凶线

最好的尖叫

——《凶线》影评

《凶线》某种层面上来说是《放大》的商业版，但导演布莱恩·德·帕尔玛很好地设计和处理了这一改动。

不仅仅是对于人物设定上，《放大》的主人公是个摄影师，而《凶线》的主人公是个音效师。这样的改动使观众能够更加直观，更加有代入感地观看电影，同时也很好地为结尾打下铺垫。

首先值得一提的就是叙事层面。本片采用双线进行的模式，一个是身为音效师的杰克为了寻找好的尖叫声配音，另一个便是为了将总统候选人被谋杀的事情调查清楚。而在结局的处理上也同样适用。也许对于两人的感情来说是个悲剧，但是对于杰克的电影配音来说是有史以来最好的尖叫。同样这所折射出的也是普通百姓在政治阴谋下的无奈。

对于光影和色彩的运用也很好地渲染了影片的气氛。当遇到血腥暴力时，导演往往使用影子来有所保留地表达，这能够为观众增添很大空间和程度上的想象。同时也在运用大片的红色以此来给人们以警示和危险。鲜红的美国国旗，亮红的鲜血。这一切都是带有强有力的冲击力的，似乎一帧又一帧地表达着痛苦。

而在影片结尾设计的“最后一分钟营救”虽然老套，但在本片同样适用。因为当悲剧发生时，杰克在获得满意的尖叫声同时也永失所爱。漫天的烟花和巨大的美国国旗背后，是疯狂的，令人心疼的惨案。底下的人群忘我地欢呼着，热闹非凡地游行着。这也许更加衬托出生离死别的悲痛。

旋转镜头的运动也很恰到好处，很准确的表现了人物在找不到原声母带的焦虑，同时运用形象化的处理，通过转盘的转动来更加增添人物内心的烦恼，更好的丰富人物形象。

老套却不落俗的电影，最后的死亡是让人心尖一颤的处理。也许他一辈子都不会想到，这个在他的录音生涯中，将成为他最满意的尖叫。

公众号里有最完整文章排版

人们常说，对他人的第一印象是3秒钟就决定了的。

看电影又何尝不是？

当花花绿绿的制片公司标识展示完成，你看到的第一个镜头就决定了你将对这部影片付出的耐心。

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播放《凶线》，你首先看到的是什么呢？

不，应该说你听到什么。

野兽叫声、心跳声、80年代的迪斯科舞曲……

主观镜头里，你是一个手拿尖刀的凶手，你潜入女生宿舍，你在窗外偷窥她们裸体热舞、和情人在地板上做爱，你还潜入了宿舍楼、偷偷进了女浴室。

在女浴室里，你照了镜子。（顺便说一句，这是我看的几千部片子中，露脸的杀手里最可怕的）

紧张、恐惧的心情顶到了极点。

直到你杀的女学生叫出来。

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没有人听了这奇怪的尖叫能hold住不笑。

电影里的人也不例外。

原来这是一场戏中戏。

B级电影公司的制作者们，在检查拍过的素材。

你瞬间感觉被导演玩弄了，同时又受虐似地提起了兴趣。

看来这是个愿意花心思和你玩儿游戏的导演，那么，接下来，他要干嘛？

◐

电影录音师杰克在外出收音时，无意间录到了总统候选人车祸的过程。这段录音，证明了这场车祸其实是谋杀。

这种意外发现凶案的片子不稀奇。

远了说，有希区柯克的《后窗》，在家养脚伤的摄影记者怀疑对面楼上一个男人杀了老婆；近了说，有《火车上的女孩》，通勤的姑娘看到车窗外女子失踪前的偷情现场。

关键是怎么拍。

◐

《凶线》的导演布莱恩·德·帕尔玛，从小在医院里长大，他的父亲是一名外科医生。

他在很小的时候就见过手术、血、死亡，甚至还被枪击过，没什么能吓住他。

另外，据说因为怀疑父亲出轨，他小时候曾花了几天时间去跟踪记录父亲的行踪。

种种血腥、暴力相关的经验，和对侦探职业的神往（或说偷窥欲望），奠定了他导演作品的主题基调。

他被誉为“美国的希区柯克”、“当代悬疑大师”。

◐

70年代的时候，帕尔玛作为新锐年轻导演中的一员，和马丁·西科塞斯、乔治·卢卡斯、斯蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格成为了朋友。

他们组成了一个叫 “the movie brats”（电影小鬼）的小团体。

从左至右：斯皮尔伯格、西科塞斯、帕尔玛、卢卡斯

他们一起喝酒、打台球，还给对方的作品出主意。

帕尔玛是把《出租车司机》剧本推荐给马丁·西科塞斯的人，也是建议乔治·卢卡斯在《星球大战》前加上序言的人。

除了互相帮助，几个青年才俊间当然也免不了竞争和彼此调侃。

帕尔玛就特别看不上乔治·卢卡斯的《星球大战》，曾经在小团体聚会中直言不讳地说自己讨厌这片。

当然，在这四人中，帕尔玛似乎才是地位最低的。

大家认为他只不过是在拷贝希区柯克的一切。

是吗？

我不这么认为。

◐

是的，帕尔玛的电影里也有“浴室杀人戏”、有难以预期的惊悚和不可知的命运转折，但他一直在探索新的电影技术和语言。

例如，他在《狄奥尼索斯在69年》这部片中利用后成为其风格标志性元素之一的“分屏“技术，还有《凶线》中运用的“斯坦尼康”（当年为他执镜的就是斯坦尼康的发明者Garret Brown，本人！）。

