Black Angel (1976)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Black Angel |
| Original title | obsession |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1976 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Brian De Palma |
| script | Paul Schrader |
| production |
Harry N. Blum , George Litto |
| music | Bernard Herrmann |
| camera | Vilmos Zsigmond |
| cut | Paul Hirsch |
| occupation | |
| |
Black Angel (Original title: Obsession ) is an American film directed by Brian De Palma from 1976. Cliff Robertson plays a businessman whose family dies in a kidnapping. 15 years later, he meets a woman who is so similar to his wife that he becomes obsessed with her. This thriller with melodramatic elements pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo .
action
Michael Courtland, a New Orleans real estate agent , celebrates his tenth wedding anniversary with his wife Elizabeth in 1959. That night, Elizabeth and Amy, their daughter, are kidnapped. Police advise Courtland to replace the requested ransom with worthless paper. The result is that the kidnappers and the two hostages flee early from the police. After a car chase, the kidnapper's car explodes. Apparently, Courtland's family was killed in the explosion. Overwhelmed by grief and guilt, Courtland leaves the main responsibility for the joint business to his business partner Robert Lasalle and erects a memorial for Elizabeth and Amy, which is a miniature copy of the church of San Miniato al Monte in Florence , where Courtland and Elizabeth met.
15 years later, Courtland is still in deep grief. Lasalle persuades Courtland to take him to Florence on a business trip. When Courtland visits San Miniato, he meets Sandra, a young woman who looks like his wife. Courtland pursues Sandra and makes her care about him. Obsessed with the idea of sculpting Sandra into a mirror image of his dead wife, he travels with her back to the USA, where the two marriage plans are met with incomprehension in Courtland's environment. Sandra, for her part, seems to be obsessed with the dead Elizabeth and delves into the dead woman's emotional life by reading her letters and diaries.
In a dream-like sequence, Michael and Sandra seem to actually get married and have sex with each other, with Sandra revealing to Michael that she is now his wife Elizabeth and wants to give him a second chance. When Courtland wakes up, Sandra has disappeared. She has apparently been kidnapped, and in exactly the same ransom note as fifteen years earlier, Courtland calls for a ransom to be paid for her. Courtland decides to comply with the kidnappers' demands this time and borrows the money from Lasalle, whereby he has to transfer his shares to him. When the ransom is handed over, the viewer learns that Lasalle is behind the kidnapping and that Sandra is his accomplice. Sandra, who is Courtland's daughter Amy, who was believed to be dead, did not die at the time, but was brought to Italy by Lasalle, who was also behind the first kidnapping, where Lasalle had persuaded the child that her father did not love her because he was responsible for her release hadn't provided real money. The meeting between Sandra and Courtland had been planned long in advance by Lasalle and Sandra, ostensibly to give Sandra the opportunity to revenge on her father. Lasalle, however, exchanged the second ransom for worthless paper. He tells Sandra, whose hatred has meanwhile turned into love for her father, the lie that Courtland still does not love her and therefore did not bring any real money to the second "kidnapping" either.
Sandra then collapses and mentally develops back into a little girl, reliving the trauma of the first kidnapping. Lasalle pays them off with a small amount of money and puts them on a plane back to Italy. Courtland finds out that Lasalle was behind the crime and stabs him, recovering the real money. He wants to shoot Sandra at the airport. Sandra made a suicide attempt on the flight back to Italy and the plane is returning to New Orleans. The two meet in the airport building: Courtland with a gun drawn and the real money that flutters out of the suitcase during a scuffle with a security guard, Sandra in a wheelchair. When she sees her father, she runs up to him and shouts “Daddy! You brought the money. ” The two hug and Courtland understands that Sandra is his daughter.
History of origin
The screenwriter Paul Schrader was supposed to provide De Palma with a treatment for a film based on Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. But after the two of them had seen Vertigo in the cinema together, they worked out a thriller story that was thematically based on Vertigo. The film was originally supposed to be called Deja Vu , which would have been incomprehensible to the American audience. First renamed Double Ransom ( Double ransom ), they found the final title later obsession .
