You the Jury: Classic Cinema Explained - TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME

This isn't your typical kid's film...

You're right though about the skeletons. Czech culture does not find bones intimidating like we do. For instance, the famous Sedlec Ossuary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

That would explain the particularly skeletal lass in Czech Streets. I'd be afraid of snapping her in two.

Erica Ambler wrote:

That would explain the particularly skeletal lass in Czech Streets. I'd be afraid of snapping her in two.

I'm waiting to see how De Palma utilizes the skeletal broad in his episode of Czech Streets.

Alright, new scene.

Inspired by the De Palma article Erica posted. The Be Black, Baby segment from HI MOM! (1970). .

Wikipedia wrote:

Be Black, Baby

Its most memorable sequence is one where a black radical group invite a group of WASPs to feel what it is like to be black, in a sequence called Be Black, Baby. It is both a satire and an example of the experimental theatre and cinéma vérité movements. Shot in the style of a documentary film, it features a theater group of African American actors interviewing Caucasians on the streets of New York City, asking them if the whites know what it is like to be black in America.

Later, a group of theater patrons attend a performance by the troupe, wherein soul food is served. The white audience is then subjected to wearing shoe polish on their faces, while the African American actors sport whiteface and terrorize the people in blackface. The white audience members then attempt to escape from the building, and they are ambushed in the elevator by the troupe. As two of the black actors rape one of the white audience members, Robert De Niro arrives as an actor playing an NYPD policeman, arresting members of the white audience under the pretense that they are black. The entire sequence plays with natural sound, and is "unrehearsed" and in "real time." De Palma's familiarity and collaboration with experimental theatre informs the sequence and ratchets up the emotional impact of those who view it, simultaneously engaging their personal responses to racism and commenting on the deceptive and manipulative power of cinema. "If truth itself is plastic," the sequence asks, "then filmed truth is deeply flawed."

The sequence concludes with a thoroughly battered and abused audience raving about the show, showering praise on the black actors, crowing "Clive Barnes [New York Times theater critic] was right!"

Be Black, Baby remains one of the most challenging and intriguing sequences from its era, and its use of an audience's willingness to become emotional accomplices sheds light on De Palma's subsequent career.

I remember seeing Hi Mom! on a double bill with Greetings at The Scala in Kings Cross in the late 1980s. (Kubrick had the place closed down not long after, but that's another story.) I found the Kennedy conspiracy bits more interesting than all the civil rights schtick if I'm honest. (De Palma revisted the Kennedys in Blow Out.)

Also, all the mainstream De Palma movies I'd seen at that point were highly polished, but these were 16mm and pretty rough. Looking at it again I don't think Be Black, Baby has aged very well. Like so much of the counter culture, it seems self-indulgent and needlessly destructive. Is it good film making? I can't say. It's mildly interesting. I suppose it does serve to place Redacted in context - De Palma has always been a more cerebral and political filmmaker than his fellow movie brats. It's just that side of him got overshadowed by the thriller/horror/gun-for-hire stuff.

This weak: the infamous David Bowie scene from David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME.



Explain it.