Raising Cain Re-Cut

It must be the wet dream of any fan editor: to have the director of the film you re-cut approve your alternate version. It happened to Peet Gelderblom. The Dutch director, a self-confessed De Palma aficionado, went to work on Raising Cain. That 1992 thriller is underappreciated, even by its own director. De Palma drastically changed the structure of the film after a couple of test screenings didn’t go down well. The resulting theatrical cut however was a compromise the director never came to terms with.

 

Using only footage from that theatrical release, and based on an early script draft and statements made by De Palma in interviews, Gelderblom tried to recreate the intended version of the film. His effort was apparently so convincing that De Palma himself embraced this fan edit and asked for it to be included on the BluRay release of Raising Cain. In the above video essay, Gelderblom describes his modus operandi and the thematic and tonal implications that his restructuring led to. By using the fan edit as a way of media archeology and artistic reconstruction, this video is a commendable blend of fandom and academia.