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 leave the viewer knowing, waiting, or understanding too late.
Blow Out: hearing evidence and losing someone
In his essay on Blow Out published by Criterion in 2011, Michael Sragow recounts Tarantino’s praise for 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 a supposed ranking of all living directors.
Blow Out, released in 1981, follows a sound technician who records an accident and begins to suspect that the recording 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 connected to an image; a sequence that seemed complete reveals a gap. De Palma turns the manipulation of audiovisual material into dramatic action. The protagonist does not need to keep running for the whole running time for there to be danger: correctly ordering a few fragments can 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 bit of fiction. The work goes on, but for anyone who knows its origin the sound can no longer be a neutral effect. The close-up that Tarantino highlighted allows us to read that distance between the professional use of a recording and the painful memory it contains for a 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 preferences in that poll. There is no need to attribute to it a detailed technical explanation that the list does not provide: the mise en scène can be analysed directly and distinguished from the documented choice.
The story allows time for Carrie’s vulnerability before unleashing the horror spectacle. The school, the house and the prom organise different forms of surveillance and pressure. Being watched does not mean feeling recognised: many gazes 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 prom sequence builds suspense by distributing information unevenly. The viewer can perceive a danger unknown to the protagonist. A kind gesture then acquires two values at once: it can be a relief for Carrie and a cause for unease for anyone expecting 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, for a few moments, genuine acceptance. The threat weighs precisely because the film gives value to that possibility. If the prom were from the outset a caricature with no promise at all, its collapse would produce a different emotional effect.
When violence breaks up the party, the visual decisions alter the way the space is perceived. Fragmentation and the multiplication of points of attention prevent what happens from being reduced to a fight between two adversaries. The whole room is transformed. The formal excess answers an emotional rupture that the film has prepared through small, recognisable situations.
Visual spectacle as emotional commitment
The two films show why it is insufficient to describe De Palma as a director of flashy camera movements. 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 close 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 allow us 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 close-up 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 emerges from everything the editing and sound have allowed us to know. An apparently simple image arrives loaded with what has gone before.
Tarantino’s relationship with De Palma can therefore be approached through two bounded examples and two viewing experiences. A poll records the choice of Carrie; a Criterion essay preserves his comment on Blow Out. From there, the best way to understand that admiration is to look at how each film directs our attention and what feeling it leaves behind when the suspense mechanism has already run its course.
See the selection of directors and actors admired by Tarantino.