Inglourious Basterds

28/09/2024

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Playing on History

Here is the irony. From a certain perspective, nobody did more than Quentin Tarantino to kill off the sort of sincere, searching and in some ways realistic tradition that 70s American cinema had cultivated. As one of the key figures of that era, Paul Schrader reckoned: “When I first saw Tarantino's Pulp Fiction…I turned to my wife during the screening & said, ‘Everything I have done is now outdated.’ I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. It’s a very important film in film history.” (Sight and Sound) Schrader offers it respectfully, but also mournfully, as well he might, with numerous films post Pulp Fiction keen to acknowledge that cinema could be self-reflexive, manipulative and callous, seeing its characters as ciphers not only for the mechanics of plot (that was always often the case) but for the knowing viewer who would insist that character identification was a sentimental throwback to an era when people took plot and character seriously. Tarantino more than anyone in the mid-nineties proposed cinema was a game, and anyone foolish enough to see in it the sort of existential probing Schrader saw as vital to his work was a naive fool. 

      “I like movies that mix things up. My favorite sheer cinematic sequences in Pulp Fiction… play like, Oh my God, this is so fucking intense, all right; at the same time, it’s also funny.” Tarantino adds, “half the audience is tittering, the other half is diving under the seat. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs works that way, too. I get a kick out of doing that. There’s realism and there’s movie-movie-ness. I like them both.” (Film Comment). Some might wonder how much realism Tarantino seeks when having a cop strapped to the chair as a hoodlum taps his toes to a pop song before carving off the man’s ear. But what he undeniably wants is the discomfort of a scene that would usually be played straight, played diagonally. It is as if Tarantino has thought not what does it feel like being tortured, but how do movies usually show torture on film and how might he put a twist on it. He will have seen A Clockwork Orange, Marathon Man and Salo, and mused over how he could do it differently. Tarantino may say “the starting point is, you get these genre characters in these genre situations that you’ve seen before in other movies, but then all of a sudden out of nowhere they’re plunged into real-life rules” but it is often more the reverse. He manages to make real-life situations look like generic moments. 

       There will be more to say about this later, but if Tarantino can be attacked for turning cinema into an ironic form over an existential inquiry, he can also be defended as a director who at least knows more than most contemporary filmmakers where his images come from. He has learnt from masters and, while this makes his work often derivative, it makes it self-consciously so. An overhead shot, a slow zoom, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree camera movement, a piece of music, will be deliberate. No film perhaps better exemplifies this retreat from realism and the absorption of cinema history than Inglourious Basterds, a work Peter Bradshaw gave one star to as he reckoned “it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp.” (Guardian) Jonathan Rosenbaum found it “a film that didn’t even entertain me past its opening sequence, and that profoundly bored me during the endlessly protracted build-up to a cellar shoot-out…” (JR) These are remarks we are inclined to half-agree with, and yet the other half wishes to claim that Tarantino is an important halfway house between the retreat from film as a medium that captures reality, and the further retreat that proposes cinema images are no more valid than any others. Martin Scorsese notes that “as recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against ‘form.’ Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. ‘Content’ became a business term for all moving images.” (Harper’s)

    The director may have little interest in reality, and even wants to counter it historically with filmic self-assertion in most of his recent work (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). He does, however, respect the history of the moving image, and film’s paramount place. How this manifests itself can be seen as infuriatingly self-regarding or generously acknowledging forebears, but here are a handful of those nods, some more obvious than others. The opening sequence, when the Nazi Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz) turns up at the farmhouse that we and Hans discover are harbouring numerous Jews under the floorboards, owes more than a little to the opening of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.  So much so that Tim Voorburg in a brief essay brings out three similarities. People work around the homestead and somebody appears on the horizon; the young and the women leave so that the men can talk, and the villain find it easy to consume food or drink while the other man sits nervously. 

