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Carrie.
An excerpt from my essay “The Mosaic-Screen: Exploration and Definition” that is about to be published in Refractory, a refereed journal of the University of Melbourne:
In a famous scene from Carrie (1976), the young girl (Sissy Spacek) suffers the ultimate humiliation of being soaked in pig’s blood before his colleagues and teachers at the high school prom. De Palma brings the split-screen into play to express Carrie’s telekinetic power — fuelled by her rage — and its sheer dominance. Spatial relations are maintained as the screen is split in two: Carrie is on the right, directing three gazes toward the left that result in the shutting of all exit doors, as shown on the left. Her image then moves to the left to preserve the spatial coordinates of the scene on screen: she is about to look to the right to switch off the white lights and immerse the room in red light. The split-screen, a form salient in its artificiality, becomes thus more concrete, co-ordinating the motion within the scene to match the movement of Carrie’s image. The consistency of spatial relationships could have been maintained by an immediate swap of images. Instead, the atypical movement of the image to the left expresses her dominating power to move and rearrange anything at a distance.
