De Palma's early obsession was pure cinema, and so is his Obsession. An exaggerated homage to Hitchcock's VistaVision jewel Vertigo, with its own copycat score by Bernard Herrmann, it is a film about remakes and make-overs, but its luscious visual surface is a separate masterpiece of widescreen color cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond. Paul Schrader's screenplay follows a wealthy southerner (Cliff Robertson) into near insanity after his wife (Genevieve Bujold) and daughter are kidnapped. In Florence, in the same church where he first met his wife, he encounters her veritable double (also played by Bujold). Tracking her amid the sidestreets and statuary, the camera cleverly hidden in his gaze, he begins the restoration of his first wife. Obsession is a meditation on the human capacity for investing place with memory, with a magnificent, 360-degree pan that takes fifteen years to complete, and a stunning concentration on architectural surfaces. And while in his later films (Blow-Out, etc.) De Palma's camera stalks to kill, in Obsession his exploration of point-of-view seems designed not to offend, but to astound.