       Tarantino doesn’t just copy the scene: he tops it. When Landa and his cohorts are seen in the distance, we see them when one of the farmer’s daughters pulls the sheet aside. The conversation between the two men starts in French and moves into English: Landa can force the farmer to reveal those who are under the floorboards without those under the floor knowing what they are talking about, and switches back to French so that Landa can claim he is just leaving, after finding nothing, before his men come in and fire numerous shots into the floor and killing all but one of the underground inhabitants. But as well as this, Tarantino takes Hitchcock’s comment about putting a bomb under the table, where an apparently mundane conversation can become suspenseful when we know what is at stake, as the camera travels down from the farmer’s chair to the people holding their breath under the floorboards. At the end of the scene with everybody else presumably dead, we see one woman escape from under the house and run through the fields. The film shows us her in the distance in a shot some critics have proposed comes from a similar one in another Leone film, Once Upon a Time in the West, but is generally accepted to be a homage to The Searchers as we see from the interior to the exterior the woman escaping through a door frame. Tarantino manages to homage ingeniously; not merely copying masters but adding a little surplus aesthetic value to the original good.     

      We notice it again later in the film when the girl we saw escaping determines to avenge those deaths. Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), now owns a cinema and reckons, when Hitler, Goebbels and others in the high command come to Paris to watch a film that she can use that flammable material, celluloid, to burn them all to death. It is a special screening of a film about a youthful German hero Zoller who also stars in it and is infatuated by Shosanna. The sequence starts with her standing against a circular window in a shot that seems to blend elements of Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) with Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty, but also his slicker more erotically inclined work like The Voyeur). The music is David Bowie’s Cat People (Putting out the Fire), a song that Schrader asked Bowie to write for the film of that name. Later in the scene, she leaves her room in an overhead shot that passes along the ceiling and the camera picks her up again in the hall in a shot very similar to a camera movement near the end of Taxi Driver; a film of course Paul Schrader wrote. 

    It would be a justifiable claim to say this is all very well but isn’t it superficial cinephilia, showing that Tarantino has seen a heck of a lot of films? Tarantino is often a technically brilliant director but he also works within the confines of cinema’s possibilities, as though life is no more than a vast reservoir for dogs like Tarantino to draw upon for generic manipulation.  However, we can also see it as a respect for a contained history — that cinema is an accumulation of images that needs protecting from the content surrounding it. The director takes this seriously enough to protect film in its very materiality, insisting on making all his films on celluloid and also by owning cinemas that only show films in 35mm or 16mm. If some will differentiate between film and TV, Tarantino goes further by distinguishing between digital and celluloid. “It's just television in public. That's how I feel about it. I came into this for film.” (Digital Spy) 

    If Tarantino undeniably respects film history, where does he stand on history, generally? He may claim that there is a political dimension to his work, and in no film more so than Inglourious Basterds: “the tragedy of genocide. I’m dealing with the Jewish genocide in Europe, but my Jews are going native and taking the roles of American Indians—another genocide. Then there’s a King Kong metaphor about the slave trade, that’s another genocide.” (Time Out) Stella Setka uses this quote amongst others to explore Inglourious Basterds as a film chiefly about re-representing the Holocaust, but isn’t it more an opportunity for Tarantino to give his ongoing interest in grievance and revenge a patina of historical significance? Rather than seeing Tarantino especially concerned with historical reality, and how it has been presented, does he not absorb useful elements of history into his generic scenarios to bolster the revenge scenario? Thus Inglourious Basterdsisn’t about the camps (they are nowhere to be seen) but about the Jews used as people with better reasons than most to want revenge. As the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Marvin Hier says: “the film has a certain release factor. If only we would have been privileged to see the Nazis defeated early on…I find it to be quite exciting…the plot I thought was quite ingenious.” (OpinioJuris)

     But Hier isn’t proposing Tarantino’s film is of much use historically; more that it might be cathartic — a point Setka makes in her essay where she reckons Jewish people are usually presented as weak and defenceless in Holocaust narratives and here as Nazi hunters (albeit led by a part-Native American, Aldo Rey (Brad Pitt)) get to take out the high command that led six million Jews to their death. But this is cartoon heroism and cartoon villainy, given dignity and depth less by the historical reality it invokes than the cinematic history it deploys. There is far greater love here for cinema history than there is for the depiction of events, and this goes much further than playing with the facts so that the film can kill off history. It needs to turn reality into movie tropes. 

