Inglourious Basterds: Satirizing the spectator and revealing the 'Nazi' within (original) (raw)
Related papers
This provocative and unique anthology analyzes Quentin Tarantino's controversial Inglourious Basterds in the contexts of cinema, cultural, gender, and historical studies. The film and its ideology is dissected by a range of scholars and writers who take on the director's manipulation of metacinema, Nazisploitation, ethnic stereotyping, gender roles, allohistoricism, geopolitics, philosophy, language, and memory. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/quentin-tarantinos-inglourious-basterds-9781441138217/#sthash.FQQ9artA.dpuf
2012
"Quentin Tarantino’s latest violent masterpiece Inglourious Basterds has been well yet critically received. Many reviewers have pointed out that the film is morally ambivalent the least because of the aesthetics of violence and the revised version of Europe’s darkest years of the twentieth century. Others, however, perceive it as a much needed and refreshing film - despite or precisely because Tarantino makes obvious the webs of violence. This article suggests that violence is a deliberate and important means for Inglourious Basterds to work. To fully appreciate the multilayered message of the film, an alternative reading of its aesthetics of violence is necessary: one that focuses on Tarantino’s defiant and bold (yet intentional) use of various forms of violence to brilliantly orchestrate (or manipulate) the viewers’ emotions and bodily senses. He stages violence as spectacle, but the way he uses violence is always also more than a spectacle: it serves as irritation—or better interruption—of audience perception, audience experience, and audience expectations. Instead of offering a cathartic moment or happy ending, Tarantino, in fact, refuses to offer catharsis and thus opens up a space for reflection and trans- formation."
Tarantino's Approach to the Notorious Nazi Past
izlazi u samo elektroničkom izdanju: DA
article analyzes Quentin Tarantion's recent grotesque postmodernist reconstruction of military operations at the end of WWII. His bad Jewish boys take revenge on the Nazis in the manner of the Apache. The analysis deals with the film director, the two main actors (Brad Pitt and Christoph Waltz), the film message, five interesting film issues, the interaction with theater and drama conventions in the film and finally with meta-filmic dimensions of this Oscar winning movie.
Ambivalent Screens: Quentin Tarantino and the Power of Vision
Film-Philosophy, 2015
With a central problematic concerning the role of fiction in relation to reality and a provocative falsification of the historical events of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) contributes importantly to analyses of the relation between perceptions of the image and conceptions of the real. Tarantino's film, as we will see, is highly invested in the role of vision both in the metacinematic sense of its blatant self-referentiality and as a thematic for the narrative and the mise-en-scene itself. From the very opening scene, in which the daughter of a French dairy farmer hears an approaching Nazi vehicle and lifts the corner of the bed sheet she is hanging up to dry and thereby invites both herself and the audience to see the Nazi intrusion into her reality, to the final scene in which two of the protagonists look straight into the camera, Tarantino's film may be understood as an invitation to look at seeing itself. Just as Tarantino, as always, paints a cinematic universe highly invested in its own role as such, where the importance of appearances, roles, acting, and clichés are put on center stage, his view of the Second World War too is staged as a battle of appearances. A film about war, it also portrays this war as a war of seeing. It is through images, the film seems to suggest, that agency can be located. Including the screen as a central factor in its cinematic and metacinematic configurations of events, the film presents the screen as a surface for projection, but also for concealment and division. As such, the screen also becomes the key to seeing, to surviving, and to remembering. Testing a more common reading of Tarantino's work in terms of Baudrillardian hyperreality against Virilian and Deleuzian conceptions of the relation between image and reality, this essay suggests that Inglourious Basterds helps testing the usefulness of these different theoretical perspectives for analyzing how agency is configured in contemporary visual culture.
The Truth in the Script and the Untruth in the Movie: Tarantino's Rewriting of American History
2021
In his historical movies, Quentin Tarantino rereads and rewrites three critical moments of the American past. An interesting strategy he uses is that of introducing different imaginary artifacts into the narration: a film-within-the-film (The Pride of a Nation) in Inglorious Basterds (2009), KKK hoods in Django Unchained (2012), and the Viking crucifix in The Hateful Eight (2015). This article aims at investigating how such a transmedia adaptation of these fictitious elements, from the scripts into the movies, defines three ekphrastic sections that overturn the relationship between truth and falsehood. This process can be analyzed in light of Michele Cometa's theory about the connection between literature and visuality; in the critic's understanding, the ekphrasis of a real artifact represents a falsification of the work itself, due to the fact that during the adaptation it is in some way altered. Conversely, the ekphrasis of a fictional artifact can be interpreted as a vali...
From: Cinema Beyond Good and Evil? Nazi exploitation in the cinema of the 1970s and its heritage. In: Elizabeth Bridges, Dan Magilow and Kris Vander Lugt (eds.): Nazisploitation. The History, Aesthetics and Politics of the Nazi Image in Low-Brow Film and Culture, London/New York 2012, S. 21-37 To reflect on historical, social and political events could be considered one possible ‘duty’ of the audiovisual media, in particular narrative television and cinema. The great success, as well as the influence, of TV programs and films such as Holocaust (1979)1 and Schindler’s List (1993) on public opinion about historical events — especially in Germany — strongly suggests that the worldwide audience is more open to fictionalized history than to more challenging essayistic work such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). This realization invites the question: Has cinema reached the status of an historical archive for some audiences? If so, it would behoove film studies scholars to analyze the specific value of such representations, especially in the case of a phenomenon as significant as the Holocaust, which Lanzmann claims is not a suitable subject of fiction. The findings of such an analysis, however, may well demonstrate that cinema trivializes rather than represents history.