Meaningful stairs

Last time I was in Paris I walked around the corner and slap bang into a set of steps I had seen before. It took me a moment to spot where: I was standing in the square which became the final scene in Brian DePalma's Femme Fatale, one of those movies I shouldn't love but do. I snapped the photos on my Olympus XA 35mm and stitched the panorama together in Photoshop. Here is DePalma talking about noir and dreams:

I had this idea to do a noir movie, but I felt that noir only works in a surrealistic way. Which meant that I had to create a dream, and put the noir story in the dream. If you look at these old black and white movies, with their sort of fatalistic storylines and very stylized way of shooting, I thought the dream device would be the best way to re-imagine it in a contemporary setting. So I put the noir melodrama in the brackets of her dream sequence and I used a lot of things that sort of happen when you have a dream. Certain things you experience reappear in your dream in kind of strange juxtapositions, and that's why the noir story appears the way it does. It doesn't seem that many of the people who have written about it have quite seen that. Somehow they don't see where the brackets of the dream are, so they write about the movie like it's a straightforward, realistic noir melodrama, but in reality it's a kind of surrealistic rethinking of the noir form. There are things that don't make sense until you think about them later, much like in a dream. You have all of these images that you have to ponder later: "why was that there" but the driving sense of it is essentially pretty simple, you know, she steals the diamonds, these guys are after her, and they're going to kill her. All the things that happen, are more or less consistent with that very simplistic, fatalistic storyline.