斯坦尼康，大家应该都知道了。

这种摄像机稳定器，现在已经被广泛运用于影视拍摄中，主要用来拍摄长镜头和运动镜头。

这里简单说一下“分屏”。

帕尔玛式的“分屏”，不是你心里想的：

而是：

你说，这有什么技术的？把左侧男人的脸往摄影机前面一杵不就得了。

请注意，画面左边和右边的焦点都是清晰的。

他是怎么拍出来的呢？

首先，需要装一个split-focus diopter lens在主镜头上，通过旋转，选择画面被这个滤镜影响的部分，从而达到调整部分画面焦点的效果。

这种技术，会让前景和后景的事物，都拥有清晰的焦点，从观者心理上，改变或强化了空间感。

对导演帕尔玛来说，这种摄影技术是他通过多元视角表达观念的一种方式。

或许，也可以反过来想，表达方式的灵感，可以从内容里找到。

例如：

猫头鹰做前景，男主做后景，是把男主比喻成猫头鹰，一个观察者。

死鱼做前景，女人做后景，预示了女人即将遭遇不测的未来。

这种“分屏”，在如今的电影界已经越来越少见了。

90年代，还在用的是昆汀·塔伦蒂诺。

昆汀·塔伦蒂诺是帕尔玛的忠实粉丝。

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帕尔玛说，他总是以一种片断化的方式工作，努力在一个单独的图像里既放进观念，又保留视觉兴趣。

在这部片中，除了分屏外，导演的招牌手法也得到了很多次具体体现，包括长镜头和顶拍手法。

在情节发展到男主角杰克一筹莫展的时候，帕尔玛来了个“小彩蝶”式旋转，整整6圈！

这个令人眩晕的镜头，配以疯狂的配乐，促成了你与杰克的心理同步。

这是动图

而更高的顶拍镜头出现在男主驱车追寻女主声音位置的时候：

这是动图

这些上帝视角都突出了命运的定数，和男主在事件中深深的无力感。

那么，整部影片，你最不该错过的一场戏是什么呢？

我首推火车站段落！

我愿意在我未来的人生里一遍一遍地重看它。

片段拍摄了在火车站电话亭为海军bj的性工作者，被杀手勒死的全过程。

导演帕尔玛在这么简单的一个情节里，运用了大量的摄影、叙事技巧。

而那些精心设计的镜头背后，是他透着邪恶气的优雅，和深藏的偷窥欲。

◐

常言道，“外行看热闹，内行看门道。”

作为一个自认对电影技术略知一二的人，我在观影经历中，时常会有兴奋得想上街跳舞转圈儿的冲动。而这种时刻，身边的朋友却往往正在缓慢进入梦乡。

《凶线》自1981年上映后一直受冷落，直到2011年被CC收入，才又重新引起影迷们的关注。这部影片也常常会入选类似“你错过的冷门电影”这样的片单。

影片结尾荒凉的结局，似乎也映射了导演本人在事业上的失意。

还记得故事是从一声尖叫开始吗？

最后，录音师杰克找到了完美的尖叫，来自于他喜欢的女孩儿死前的呼救。

你说，这是他的冷酷无情，还是对自己失败人生的惩罚？

你说，帕尔玛真的在意自己在商业领域上，比不过马丁·西科塞斯、乔治·卢卡斯、斯蒂芬·斯皮尔伯格吗？

姜文在一次采访里说，不会为观众现在看不懂而妥协，因为观众总有一天会成长。当他们成熟后，再回过头来看自己的片子，知道自己没有糊弄他们，就行了。

我想，这就是真正艺术家的匠心吧。

做自己的作品是不需要迁就任何人的。

◐

片中，女主角是化妆师，她跟男主角讲，化妆的最高境界就是好看的伪素颜。

这些看似闲聊的台词，实际上反映了影片的主题。

真真假假、虚虚实实，带子一直转，信息不停给。

正如戈达尔说的，“电影是每秒24格试图讲述真理的谎言。”

今天的推送对有些人来说，也许不那么感性，但在我看来，fancy camera tricks自藏诗意。

把我的喜悦分享给你，祝你假期愉快～

彩蛋

1，约翰·特拉沃尔塔拍摄时患了失眠症，但好的是：缺觉的状态帮助他创造了更具情绪化表现力的表演

2，昆汀·塔伦蒂诺正是看了约翰·特拉沃尔塔在这部片中的表现，才请他去演《低俗小说》

3，女主角和导演帕尔玛在拍摄中结了婚（3年后离了）

4，女主角在影片中戴的项链是兔子脚

参考资料：

◣杨柳 姜昆：向你致敬——《惊魂记》 与希区柯克

◣徐海龙：德·帕尔玛惊悚片中的性别关系和双重体验

◣吴雪衫（译）：爆炸 ——塔伦·西蒙与布莱恩·德·帕尔玛的对话

◣一夜之间，美国重回梦一样的八十年代！（//www.sohu.com/a/209924173_467331）

如果你觉得此文有用，请帮我点个“有用”～

如果你觉得此文有用，请帮我点个“有用”～

如果你觉得此文有用，请帮我点个“有用”～

原创：黄老师

公众号：黄老师电影院（huangfilm）

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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