Quentin Tarantino's admiration for Brian De Palma has concrete examples. Blow Out and Carrie offer two ways of turning a genre story into an emotional experience, through images that make the viewer know, wait, or understand too late.
Blow Out: hearing evidence and losing a person
In his essay on Blow Out published by Criterion in 2011, Michael Sragow quotes Tarantino's praise of John Travolta's final close-up. He considered it one of the most heartbreaking moments in cinema. It is an accurate assessment of an image and its effect, enough to document enthusiasm without adding an assumed ranking of all living directors.
Blow Out, released in 1981, follows a sound technician who records an accident and begins to suspect that the tape contains evidence of a crime. The situation presents a properly cinematic problem: distinguishing what happened from what seems to have happened. The character listens, compares, and reconstructs. His professional tools are also the means by which the film manages our attention.
The viewer shares part of that investigation. An isolated sound changes meaning when it is linked to an image; a sequence that seemed complete reveals a gap. De Palma turns the manipulation of audiovisual materials into dramatic action. The protagonist does not need to run through the whole runtime for there to be danger: correctly arranging a few fragments may bring him closer to a truth that others want to keep hidden.
The ending adds a wound to that mechanism. A scream belonging to a tragedy ends up folded into a cheap fiction. The work goes on, but for anyone who knows its source, the sound can no longer be a neutral effect. The close-up Tarantino highlighted lets us read the distance between the professional use of a recording and the painful memory it holds for one person.
Carrie and the distribution of the gaze
Carrie, from 1976, appears in Tarantino's selection for Sight and Sound in 2012. Its inclusion places the film among his stated favorites in that poll. There is no need to attribute a detailed technical explanation to him that the list does not provide: the staging can be analyzed directly and distinguished from the documented choice.
The story gives time to Carrie's vulnerability before unleashing the terror spectacle. The school, the house, and the dance organize different forms of surveillance and pressure. Being watched does not mean feeling recognized: many looks judge her, mock her, or expect her to occupy the place others have decided for her. The audience knows that fragility and carries that knowledge into the celebration.
The dance sequence builds suspense by distributing information unevenly. The viewer can perceive a danger that the protagonist does not know about. A kind gesture then takes on two simultaneous values: it can be a relief for Carrie and a cause for unease for anyone waiting for humiliation. That difference sustains the tension long before any display of power.
The dress, the lighting, and the attention Carrie receives allow us to imagine true acceptance for a few moments. The threat weighs precisely because the film grants that possibility value. If the dance were from the outset a caricature with no promise at all, its rupture would produce a different emotional effect.
When violence breaks the party, the visual decisions change the way we perceive the space. Fragmentation and the multiplication of points of attention prevent us from reducing what happens to a fight between two adversaries. The entire room is transformed. The formal excess responds to an emotional break that the film has prepared through small, recognizable situations.
Visual spectacle as emotional commitment
The two films show why it is insufficient to describe De Palma as a director of flashy camera moves. In Blow Out, reconstructing images and sounds binds one person to another. In Carrie, knowing more than the protagonist makes the waiting painful. The formal devices affect our relationship with the characters; they do not remain separate from them as decoration.
They also use the possibility of intervention in different ways. The technician believes that careful listening can correct the public version of an event. Carrie tries to find a place within a group that has the power to accept or destroy her. Both stories make it possible to study the distance between an illusion of control and real vulnerability, without claiming that Tarantino formulated that comparison exactly.
The praise for Travolta's shot is especially revealing because of its scale. A film full of technical operations ends up concentrating its weight in a face. Emotion does not require abandoning artifice: it arises from everything the editing and sound have allowed us to know. An apparently simple image arrives loaded with everything that came before it.
Tarantino's relationship with De Palma can thus be approached through two limited pieces of evidence and two viewing experiences. One poll confirms the choice of Carrie; a Criterion essay preserves his comment on Blow Out. From there, the best way to approach that admiration is to look at how each film directs our attention and what feeling it leaves behind once the suspense mechanism has run its course.
Check out the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.