凶线

政治惊悚片。帕尔马总有富有创造力的镜头，这部片子中的裂焦镜头多而精妙，Jake和猫头鹰、Jake听到警察和官员谈话、死鱼和女性受害者，都是非常精湛的构图。Jake在工作室里找录音带那一段9*360°的旋转镜头令人印象深刻。Jake在烟花下抱住妓女尸体的镜头明明很俗套，却拍出了超乎常人的美感。 剧作的开端很抓人，一名电影音效师，在桥上采集素材时偶然捕捉到州长开车落水前的枪响，又下水救了车里的妓女。政治迫害和州长召妓的秘密就这样偶然被Jake发觉，而召妓其实也是对手雇佣摄影师曼尼·卡普和妓女设下的圈套。Jake剪下杂志刊登的卡普拍摄的车祸照片，与录音拼凑成了完整证据，且发觉了照片中微微一抹疑似枪械的银光。而敌对势力则抹除了Jake的原录音，并时刻准备除掉三个知情人，销毁全部证据。 竞选对手其实内部不合，原方案是制造召妓丑闻取回照片，但组织中的杀手却擅自行事，直接了解了州长的姓名。杀手善后的手段很老道，偷换了事故车辆上中弹的轮胎，用爆胎混淆视听。为了做掉妓女并掩盖其真实死因，提前连杀两名具有相似体貌特征的女性，再用公用电话报警“自白”，伪造成连环杀手。最后冒充电视主持人，以协助公开真相为由约出妓女，把证据扔进湖里销毁后，在独立日游行的国旗下行凶。虽被及时赶到的Jake反杀，但Jake也永远失去了公开真相的机会。 妓女临死前的真实尖叫成为了新片中正需要的声音素材，而Jake也只能听着妓女临死前的录音怀念亡者，在剪辑室里抽着烟自嘲：真是完美的尖叫啊。

Often addressed as a foley artist’s version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), De Palma’s BLOW OUT is unqualifiedly lecherous in his straight-male’s exploitation of female bodies, but technically, it is a stunner, and among one of his most accomplished works (standing shoulder to shoulder with CARRIE, 1976), for example, those strikingly juxtaposed split-screen shots are uncannily indelible, or the intricate 360-degree rotating long take in the midstream that goes nearly hallucinogenic to knock you dead.

The plot inherits the ‘70s paranoia of political conspiracy theory and mixes it with a misogynist strangler on the prowl to snuff disreputable girls (the double-standards in relation to johns and hookers are grossly offensive) with a piano wire. Jack Terry (Travolta) is a Philadelphia sound technician working on low-rent slashers (the perversely voyeuristic set-up is a garish, trashy homage to PSYCHO, 1960), after saving an escort girl Sally (Allen, the then Ms. De Palma) in an automobile accident, he finds out something amiss about it through the sound recorded on the spot, seeking out Sally, whom he is quite taken to, he resolves to get to the bottom of it, which also puts Sally’s life on the line, can he save his girl in the eleventh hour? This time, De Palma bents on breaking some hearts.

If anything, in the climax during the Liberty parade, De Palma perversely dials up pathos to the eleven, Jack’s inconsolable grief is accentuated under a pyrotechnic sky and muffled by Pino Donaggio’s waxing melodramatic score, you never expect De Palma could be so romantic, and the effect might go overboard into mawkishness, but Travolta and Allen steadfastly build their romance on a pleasurable wavelength, Jack and Sally are mutually attracted to each other without being weighed down by their precarious milieu, so when the pathos arrives, it hits home, not to mention “the perfect screaming” coda, De Palma’s devious device surely packs a punch albeit his sneakily sadistic streak.

Travolta is a disarming leading man with his double-jaw squareness all over the place, you like him for his righteousness and cool facade; Allen ebulliently endows a working-girl-with-a-gold-heart type with such warmth and naïveté, you cannot help but hope she could make it out alive, until you are pulverized by such a cruel joke. Lithgow, after OBSESSION (1976), again takes a villainous turn in a De Palma movie, and his cold gaze alone can bring the chill down to the bone, then there is a terrific Dennis Franz, who plays a repugnant saddo with slimy assurance.

