Hi, Mom!

Director: Brian De Palma

1970 / 87min / 35mm

Robert De Niro plays a kind of proto-Travis Bickle in this mordant screwball satire that synthesizes the sociopolitical commentary of De Palma’s Greetings and the experimental theater aspects of his Dionysus in ’69, all while evincing fascination with voyeurism that will emerge as a central focus in the director’s filmography. De Niro’s unhinged, peep-show-obsessed Vietnam vet is looking for love—and fixing a hidden camera on it—in end-of-the-’60s Greenwich Village before becoming involved in a radical African American theater group meant to jolt white bourgeois audiences from their complacency—the central performance (“Be Black Baby!”) De Palma’s first true sustained set piece, and a self-contained masterwork—and, finally, trying his hand at domestic terrorism. A Molotov cocktail of totally liberated renegade filmmaking.

“Hi, Mom! might be the movie with the sense of humor and structural freedom that is closest to how I thought of the jokes and story arcs in Reel Politik. I love that De Palma, who became a master of tightly controlled thrillers and immaculate set pieces, once made this disjointed, funny, casually radical movie that has the sensibility of an episodic comic strip. The first time I watched this, when it was over I said, out loud to an empty apartment: ‘That was stupid.’ I no longer feel that way.” —Nathan Gelgud

Distributor: Park Circus

Introduction by Reel Politik author Nathan Gelgud on Friday, November 7th