The film was financed on a private basis: the producer George Litto, who had previously been an artist agent, raised the necessary 1.4 million dollars from business people in Cincinnati who were looking for a tax-saving option.
The script originally contained a third act: After the murder of Lasalle, Courtland was supposed to go to a mental institution and not be released until 15 years later. In Florence he was supposed to find his daughter in San Miniato, who had been in a catatonic state for many years. In a kind of psychological experiment, the two were supposed to re-enact the kidnapping in order to process their traumatic experiences of the first two kidnappings, with the daughter reliving the first kidnapping and the father the second kidnapping in flashbacks . On the advice of Bernard Herrmann , De Palma withdrew from this third part in order to preserve the story with a minimum of credibility. Schrader resented De Palma for this change in his script and withdrew from the project.
Some other plot elements were also dropped in the course of the realization of the project: Originally Courtland's secretary Jane was supposed to play a larger role as an amorous counterpart to Sandra, and it was planned to give an actor three different roles - one of the kidnappers, a love rival in Florence and a psychiatrist in the third act - to be played, similar to the role of Peter Sellers in Lolita . Schrader wanted to use the song Changing Partners by Patti Page as music for the dance of father, mother and daughter on the wedding day , but this failed because of the required $ 15,000 license fees. As a substitute, Herrmann wrote a waltz, the motif of which reappears in the final scene between father and daughter.
It was Herrmann who encouraged De Palma to use photos for the title sequence that Courtland and Elizabeth showed in Florence in 1947 when they met there. On the one hand, this was intended to show the importance of the city and the Church of San Miniato for their relationship, on the other hand, an elegant transition to the first game scene could be created, in which the photos turn out to be slides that are shown at the anniversary celebration of Michael and Elizabeth.
Litto ensured that the scenes showing a marriage and the wedding night of Courtland and Sandra were retrospectively so alienated that they appeared as Courtland's dream in order to avoid the accusation that the film shows an explicit incest .
reception
Columbia bought the film after its completion, but was not convinced of its qualities enough to market it in the way De Palma had hoped to land its first major audience hit. Still, the film grossed a respectable $ 4 million box office.
The critics praised the stylish camera work by Vilmos Zsigmond and Hermann's highly romantic film music, but both the film's kitschy undertones and the close reference to Vertigo were criticized.
Reviews
Roger Ebert described the film in 1976 as an "overwrought melodrama," but that's what he thinks best about it. He stated: “The film has been criticized as implausible and woodcut, but that doesn't apply at all. Of course the ending is like something out of a terrible book of novels, of course the music borders on hysteria. ”But he, Ebert, is a fan of this exaggerated way of filmmaking:“ I not only like films like this, I enjoy them. ”
Variety particularly praised the script and the actor's performance: “Paul Schrader's script (...) is a complex but understandable mixture of betrayal, agonies in love and selfishness. (...) Robertson's subdued portrayal contributes just as decisively to the surprisingly diverse effect as Bujold's versatile, sensual and exuberant charisma. "
Time Out related the film to De Palma's later works and to Hitchcock's work: “Schrader and De Palma's homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo may still lack the contempt for women and the blood-soaked sensationalism of De Palma's later works, but it is nonetheless a humiliating imitation of the Master's style. Virtuoso sliding camera movements do not necessarily make a good film. The main problem with the film is the excruciatingly slow pace. "
Film analysis
The influence of vertigo
Like Hitchcock, De Palma was fascinated by certain topics: deception, guilt and purification, the fascination of the morbid and the duplicity of characters and events are leitmotifs that run through the work of the two directors. De Palma takes from Vertigo the motif of the traumatic events that are repeated at intervals and that the main character goes through with similar women.
In contrast to Hitchcock, where the psychological effect of the film mainly results from the dialogues, De Palma lets his story arise through the interplay of images and music. The protagonists' motives for action are explained less narrative than the viewer grasping them through the emotional sub-text built up through cinematic means.