Boasting a bold range of coloration and compositional grandeur, BLOW OUT might just be the ultimate confluence of De Palma's louche proclivity and high-wire craft, a mesmeric doozy of first water.

referential entries: De Palma’s BODY DOUBLE (1984, 6.2/10), CARRIE (1976, 8.1/10); Alan J. Pakula’s THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974, 7.5/10); Peter Strickland’s BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012,5.9/10).

Title: Blow Out

Year: 1981

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery

Country: USA

Language: English

Director/Screenwriter: Brian De Palma

Music: Pino Donaggio

Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond

Editing: Paul Hirsch

Cast:

John Travolta

Nancy Allen

John Lithgow

Dennis Franz

Peter Boyden

Curt May

John Aquino

John McMartin

Rating: 7.6/10

《凶线》从一开场就为观众奉献出两段代入感极强的第一人称长镜头：

如何保证摄影机不过度偏离主轴，并确保镜子里的画面不穿帮，这个角度摄影师肯定找了很久

这段炫技十足的开场已经成功将观众的注意力吸引，并在潜移默化中帮助观众建立起接下来的观影预期。而正当观众带着预期去观看接下来的故事时，一个无比糟糕的尖叫声把这一切彻底摧毁。而后镜头一转，我们才知晓刚刚的画面仅仅只是一部B级片的拍摄素材，而银幕前的制作人员正为这一糟糕的音效苦恼。

但也正是这个“顽皮”的音效设计，使得观众终于发现这段调度精湛的开场其实是一个经过精心包装的“影中影”结构。并且这段开场还正式确立了影片的故事母题与声音设计母题，也展现出帕尔玛在「元电影」这方面的切入角度：影像中「画面」与「声音」的引导/对立关系，同时也是关于电影作为媒介所能触及到的感官路径的探讨。

一、裂焦镜头、背面投影与分屏

裂焦镜头，即通过特制的“裂焦屈光镜”来造成一种类似深焦大景深的效果，在视觉上能够使得近景与远景两个平面的物体成像都十分清晰。而另一个显著特征便是在两个正焦平面的过渡地带会失焦，即景深不连续。该手法最早出现在《公民凯恩》之中（摄影师是格莱格·托兰德），而在帕尔玛手中被发扬光大，变成了最佳的叙事辅助手段。

《公民凯恩》中，角色被置于过渡失焦地带，而物件是正焦，十分有趣的安排

很多时候我们观看对话戏，除了正反打以外，还可以通过变焦来切换讲述者与倾听者，有助于观众的视线聚焦于叙述主题。但帕尔玛很多时候偏不这么干，要么他将对话中的两者聚焦于同一视觉平面，要么会添加其他未参与对话的客体，当两者同样清晰时，传统的聚焦手段便被割裂，从而创造出全新的戏剧效果。

裂焦镜头放大可以角色的侧脸，从而突出某种符合情境的情绪（脸越大，情感也越大）

《碟中谍》的裂焦镜头，近景与远景的占比失衡营造出一种恰到好处的喜剧效果

而在其他非对话戏的段落里，当裂焦镜头取代变焦镜头后，那种自然的视线引导手段便消失殆尽，用最粗暴直白的方式将信息展现给观众。另一方面，裂焦镜头中被摄制对象的近景远景位置关系也是解读帕尔玛镜头序列的重要线索。当人物处于远景，物件处于近景时，则是在无形中为镜头增添一层「窥视」的效果（第一人称视角下该镜头效果最为突出）；而人物处于近景，物件处于远景时，则是直观的指明角色接下来所要做出的选择，亦或是对角色自身命运的最佳暗喻。

