Greetings

(Brian De Palma, US 1968, 88 min., 35mm)

Five Faces of New York in the 1970s. Greetings was Brian De Palma’s first great cinematic statement. It appeared on the eve of this country’s most turbulent decade since the American Civil War, and in advance of the efforts of an ostensibly “new” Hollywood to render the boundless energies of the counterculture into commodity form. Throughout this thrillingly erratic film, De Palma seems to be searching for an attitude, for a style, that could be appropriate to the strangeness and violence of his moment. He openly samples from the French New Wave and American underground filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, but also makes ample use of the particular resources available to him, from the seedy streets and characters of late-sixties Manhattan—with its infinite list of internal contradictions—to the charisma and range of a young, unknown actor named Robert De Niro. Ultimately, however, it is toward comedy that Greetings could be said to aspire. Even beyond its heady politics, its film-historical fluency, and its sharp-eyed critique of American society, Greetings invites its audience to laugh.