein that audiences applauded without recognizing the reference. Carlito’s Way, in 1993, may be the better film — Al Pacino as a reformed gangster who cannot escape the pull of a life he has formally renounced, shot with a fatalism that the decade’s American cinema rarely achieved. Mission: Impossible in 1996 was his highest-grossing film, a franchise-starter rather than a personal statement, and the fact that it remains the best entry in the series says something about what studio mechanics gain from a director who actually knows how to construct a sequence.

After that, the record grows more complicated. Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, The Black Dahlia: films that wanted to be major and, for reasons neither entirely De Palma’s nor the studios’, weren’t. Redacted, in 2007 — a found-footage examination of American war crimes in Iraq — won the Silver Lion at Venice and was seen by almost no one in the United States. Domino, his last completed film, released in 2019 when he was 78, was a troubled production that De Palma himself criticized publicly. The insurance difficulties of financing films at that age were real and were not going away.

The answer to whether he was finished arrived, in 2026, in the form of Sweet Vengeance: a thriller based on two documented criminal cases, filmed in Portugal, with De Palma directing at 85 after a seven-year gap. He has described it as a project he has been trying to make since 2018. That it has taken this long says as much about how the industry treats directors of his age and temperament as it does about the logistics of independent production.

What the remaining films will say is not yet known. What the record says — fifty years of sequences that cinematography students deconstruct frame by frame, fifty years of moral provocation that film scholars argue about in opposite registers, fifty years of a cinema that asked its audience to watch and then asked them what watching revealed about who they were — is not going to be revised. The camera never looked away. That was always the point.