窥视与危机

近景死鱼，远景女人，明示后者即将被杀害

通过裂焦镜头和二者的同步运动，将角色的性格具象化后，角色后续的行为也就有了依据。

直观展现角色下一步的目标去向

再举一个《碟中谍》的裂焦案例：有时危机并不一定从近景窥视，也会从远景接近

背面投影，一种将前景动作与事前已在摄影棚拍摄好的背景胶片投射到摄影中的银幕上，再经由摄影统合在同一底片上的技巧，与正面投影相对。由于早期拍摄外景时会受限于摄影机和录音技术，背面投影被广泛运用于拍摄行驶车辆中人物的对话镜头。而希区柯克也擅长利用背面投影去扩展电影里的世界，并达到追求“自然主义”的目的。尽管随着技术的不断更新，这种技术本身也已经变得十分不自然。那么现在仍然使用背面投影技术肯定是出于某种艺术上的考量，通过这种前后景不协调所造成的空间割裂来让观众回想起古典好莱坞的风格。

希区柯克电影中的背面投影（《群鸟》与《西北偏北》）

《欧洲特快车》中的背面投影镜头便是导演艺术化表达的最佳案例

其实仔细回看《凶线》，帕尔玛也仅仅是在两处地方运用了背面投影：一处是男主通过录音推导出事故现场的真相；另一处便是男主飙车追赶的段落。前者毫无疑问是符合我之前所说的“艺术考量”的，而后者呢？在这个实景拍摄追车戏已无限制的时代下，帕尔玛为何要选择这种“吃力不讨好”的拍摄技法？是单纯的怀旧，还是另一种形式的“艺术追求”？

分屏镜头，正如字面意思那般，是将银幕上完整的画面分割成不同的几个画面，从而达成美学上或者叙事上的特定需求，原本是电影语法上的的某种形式，最初却是起源于电影早期的技术发展，例如 遮片技术、多重曝光技术等。早期电影对分割画面的尝试可以被看作是 一种对技术手段的试水和画面空间的扩充 ，而进入六七十年代之后的电影，则是真正将分割画面纳入到电影叙事语法的体系中来。这其中最具代表性的就是帕尔玛。

《姐妹情仇》，属于窗口的双线窥视，帕尔玛对分屏手法的一次成熟实验

《剃刀边缘》中利用“电视媒介”来达成情境上的交汇

《魅影天堂》中用了两段超炫的同步长镜头来扩展影像空间的可能性，同时仍然遵循着基本的时间规则

而《魔女嘉莉》绝对是帕尔玛在分屏手法上玩的最嗨的一次，我从未想过屠杀可以这样拍

但注意，尽管帕尔玛是分屏手法的大师级人物，但他在运用该手法时却显得非常克制，一部电影只用一两次，这样能最大限度的保证观众对单一手法的新鲜感。在帕尔玛手中，分屏技术打破了时间和空间的界限，在有限、固定且单一性的银幕空间上，呈现了多种空间和多种时间的进程的组合。在某些时刻，两个分裂的叙事空间会在高潮处汇聚到了一起，但分屏画面却依然在持续，取代了传统的正反打手法，空间以一种多视角的表现形式出现在我们面前，并具备了并置的时间特征。通过这种表达，帕尔玛的分屏技术创造出了一种全新的悬疑：传统的剪辑手法像是对观众的提示，造就悬疑的同时也毁掉了悬疑。而分屏技法规避了这一点，通过引入不同的视角，将所有元素都放到画面中来。在这样的时空并置中，人物构成了一种共存性的平等关系。或者是同一人物所进行的活动，但是呈现出来的信息却能更加全方位。对观众来说，这种“麦格芬”既存在又不存在，始于对希区柯克的致敬，但又比希区柯克更加丰满。