Disclosure of the layers: the film as a relationship melodrama
The first time Courtland and Sandra meet, Sandra restores a wall fresco in the church. She asks if Courtland would rather restore the masterful Renaissance painting, or expose the underlying older and overpainted image, which appears to be of poor quality. Courtland chooses to save the masterpiece. The scene suggests that De Palma is also interested in exposing the layers of the relationship between the two, which are characterized by conflicting feelings between love and hate. According to Laurent Bouzereau, the old, less beautiful painting represents Courtland's guilty past he wants to forget, while the masterpiece symbolizes his new burgeoning relationship, the new woman to protect in order to wash away the old guilt. De Palma cites the motivation for shooting Schwarzer Engel : "What appealed to me the most was the opportunity to create a love story that is so strong that it can break through time barriers (...)" . His main focus is less on the construction of an exciting thriller, but on the representation of a delusional relationship story. Courtland is infatuated with the idea of molding Sandra into an image of his dead wife. Sandra immediately speaks to Courtland when she tells him about Dante Alighieri , who, only to be close to his beloved Beatrice Portinari - Dante's beloved has the same surname as Sandra - pretends to love another woman. While Courtland is hopelessly entangled in his idea of finding redemption from old guilt in new love, Sandra falls apart in the conflict between hate and love for her father. Both put their mental health at risk.
Architecture as a reflection of the characters
Extensive architectural elements are staged in the film. Both the old, splendid New Orleans and Florence are presented to the audience in their architectural beauty, but without falling into postcard clichés. De Palma often uses twilight, rain or fog to create melancholy moods. This contrasts with the images of modern, cold office buildings. They stand for the business world in which the greedy Lasalle moves, whereas the Italian architecture represents Courtland's romantic, past-related, European-oriented emotional world. For Courtland, Florence is the place of romantic fulfillment: he meets both women in Florence, but he loses both women in America in situations that have to do with money. The Church of San Miniato is the link between the old and the new world: Courtland has a scaled-down copy of the church built in the New Orleans cemetery as a memorial for his family. New Orleans is the ideal culmination point of the two cultures: here both European and American influences become visible, and the city offers not only the splendor of the old south but also the skyscrapers of the modern business world as environments in which the characters move.
Film technical means
Plan sequences, moving camera, zoom, slow motion
De Palma and his cameraman Zsigmond emphasize the emotional depth of individual shots, for example when Michael and Sandra first met in Florence, with long planned sequences that force the viewer to keep busy with the action without cutting into a new one Attitude to be distracted. Zsigmond's camera is always on the move in order to express the emotions of the protagonists in pictures. In addition to tracking shots, the zoom is a frequently used stylistic device. For example, in the scene when Courtland is sitting confused in his hotel room after his first meeting with Sandra, the camera zooms down from the ceiling to the photo that he is holding in his hand and that shows his dead wife Elizabeth.
In the scenes in which Sandra internally develops back to the child and relived the traumatic events, the camera has the task of making this development clear for the viewer: The camera position becomes higher and Sandra seems to shrink to the size of a child. In combination with Bujold's ability to also act as a childish aspect, the camera work creates a credibility for the fact that Bujold plays both mother and daughter in these flashback scenes; a filmmaking decision that the producer was not initially convinced of because he feared it might confuse the viewer.
In the final scene at the airport, De Palma falls back on a cinematic means that he has already used in earlier films: When the suicidal Sandra jumps out of the wheelchair to run towards her father, she can be seen in slow motion to follow the scene, supported by Herrmann's music to give additional emotional drama. The pulsating glow of the neon tubes on the ceiling, which can be seen through the slow motion effect, was only discovered later by De Palma and Zsigmond on the developed film, but not discarded as a film error, but left in the film as a special effect.
