If the concept of division is the foundation of De Palma's cinema, then the first division perceived by the eye (or by the camera) is certainly the division of space. The screen itself is nothing but a basic separation, the first delimitation of a sub-space, of a micro-universe, of what is inside (and is observed) versus what is outside (and, perhaps, is observing). And the screen is also a geometry, a primary form of architecture.

It's not by chance that one of the most typical structures in De Palma's style is exactly a division of the screen within itself, generating sub-screens, sub-universes, sub-environments: the split-screen indeed, which is not only a multiplication of the point of view, but also, and always, a multiplication and cloning of space and form.

One cannot underestimate the importance of geometry in creating and organizing the visual hierarchy and the levels of consciousness pursuing one another on the screen. In De Palma movies, geometry is the true structuring principle of vision, it becomes not only form, but also meaning, a conception of the world and of human life, with a perfectly natural correspondence such as can only be seen only in the work of great figurative artists, either painters, sculptors or architects. So, space becomes automatically a symbol of human condition, of its boundaries and at the same time of its deepest aspirations.

We can understand, therefore, why De Palma's cinema is so consistently agoraphobic, or better still claustrophilic. The demarcation of a definite environment seems to be, for the director, a fundamental premise in order to build and mirror the filmic structure, in an astounding holistic vision of the movie, involving and interwining all its various aspects, visual conception and score, words and editing, citations and narrative rhythm, in a single and indivisible formal scheme, a multi-dimensional mise-en-abime where each detail reflects and summarizes the whole, at the same time deforming it into a new perspective.

That's why the house becomes, after the screen, the main division-boundary in space, just as the body is the first division-boundary in the mind. This body-house lives the same painful identity and fragmentation as the body of flesh, eventually growing into its mirrored and amplified image. And, consequently, the house splits up and expands, from a single place of solitude (Carrie) or of voyeuristic contemplation (Body Double) it turns to a structure of re-creation of an alternative, usually deformed, reality (the theatre-Paradise in Phantom and the local-Paradise in Carlito's way), up to the immoderate and arrogant dimensions of the Millennium in Snake Eyes. And while linear, curving or spiral camera movements once more bring about the ancient pictorial dialectic between finite and infinite, Mission to Mars too builds up its catalogue of strictly closed environments standing against the desolate dispersion of space.

Architectural spaces are therefore trying, with their seeming rigidity-safety, to create again the illusion of persistence and steadiness of the body, which the mind of the hero-witness intimately knows is not its own. But the limiting consolation of their walls is indeed ephemereal. De Palma's architectures are, for their own nature, dynamic and frail, they are inexorably bound to the constant actions of derangement that vision and vision's divisions are operating in them. Then, the house-theatre-world divides and opens out within itself, and like the body it starts bleeding, losing certainty of what is inside and what is outside, it becomes a place of uncertain and often fatal transition, a railway station or shopping centre where oblique connections open and run, escalators or staircases, terraces and tunnels, where characters pass or hide, knowing perhaps that they have found there, in the end, the most changing and yet ultimate environment. Reality doubles creating superimposing planes, levels observing and decoding one another, while the slow movement of an elevator or of a camera guides the final protagonist, the spectator's eye, through the last, narrow tunnel of consciousness and of the point of view, waiting for the doors to open, revealing a further, deceiving aspect of truth, or of death.

But in the end, in the desperate movement becoming absolute changelessness, in the obsession of an inner and outer fracture constructing an astounding unity in aesthetic and meaning, there remains the unforgettable and impressive beauty of the images: the church of San Miniato al Monte and its disconsolate echo on the grave of the woman beloved in Obsession, the ring set in concrete in the ending of Snake Eyes, the sunny bathing-tents underscoring the game of doubles between the characters in Body Double, the perfectly white and immaterial domes in Mission Impossible and Mission to Mars: architectures and forms of consciousness in whose disturbing mirror the unfathomable beauty of art and cinema is reflected.