但与帕尔玛的其他分屏不同，《凶线》里的唯一的分屏段落并未承载悬疑要素，在形式和内容上也意外的“单调”。这一段落首先是由一个交代景别关系的裂焦镜头开始（某种程度上也算暗示了裂焦镜头和分屏的内核上是趋近的），左边是详细的电影音效整理工作，而右边只是一则关于州长出席烟火晚会的新闻。在剪辑点的数量上，左边明显是要比右边多的，这样就方便集中观众的注意力到左半画面内。而音效上也暗含后续故事发展的线索（“foot steps”“clock”“thunder”“shot”“body fall”等具体音效），画面更是直观的展现了电影后期制作的内容，与右边的新闻媒体进行对比，一方面是再度切题「元电影」的属性所在，另一方面也稍稍涉及到了媒介自反的内容（从角色对新闻毫不关心的态度也能佐证，亦或是「电影」对「电视」的媒介对抗？）。

先从裂焦镜头开始，展现出「电影」与「电视」之间的对立；随后切入分屏，媒介之间的对抗开始加剧；最后通过机位设置完成左右构图上的失衡，对抗结束。

二、电影是「视觉」与「听觉」共同整合的艺术

关于电影本身，从首部有声电影《爵士歌手》上映以来，电影就不再仅仅只是纯视觉艺术了。而至于声音如何与画面产生关联，这其中也要遵循某种基本规则。1959年布列松所拍摄的《扒手》也许就是这一规则最典型的案例：在没有人物/人物还未入场的空镜头内，音效可以提前铺垫情绪、传递信号、构建空间。也就是“先声，后视，再感”。让声音去引导观众，促使他们对接下来的画面产生某种预期，而创作者接下来要考虑的，是顺从预期亦或是违背预期，则取决于他们所想要达到的戏剧效果。

先让我们来看看电影9-12分钟这一段男主录制环境音的片段。基本完美沿用了上面讲过的声音引导理念，主角手中跟随声音游走的麦克风便是「由声入画」的过渡物件。在这一段落中，声音和画面仍然是耦合的。除此之外，帕尔玛还安排了五组相似的镜头序列，来引导观众一步步走向剧情的爆发点：

第一组镜头序列：三个镜头由近及远，一步步放大环境缩小人物，并在最后一个镜头内通过前景虚化的树叶来强调某种无形的窥视感，也在暗示危机/事故的到来。

第二组镜头序列：依旧是由近及远的镜头安排，不过这一次是从“被窥视者”的视角为主，继续填充环境，并在最后用裂焦镜头来丰富影像的趣味性。

第三组镜头序列：无特殊变化，仅有过渡作用。

注：右下角的是一只蟾蜍

第四组镜头序列：镜头安排仍然无特殊变化，但最后一个镜头再一次出现了前景虚化的树叶，强化窥视感，可以看作危险信号，事故即将发生。

第五组镜头序列：没有使用之前的镜头过渡模式，而是直接切入录音人和声源的裂焦镜头，明示二者之间的符号象征关联，也为后面主角追查真相的行为作视觉铺垫。随后，车祸发生，该段落结束。

视觉上的行为同步即二者联系的证明

在这一段中帕尔玛尽情展现了自己的调度功底，通过镜头序列中不同的细节变动来暗示危机/事故的发生，而且每一组镜头序列中音效都是至关重要的部分，每一组镜头序列的承接都是由音效带动镜头运动，然后再由镜头运动将视线自然引导至目标。

但在此之后，电影剧情上的「视」与「听」被刻意分割：围绕着同一件谋杀，作为画面载体的照片所展现出来的信息是片面的，并在大部分的时间被权贵和媒体所利用；而作为声音载体的录音带，则是主角追寻真相的关键线索。

当电影进行到30分钟处，又出现了「元电影」概念的另一佐证：主角将杂志上的照片以「帧」为单位进行拼贴，最终产生了完整的「胶卷」；第52分钟时，声音与画面最终在「胶卷」上相聚，残缺的信息被拼凑完整，而最终观众所看见的，便是名为「电影」的载体所呈现出来的事实真相。

帕尔玛用两个片段把电影制作工序详细地展现给观众，正如之前所说“一部关于电影幕后制作过程的电影”，除此之外还概括了电影是「声」与「画」共同组成的艺术形式，并将这一母题与影片本身的悬疑类型高度融合，文本与影像在互文中点出这一关系的本质所在：关于「电影」如何以何种形式传递、拆分、整合与隐藏「信息」。

