Sisters · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is dying on the floor of a Manhattan apartment. He drags himself to the window and writes HELP on the glass in his own blood. Across the courtyard, a woman sees him. And De Palma puts both of them on the screen at the same time, one to a panel, with a hard vertical seam down the middle, then holds that arrangement for the better part of ten minutes while nothing crosses it.

That seam is the film.

Sisters is built on doubles all the way down. Two apartments facing each other over a courtyard. Two women, one who looks and one who is looked at. Two personalities in one body. A hide-a-bed sofa that is furniture and coffin. And the frame itself, cut in half. De Palma got the premise from a Life photo essay on the Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova. What he built from it is a machine for testing whether seeing something is the same as being able to say it.

Deleuze has a term for a shot that doesn't merely give us a character's view but shows us the character in the act of viewing: the dicisign. The image folds looking into itself, so you feel the camera's position as a fact rather than a window. Sisters opens with the gag version. A fake television program called Peeping Toms runs a hidden-camera prank for studio laughter, staged around a woman undressing, and seats the audience at the viewfinder before there is any plot to justify it. Later the same structure returns without the laugh track. Grace Collier at her window, watching a lit box across the courtyard that Gregory Sandor photographs flat and frontal from a fixed vantage, like a proscenium. Which is why what she sees registers as spectacle first and evidence second.

Now the invention. In Deleuze's account the frame is never a closed box: it always implies an adjacent space you can't currently see, the out-of-field, and classical suspense runs on exactly that. The thing you don't see yet is the engine. De Palma takes the engine out. He puts the adjacent space on the screen, right beside the thing it ought to be affecting, and then discovers that it changes nothing. Paul Hirsch's cutting steers your attention across the seam by movement, by volume, by which panel goes still. The dread comes from the gap. We know; the police on the other side of the line do not; and the knowledge simply fails to travel. Visibility turns out not to be admissibility. It is Hitchcock's bomb-under-the-table rendered as graphic design, saying something bleaker than Hitchcock ever said.

Deleuze reads Hitchcock as the filmmaker of the relation-image: the audience installed as a knowing third party, holding a relation the characters cannot. Sisters inherits that structure and then deletes the third term. Watch the sofa. A hide-a-bed means one thing by habit, and when the film loads a body into it the object goes anomalous and has to be read rather than recognized. Deleuze calls that a demark, an object that breaks its own customary chain. The sofa then travels by rail to Quebec and sits on a station platform while a private detective watches it from the top of a telephone pole. He has the truth and there is no one left to receive it. Notice too that the murdered man, Philip Woode, is Black, and the film constructs its police indifference around that without a word of editorial. Credibility is not handed out evenly, and the film knows it.

Grace does everything a thriller protagonist is supposed to do. She perceives, she reports, she hires Joseph Larch, she gathers proof. Jennifer Salt plays her as right about everything and insufferable about all of it, which is precisely why nobody listens. And none of her actions resolve anything. Deleuze's great break in film history arrives when this circuit snaps, when a character can only look, and the looking leads nowhere, and the film becomes about enduring instead of doing. He calls such a figure a seer. Grace is a seer trapped inside a genre that promised her agency, and her situation is worse than disbelief, because Emil holds hypnosis, psychiatric authority and institutional custody, which means the account can be removed from the witness herself. She ends the film reciting that there was no body. That isn't suspense. It's Kafka.

The passage that does it drops color for black-and-white and normal optics for fisheye: faces bulging toward the lens, clinic corridors bending. Drugged and hypnotized, Grace is inserted into Danielle's memory in the role of the twin who was cut away. This is not a dated flashback with an owner. Deleuze describes the past as a set of coexisting regions, sheets of past, which one moves through rather than retrieves, and here a woman is lowered into a region that was never hers. The grammar is borrowed openly from The Manchurian Candidate, whose circling camera revolves through a brainwashing tableau in which one space holds two irreconcilable versions of events; the bowing-wall subjectivity of the apartment comes from Repulsion. What the sequence produces is a crystal-image, actual and virtual swapping places so fast you can't say which is reflecting which. Margot Kidder performs the switch through voice and posture alone, no makeup trick, and Danielle's flat is dressed as a stage set of femininity, birthday cake and sleeping pills and an ex-husband with a key, because the prologue already trained us to read a woman's private space as a broadcast.

Cinema's oldest promise is Bazin's: the camera was there, therefore this happened. Sisters grants the maximum evidentiary condition, a murder seen whole from two vantages at once with no cutaway to hide behind, and then erases it from the record. Deleuze's powers of the false names the move exactly. Not a lie, but a condition in which true and false stop being decidable because the institutions that adjudicate them have been captured. In 1973, with Watergate unspooling, that argument was everywhere. De Palma's contribution was to put it in a doctor, an apartment and a piece of furniture rather than a government.

He is working with used parts, loudly. Rear Window supplies the courtyard and the discredited watcher. Psycho supplies the mid-film protagonist substitution, the murder fragmented into dozens of shots that never show the blade entering, the methodical cleanup, and the citation you can actually hear: Bernard Herrmann, pulled out of exile, writing shrieking strings against a cold Moog sustain. Vertigo supplies the circling camera and the logic of one identity substituted for another. Peeping Tom supplies the camera-as-weapon, of which the game-show prologue is the joke version. Detractors called this plagiarism with a smirk. But a film that hires Hitchcock's own composer is footnoting its sources out loud, and Deleuze would recognize a cinema conscious of its clichés, using them as raw material instead of faking an originality it doesn't want.

The dividends came fast. Obsession, Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double, and Raising Cain returning to this exact material two decades later. Herrmann's late resurgence, which gave us Taxi Driver. Hirsch's first credit in one of the era's major editing careers. And the extended split screen, received in 1973 as a flourish, rehabilitated as a serious dramatic instrument that every subsequent use still measures itself against.

Watch it again for the seam. Then sit with the question the film has never stopped generating, the one at the center of the long feminist argument about De Palma: whether its plain sympathy for a woman whose testimony is stolen and a woman whose body was surgically managed survives its own appetite for filming them in peril. The film doesn't settle it. Philip writes HELP on the glass so someone outside can read it, and outside is exactly where nobody has standing.