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18 CINEMONTAGE / SEP-OCT 14 — "basically, anything I could get my hands on," he says. When De Palma made his next film, Hi, Mom! (1970), Hirsch was made the editor of both the feature and its trailer. "He gave me opportunities when no one else did and endowed me with a lot of confidence," Hirsch reveals. "I cut five pictures for him before working for anyone else, and his support was extremely validating." The filmmaker was also not shy about sharing the editor — Hirsch says that De Palma not only recommended him to George Lucas for Star Wars, but also negotiated his deal. The two grew together. After Greetings and Hi, Mom! — comedies made on low budgets — De Palma developed and refined his virtuosic talent for telling stories in the absence of the spoken word, a feature much praised by critics. "He calls this 'pure cinema,' and pursues it in all his films," Hirsch explains. Think of the bedlam brought about by Carrie White in Carrie or the agents sneaking into the computer room in the Hirsch-edited Mission: Impossible (1996) — sequences which depend on what Hirsch calls "audio-visual" qualities for their terror or tension. In a way, Blow Out reflects De Palma's belief in these principles. In the saga of Philadelphia sound engineer Jack Terry (Travolta), the film makes a compelling case that images and sounds contain deeper truths than words. When a politician is killed in a mysterious auto accident, his advisers can manipulate words, and they do. Fortunately — and tragically — Jack can bypass the lies: Just before the accident, he was recording assorted sounds for one of the tacky horror movies on which he works. The accident (which he has also recorded) doesn't sound right to him — does the sound of a bullet precede the blowing out of the tire? With the politician in the car is a prostitute, Sally (Nancy Allen), a fact that deepens Jack's hunch that something is rotten in Philadelphia. "Blow Out reflected the feeling of distrust that began to pervade American life in the aftermath of the Kennedy and King assassinations," Hirsch says. "The Zapruder film was considered too graphic for viewing by the public, but Life magazine published many, but not all, of the frames as stills." In a brilliant scene, Jack pairs his audio with magazine stills, which document the accident. He takes scissors to the stills as he recognizes that he can recreate the accident by re-photographing the stills and yoking the resulting film to his audio. "John had to learn how to handle editing equipment in a believable way, and Brian sent him to me for lessons," Hirsch explains. "I showed him how an editor would scrub the sound to find the exact perf where a sound would start, and how to mark the film and sound to put them into sync with each other." Travolta was a quick study, but after De Palma shot the sequence, Hirsch had the slightly surreal experience of editing it. He likens the experience to being inside a print by M.C. Escher. "I would be editing a piece of film showing Jack's hand making a mark on the film with a grease pencil, and I would be looking at my own hand marking it with a real grease pencil," Hirsch recalls. It was equally bewildering to deal with the numerous shots of Jack running the film he has created of the accident backwards and forwards — which he does time and again, as he tries to unfurl what, exactly, occurred. "I would be running this back and forth, too, also searching for the right frame," Hirsch continues. "It became so confusing at times that I had to stop and look at my hand on the joystick to see which way I was running the film." Blow Out earned its reputation on many bases: the assurance of De Palma's direction, the novelty of its plot and the appeal of Travolta's and Allen's performances. But among them is the now-outdated means by which Jack does his investigative work. Comparing Blow Out with Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up in a 1981 interview with Films & Filming, De Palma said, "Both pictures deal with a kind of technical way of finding out about a crime." As used by Travolta (under the direction of Hirsch), the reel-to-reel tape recorders and Moviolas in Blow Out have the same nostalgic quality as the tap-tap- tapping of the typewriters in All the President's Men (1976). "We had inadvertently taken a snapshot of a work process that is now obsolete," Hirsch says. "All those tools and methods that were my life's work for 25 years are no more." While De Palma was conversant with editing, and took editing credits on several early films, he left it to Hirsch to implement his vision — or to crawl his way out of the Escher print, as it were. "Sometimes, on viewing my cut, he would simply sign off on it," Hirsch relates. "He does not get lost MY MOST MEMORABLE FILM CONTINUED FROM PAGE 16 Paul Hirsch, right, with John Travolta during the filming of Blow Out.