用“电影”还原真相

三、重回片头

讲了那么多，现在让我们重新回归到片头，看看帕尔玛是如何通过这样一个片头去展现电影的视觉母题、声音设计母题和故事母题。

一开始便通过指针四次幅度频率不定的摇摆自然带出制片公司、总导演和男女主演员的名字。

注意片头的音效设计：第一次和第二次摆动所配的背景音效都是风声+心跳声，字幕打出制片公司时的音效是较为平缓的，当导演名字出现后，连续出现了三个类似喘息声的音效，正如前面所说，暗示事故/危机的到来。

随后字幕打出的是男主演John Travolta，而这时背景音效取代成车辆失控时的鸣笛声。

随着女主演Nancy Allen的字幕亮相，背景音也转成了影片结尾处那声撕心裂肺的尖叫。

标题大字在银幕上一闪而过，背景音变成枪声和轮胎漏气的声音。

之后便是最妙的设计：片名“BLOW OUT”中的两个单词从屏幕两侧出现，并随着车辆失控打滑的音效不断靠近，就在两个“O”即将重合时，片头结束。

那么这个片头到底秒在哪里？

一、关键视觉元素（表现声音强弱的摇摆指针）、听觉元素（风声、枪声、车辆打滑声和尖叫，而且这些音效是与角色本身挂钩的）和剧情要素（车祸谋杀现场与结尾）的展现：

二、片名中不断靠近两个“O”像是简化后的轮胎，而背景音效也正好对应片中因轮胎漏气的关键情节。

三、考虑到第二点所说的那种「由声入画」的手法，那么两个互相靠近并不断重合的片名也许正是「画面」与「音效」的类比，只有当两者“完全重合”，电影才能将所要表达的信息完全传递给观众。

而上述部分在第一次观影时是很难发觉的，只有重看后才发现片头所潜藏的信息是如此关键，并在形式上与文本内容形成了完美的互文。对于帕尔玛，我只能顶礼膜拜了。

最后聊聊结尾：

很奇怪的是，在之前的帕尔玛电影里，“爱情”这个概念基本都被拿来当作剧情的垫脚石了。《魅影天堂》就是最典型的例子，那部电影里的每一段爱情描写都像是被剧情所裹挟，仓促、机械而套路。尽管我非常中意《魅影天堂》的悲剧结局，但那种震撼跟爱情描写一点关系都没有，不如说爱情戏的粗劣在很大程度上拉低了影片整体的水准。

癫狂与没落

究其原因，可能是帕尔玛为了不让电影主题偏移而做出的选择，也可能是帕尔玛真心不擅长写爱情戏，亦或是两者皆有。不管怎样，在爱情描写这方面，帕尔玛是真的挺“直男”的（贬义的那种）。

所以在《凶线》里，尽管漫天烟火与背景音乐所营造的氛围是那么忧伤，我仍然把这种桥段的存在看作是帕尔玛为了“煽情”而刻意为之。除了惊叹于视觉效果外，其他的部分（尤其是情感）我还真没什么感受。

当然没有贬低的意思，这一镜整体拍的那是相当惊艳，我相当中意

直到“尖叫声”的再度亮相：在最后的最后，男主反复听着那段让人痛心不已的录音，并用女主被杀前最后一声刻骨铭心的尖叫替换了之前那个蹩脚的音效，于是《凶线》的剧情在谋杀与爱情上绕了那么一大圈，最后又回到这部“粗制滥造”的B级片上。

