Another round of titles is ready to take its place in the 4xblu online store. Today’s additions consist of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life,” Gilles Grangier’s “The Night Affair,” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters.”
Of the so-called “New Hollywood” directors, Brian De Palma was a rarity in that he didn’t go to film school. In fact he’d grown up as something of a science wiz, building computers in high school and then studying physics at Columbia University, where he became a film fanatic after seeing “Citizen Kane” and “Vertigo.” De Palma then went to grad school at Sarah Lawrence, studying direction in the theater department and co-directing his first feature-length fiction film, “The Wedding Party,” with professor Wilford Leach and classmate Cynthia Munroe.
“The Wedding Party” would go unreleased until after the commercial success of De Palma’s 1968 breakthrough “Greetings!,” a politically-themed comedy about three young New Yorkers trying to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. The film spawned a sequel, “Hi, Mom!,” and punched De Palma’s ticket to Hollywood. However, he was fired from his first studio picture, “Get to Know Your Rabbit,” after clashing with star Tommy Smothers. In the wake of De Palma’s disastrous experience in Tinseltown, producer Ed Pressman was able to independently raise the funds for two pictures: “Sisters” and “Phantom of the Paradise.” De Palma opted to make the former since it would be cheaper, easier to make, and more commercially viable.
In a 1973 interview with Filmmaker’s Newsletter, De Palma said,”I get strong visual ideas and then I try to develop the story around them… I had the image of the guy writing ‘Help’ from two points of view years ago, so the problem was how to turn the story so that you could get to that scene.” De Palma elected to use split-screen for numerous scenes in “Sisters,” something that he’d employed extensively for 1969’s “Dionysus in ’69,” a filmed stageplay by experimental New York theater troupe The Performance Group. From there, it’s not hard to imagine how De Palma made the leap from formally representing dual perspectives to coming up with a story where themes of duality are rife.