     There is an aspect of this in almost any film, and you only have to see unvarnished reality on screen in an Andy Warhol work to see how shaped and manipulated almost everything else in film happens to be. But few more than Tarantino push this retreat from life into the self-consciousness of the generic, and perhaps central to the director’s appeal is his ability to create a facetious play on moments that would seem familiar in one context but that Tarantino offers in another. The early sequence with Hans Landa plays like the appearance at your door of a pedantic, petty bureaucrat you can’t quite get rid of quickly enough. He seems the sort of person who has time on his hands and is happy to waste yours. In most circumstances, you accept the intrusion and sometimes stupidly offer the hospitable: a drink that leads him to stay far longer than you would like. But of course, Tarantino offers this officiousness in Nazi uniform as the director plays with the mundanity of Landa’s general presence, with the menace that the uniform implies. The viewer is caught between irritation and despair, annoyed by his fussy presence and fearful for those it turns out the farmer is hiding. In Leone’s scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there is no such facetiousness, no contrast between the mundane and the menacing. It is all menace. 

    This facetiousness is there in a different form in other scenes too. When one of the Aldo Ray’s team takes out a Nazi he does it with all the panache of knocking a ball out of the park in a game of baseball. The Nazi sits unwilling to help the hunters by pointing out key locations on a map, and out of the tunnel exits Sergeant Donny ‘The Bear Jew’ Donowitz, a tunnel that might not be at the stadium of the New York Yankees but that Tarantino all but invokes as Donny comes out of it, wields the bat, knocks the German soldier’s head in and celebrates like he has scored a home run. We see it once more when Zoller tries to chat up Shosanna. He is the clumsy, gauche youth intimidated by this forthright young woman and yet she begins to notice whatever attention he wants to give her, he is getting far more from others as he is asked for his autograph. This is the reluctant youthful star, someone who doesn’t quite have the confidence to seduce a girl but has a reputation for confidence elsewhere. We discover, of course, that he is a war hero responsible for protecting a village from invading allied troops, taking out hundreds. He wants to impress a girl and does it with a modest list of his accomplishments, offering the number of people he took out over three days. He is a little like Oldsen in Local Hero who announces one by one the many languages he speaks. But here the discrepancy between the clumsiness and the facility is all the more pronounced by the hundreds who have died due to his skill set.  

     It is an aspect that has always been there in Tarantino’s work: the minor detail meeting the magnitude of event, whether it is the gang in Reservoir Dogs discussing tipping and minimum wage before the heist, or Vincent and Jules bickering about Big Macs before a hit in Pulp Fiction, the director makes light of the serious by creating two registers more or less simultaneously. As he says of a scene in Pulp Fiction: “It was never a conscious decision, playing on the idea of big men are actually little boys with real guns, but it kept coming out and I realized as I was writing Pulp, that actuallyfits. You can even make the analogy with the scene with Jules and Vincent [John Travolta] at Jimmy [Quentin Tarantino]’s house, they’re afraid of their mom coming home. You spilled shit on the carpet—clean up the mess you made from screwing around before your mom gets home.” (Film Comment) Such moments give to his films their anomalous originality, deriving a basic form from chiefly Hitchcock and Leone and making the work self-reflexive by the mix of the minor and the major — the detail and the plot demand. Yet he adds to this in Inglourious Basterds a newfound historical inflection and makes the movie references that have always been there both a far more integral part of the plot, and also more nuanced and broad in their application. It isn’t only that at one moment he uses music from Ennio Morricone’s score for The Battle of Algiers, or at others offers Leni Riefenstahl’s name on a marquee, a character named Emil Jennings, and references to Pabst. It is also there in the person behind one of the assassination attempts on Hitler’s life who is a film critic (Michael Fassbinder) and the person he is liaising with, a famous German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). It makes sense they would know each other, and that their spying would be covered by their roles in cinema.