John Travolta这一段的表演是无法不让人动容的

正如前文所言，「画面」与「音效」融合后所传递的信息是一致的，但最后的这个情节设计又把这一理论给无情粉碎。当观众经历了全部剧情后，在情感上就形成了一种难以言喻的「声画对立」。承载着爱情记忆的尖叫，在B级电影里被画面扭曲成廉价的感官刺激符号，对于男主的想法，我们永远无从得知；他把这段记忆铭刻在一部B级恐怖片上，电影会承载这段记忆吗？亦或是通过影像的扭曲来遗忘痛苦，我们也只能猜测。于是，此前一直脱节的情绪在这一瞬间终于升华，压抑的情感始终无法宣泄，骨鲠在喉，难以释怀。爱情被赋予了实体，完成了属于「元电影」的叙事回环。

再联想到之前关于“声画分离导致真相被掩盖”的言论，这一次，声画重组所带来的是更深层次的紊乱，不禁让人思考：声与画，到底是谁才能引导并决定我们所感知的真相？

也许是娱乐。

一切只为娱乐，声与画都是被娱乐所裹挟的傀儡，在狂欢的浪潮之下，一切情感反馈都是被提前设置好的，于是那声尖叫最后所承载的悲情也变得毫无意义，意义被观众赋予，被观众所决定，最后又反馈给观众本身。

一切皆是娱乐。

这是我第一次在帕尔玛的电影里看见“真情”。

被「电影」所围绕的真情。

转载于：//scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/07/17/blow-out-pauline-kael/

At forty, Brian De Palma has more than twenty years of moviemaking behind him, and he has been growing better and better. Each time a new film of his opens, everything he has done before seems to have been preparation for it. With Blow Out, starring John Travolta and Nancy Allen, which he wrote and directed, he has made his biggest leap yet. If you know De Palma’s movies, you have seen earlier sketches of many of the characters and scenes here, but they served more limited—often satirical—purposes. Blow Out isn’t a comedy or a film of the macabre; it involves the assassination of the most popular candidate for the presidency, so it might be called a political thriller, but it isn’t really a genre film. For the first time, De Palma goes inside his central character—Travolta as Jack, a sound effects specialist. And he stays inside. He has become so proficient in the techniques of suspense that he can use what he knows more expressively. You don’t see set pieces in Blow Out—it flows, and everything that happens seems to go right to your head. It’s hallucinatory, and it has a dreamlike clarity and inevitability, but you’ll never make the mistake of thinking that it’s only a dream. Compared with Blow Out, even the good pictures that have opened this year look dowdy. I think De Palma has sprung to the place that Altman achieved with films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Coppola reached with the two Godfather movies—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is an artist’s vision. And Travolta, who appeared to have lost his way after Saturday Night Fever,makes his own leap—right back to the top, where he belongs. Playing an adult (his first), and an intelligent one, he has a vibrating physical sensitivity like that of the very young Brando.

Jack, the sound effects man, who works for an exploitation moviemaker in Philadelphia, is outside the city one night recording the natural rustling sounds. He picks up the talk of a pair of lovers and the hooting of an owl, and then the quiet is broken by the noise of a car speeding across a bridge, a shot, a blowout, and the crash of the car to the water below. He jumps into the river and swims to the car; the driver—a man—is clearly dead, but a girl (Nancy Allen) trapped inside is crying for help. Jack dives down for a rock, smashes a window, pulls her out, and takes her to a hospital. By the time she has been treated and the body of the driver—the governor, who was planning to run for president—has been brought in, the hospital has filled with police and government officials. Jack’s account of the shot before the blowout is brushed aside, and he is given a high-pressure lecture by the dead man’s aide (John McMartin). He’s told to forget that the girl was in the car; it’s better to have the governor die alone—it protects the family from embarrassment. Jack instinctively objects to this cover-up but goes along with it. The girl, Sally, who is sedated and can barely stand, is determined to get away from the hospital; the aide smuggles both her and Jack out, and Jack takes her to a motel. Later, when he matches his tape to the pictures taken by Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), a photographer who also witnessed the crash, he has strong evidence that the governor’s death wasn’t an accident. The pictures, though, make it appear that the governor was alone in the car; there’s no trace of Sally.