Widescreen format and sharpness
Black Angel was De Palma's first widescreen film . He uses the larger image detail available to him, especially in the scenes in which he depicts urban architecture. When, for example, Courtland and Lasalle are sitting in a café in Florence, the camera pans back and forth between the two protagonists, who are on the right and left outside the perceptible image section, in order to always see the image of the square in front of the window is the Palazzo Vecchio with the David statue , sharply drawn. Although De Palma does not use the split screen in this film, since the resulting “cold” effect would have opposed the melodramatic softness of the film, he still worked with image-dividing processes. Zsigmond, for example, used split lenses in order to be able to photograph both a right half of the image in the foreground and a left half of the image in the background in sharp focus in some scenes.
360 ° pans as a narrative tool
A camera panning 360 ° takes on a narrative function in the film three times: When Courtland mourns for his family at the memorial, the camera pans 180 ° to the memorial, with bulldozers of the surrounding park under construction. When you swing back to Courtland you can see the finished park with tall trees. Courtland is still in the same place, still in mourning, but he has visibly aged. A tablet explains that 15 years have passed.
When Sandra enters Elizabeth's room for the first time, the camera also pans 360 ° through the room and after completing the panning, you see Sandra, just standing in the door, sitting at the table, absorbed in Elizabeth's diary. A glance at the furnishings in the room, reminiscent of Elizabeth, makes it clear that Sandra is immersed in the emotional world of the deceased.
In the final scene, too, the camera pans quickly and often around the father and daughter, who are in close embrace. The viewer is given the opportunity to alternately follow the actors' mine game, which changes as they understand the situation.
Illumination
Especially in the first part of the film, which took place in the past, Zsigmond provided a soft, widely diffused and exaggerated light to give the scenes a dreamlike atmosphere of vague irrationality. The resulting blurring corresponds to the situation of Courtland, who only lives in the dream world of his memory. When he first met Sandra, this light returned in the form of a myriad of candles in the Church of San Miniato.
music
For the film music, the producer's first choice was John Williams . De Palma, however, convinced Litto of the qualities of Bernard Herrmann by showing him a raw scene of the lovers in Florence and adding film music from Vertigo , for which Hermann had also written the soundtrack. Hermann was already terminally ill at that time, but he was so fascinated by the film that he wrote a much-praised, romantic, sometimes pathetic soundtrack that captured and expressed the emotional subtext of the film. Herrmann said to Schwarzer Engel : “It's a very strange, very beautiful film. (...) It's all about time. That reminds of Marcel Proust and Henry James . "
Awards
Bernard Herrmann was posthumously nominated for an Oscar for best film music at the 1977 Academy Awards. The film also received a nomination for best horror film at the 1977 Golden Scrolls awards ceremony .
Soundtrack
- Bernard Herrmann : Obsession. Suite From the Motion Picture Score . On: Bernard Herrmann: Welles Raises Kane · The Devil & Daniel Webster · Obsession . Unicorn Kanchana, s. l. 1994, sound carrier no. UKCD 2065 - stereophonic recording (phase-4-stereo) by the National Philharmonic under the direction of the composer of the 1975
literature
- Leonardo Gandini: Brian De Palma . Gremese publishing house, Rome 2002, ISBN 3-89472-377-7
- Laurence F. Knapp (Ed.): Brian De Palma - Interviews . University Press of Mississippi, 2003, ISBN 1-57806-515-1
- Laurent Bouzereau: The DePalma Cut . Dembner Books, New York 1988, ISBN 0-942637-04-6
Web links
- Black Angel in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Black Angel at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Certificate of release for the Black Angel . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , April 2011 (PDF; test number: 48 853 V).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Gandini, pp. 27–32
- ↑ a b c d e f Schwarzer Engel -Making Of on www.briandepalma.net ( Memento from August 29, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Review by Roger Ebert
- ↑ Critique of Variety
- ↑ Time Out's review
- ↑ a b Black Angel on www.briandepalma.net ( Memento from August 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b c d e Documentation Obesession re-visited on the DVD
- ↑ Bouzereau p. 137
- ↑ Bouzereau p. 147