One of Brian De Palma’s greatest films and one of the great American films of the 1980s, Blow Out is such a hallucinatory, emotionally and visually commanding experience that the term “thriller” seems insufficient. De Palma takes a variety of elements - the Kennedy assassination; Chappaquiddick; Antonioni’s Blow Up; the slasher genre that was then in full flower; elements of Detective Bob Leuci’s experience working undercover for the Knapp Commission; the harshness and sadness of American life; and, as ever, Hitchcock’s Vertigo - and swirls and mixes them into a film that builds to a truly shattering conclusion. With John Travolta, in what is undoubtedly his greatest performance, as the sound man for low-budget movies who accidentally records a murder; Nancy Allen, absolutely heartbreaking; John Lithgow as the hired killer; and De Palma stalwart Dennis Franz as the world’s biggest sleaze.This was the second of three collaborations between De Palma and recently departed master DP Vilmos Zsigmond, in whose memory these 35th anniversary screenings are presented.