Blow Out is a variation on Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), and the core idea probably comes from the compound joke in De Palma’s 1968 film Greetings: A young man tries to show his girlfriend enlarged photographs that he claims reveal figures on the “grassy knoll,” and he announces, “This will break the Kennedy case wide open.” Bored, she says, “I saw Blow-Up—I know how this comes out. It’s all blurry—you can’t tell a thing.” But there’s nothing blurry in this new film. It’s also a variation on Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and it connects almost subliminally with recent political events—with Chappaquiddick and with Nelson Rockefeller’s death. And as the film proceeds, and the murderous zealot Burke (John Lithgow) appears, it also ties in with the “clandestine operations” and “dirty tricks” of the Nixon years. It’s a Watergate movie, and on paper it might seem to be just a political melodrama, but it has an intensity that makes it unlike any other political film. If you’re in a vehicle that’s skidding into a snowbank or a guardrail, your senses are awakened, and in the second before you hit, you’re acutely, almost languorously aware of everything going on around you—it’s the trancelike effect sometimes achieved on the screen by slow motion. De Palma keeps our senses heightened that way all through Blow Out; the entire movie has the rapt intensity that he got in the slow-motion sequences in The Fury (1978). Only now, De Palma can do it at normal speed.

This is where all that preparation comes in. There are rooms seen from above—an overhead shot of Jack surrounded by equipment, another of Manny Karp sprawled on his bed—that recall De Palma’s use of overhead shots in Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972). He goes even further with the split-screen techniques he used in Dressed to Kill (1980); now he even uses dissolves into the split screen—it’s like a twinkle in your thought processes. And the circling camera that he practiced with in Obsession (1976) is joined by circling sound, and Jack—who takes refuge in circuitry—is in the middle. De Palma has been learning how to make every move of the camera signify just what he wants it to, and now he has that knowledge at his fingertips. The pyrotechnics and the whirlybird camera are no longer saying “Look at me”; they give the film authority. When that hooting owl fills the side of the screen and his head spins around, you’re already in such a keyed-up, exalted state that he might be in the seat next to you. The cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, working with his own team of assistants, does night scenes that look like paintings on black velvet so lush you could walk into them, and surreally clear daylight vistas of the city—you see buildings a mile away as if they were in a crystal ball in your hand. The colors are deep, and not tropical, exactly, but fired up, torrid. Blow Out looks a lot like The Fury; it has that heat, but with greater depth and definition. It’s sleek and it glows orange, like the coils of a heater or molten glass—as if the light were coming from behind the screen or as if the screen itself were plugged in. And because the story centers on sounds, there is a great care for silence. It’s a movie made by perfectionists (the editor is De Palma’s longtime associate Paul Hirsch, and the production design is by Paul Sylbert), yet it isn’t at all fussy. De Palma’s good, loose writing gives him just what he needs (it doesn’t hobble him, like some of the writing in The Fury), and having Zsigmond at his side must have helped free him to get right in there with the characters.

De Palma has been accused of being a puppeteer and doing the actors’ work for them. (Sometimes he may have had to.) But that certainly isn’t the case here. Travolta and Nancy Allen are radiant performers, and he lets their radiance have its full effect; he lets them do the work of acting too. Travolta played opposite Nancy Allen in De Palma’s Carrie (1976), and they seemed right as a team; when they act together, they give out the same amount of energy—they’re equally vivid. In Blow Out, as soon as Jack and Sally speak to each other, you feel a bond between them, even though he’s bright and soft-spoken and she looks like a dumb-bunny piece of fluff. In the early scenes, in the hospital and the motel, when the blonde, curly-headed Sally entreats Jack to help her, she’s a stoned doll with a hoarse, sleepy-little-girl voice, like Bette Midler in The Rose—part helpless, part enjoying playing helpless. When Sally is fully conscious, we can see that she uses the cuddly-blonde act for the people she deals with, and we can sense the thinking behind it. But then her eyes cloud over with misery when she knows she has done wrong. Nancy Allen takes what used to be a good-bad-girl stereotype and gives it a flirty iridescence that makes Jack smile the same way we in the audience are smiling. She balances depth and shallowness, caution and heedlessness, so that Sally is always teetering—conning or being conned, and sometimes both. Nancy Allen gives the film its soul; Travolta gives it gravity and weight and passion.

Jack is a man whose talents backfire. He thinks he can do more with technology than he can; he doesn’t allow for the human weirdnesses that snarl things up. A few years earlier, he worked for the police department, but that ended after a horrible accident. He had wired an undercover police officer who was trying to break a crime ring, but the officer sweated, the battery burned him, and, when he tried to rip it off, the gangster he hoped to trap hanged him by the wire. Yet the only way Jack thinks that he can get the information about the governor’s death to the public involves wiring Sally. (You can almost hear him saying “Please, God, let it work this time.”) Sally, who accepts corruption without a second thought, is charmed by Jack because he gives it a second thought. (She probably doesn’t guess how much thought he does give it.) And he’s drawn to Sally because she lives so easily in the corrupt world. He’s encased in technology, and he thinks his machines can expose a murder. He thinks he can use them to get to the heart of the matter, but he uses them as a shield. And not only is his paranoia justified but things are much worse than he imagines—his paranoia is inadequate.

Travolta—twenty-seven now—finally has a role that allows him to discard his teenage strutting and his slobby accents. Now it seems clear that he was so slack-jawed and weak in last year’s Urban Cowboy because he couldn’t draw upon his own emotional experience—the ignorant-kid role was conceived so callowly that it emasculated him as an actor. As Jack, he seems taller and lankier. He has a moment in the flashback about his police work when he sees the officer hanging by the wire. He cries out, takes a few steps away, and then turns and looks again. He barely does anything—yet it’s the kind of screen acting that made generations of filmgoers revere Brando in On the Waterfront: it’s the willingness to go emotionally naked and the control to do it in character. (And, along with that, the understanding of desolation.) Travolta’s body is always in character in this movie; when Jack is alone and intent on what he’s doing, we feel his commitment to the orderly world of neatly labeled tapes—his hands are precise and graceful. Recording the wind in the trees just before the crash of the governor’s car, Jack points his long, thin mike as if he were a conductor with a baton calling forth the sounds of the night; when he first listens to the tape, he waves a pencil in the direction from which each sound came. You can believe that Jack is dedicated to his craft because Travolta is a listener. His face lights up when he hears Sally’s little-girl cooing; his face closes when he hears the complaints of his boss, Sam (Peter Boyden), who makes sleazo “blood” films—he rejects the sound.

At the end, Jack’s feelings of grief and loss suggest that he has learned the limits of technology; it’s like coming out of the cocoon of adolescence. Blow Out is the first movie in which De Palma has stripped away the cackle and the glee; this time he’s not inviting you to laugh along with him. He’s playing it straight and asking you—trusting you—to respond. In The Fury, he tried to draw you into the characters’ emotions by a fantasy framework; in Blow Out, he locates the fantasy material inside the characters’ heads. There was true vitality in the hyperbolic, teasing perversity of his previous movies, but this one is emotionally richer and more rounded. And his rhythms are more hypnotic than ever. It’s easy to imagine De Palma standing very still and wielding a baton, because the images and sounds are orchestrated.

Seeing this film is like experiencing the body of De Palma’s work and seeing it in a new way. Genre techniques are circuitry; in going beyond genre, De Palma is taking some terrifying first steps. He is investing his work with a different kind of meaning. His relation to the terror in Carrie or Dressed to Kill could be gleeful because it was pop and he could ride it out; now he’s in it. When we see Jack surrounded by all the machinery that he tries to control things with, De Palma seems to be giving it a last, long, wistful look. It’s as if he finally understood what technique is for. This is the first film he has made about the things that really matter to him. Blow Out begins with a joke; by the end, the joke has been turned inside out. In a way, the movie is about accomplishing the one task set for the sound effects man at the start: he has found a better scream. It’s a great movie.

The New Yorker, July 27, 1981