         With its ironic tone, its self-reflexivity, its bad-ass Nazis and no less bad-ass Nazi hunters, all things considered the film should be deemed by Tarantino fans a masterpiece, and anybody who gives a Tarantino film five stars may be regarded surely as a fan. On Pulp Fiction’s rerelease, in 2014, Bradshaw gave it five stars, saying “Don DeLillo began the 90s by warning that the US is the only country in the world with funny violence. Maybe Pulp Fiction was the kind of thing he had in mind. Unmissable.” (Guardian) Yet as we have noted he gave Inglourious Basterds only one. Bradshaw seems to like funny violence but not in the later film. Both reviews contain the De Lillo quote, but in Inglourious Basterds Bradshaw says that “here the boringness is just boring, and the violence doesn't get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste — and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo.” (Guardian) But this sounds like a critic who wants to reveal he is always tapping into the zeitgeist. Pulp Fiction is a five-star movie that captured its moment; Inglouiorus Basterds shows Tarantino as a has-been. 

     Inglourious Basterds suggests however that Tarantino has not so much lost his cool but found a form to make manifest his love for cinema at the same time revealing better than all his prior work the limitations of this love. There has always been the problem that Tarantino has no great interest or understanding of life, and when Caryn James says the film’s “opening episode [is] rooted in classical realism (a rarity for Tarantino) [and moves] to an ending that is pure movie fantasy (much more typical)”, we can agree with the rarity of realism generally and find it no more evident at the beginning of this film than in its conclusion. Unless character and situation pass through the prism of the filmic, the director isn’t interested, which is why we have noted the way he can take a common scene from life and turn it into an uncommon one in film. One can attack Tarantino for this but that would be close to a category error, like asking Disney to make neo-realism. Yet Bradshaw sees Pulp Fiction as masterful as he finds Inglourious Basterds inept. However, it seems all that has changed is the emphasis: that in the more recent film he has become even more sadistically determined to extend the time between a character’s realisation they will die and its manifestation, and proposing that just as he often takes what he needs from life-like situations to make them generic, he then wishes to do the same with historical events as well. This is Tarantino outdoing Tarantino, and why wouldn’t anybody who starts out being a fan of the director want even more of it? If someone likes Pulp Fiction for its contrived approach to set-pieces, its determination to see everything through the lens of prefabricated images, no film more self-consciously works with both than Inglourious Basterds. 

        Nevertheless, those who like Tarantino for the self-consciousness of those images might prefer this to be absorbed into the film so that they respond to the cleverness of what he is doing without feeling obliged to absorb themselves in the very cinema that Tarantino is acknowledging. It is one thing to have the vaguest of notions about torture scenes in film when you sense Tarantino riffing on them in Reservoir Dogs, but imagine if to comprehend the scene it would be useful to know of Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, Bunuel’s absurdist one in Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and Godard’s protracted one in Le Petit soldat, let alone Marathon Man etc? It would be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino expects this kind of knowledge, but when we hear the music from The Battle of Algiers, White Lightning or Dark of the Sun or see shots from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Taxi Driver and The Conformist, they seem to carry a far greater cinephilic appreciation, one that perhaps started with combining music from one film (Across 110th Street) with images from another (The Graduate) in Jackie Brown, while also casting two stars from the seventies that were relatively little known by the late ‘90s: Pam Grier and Robert Forster. If Pulp Fiction is for many Tarantino’s masterpiece, it rests partly on the proliferation of pop-cultural references rather than cinematic ones, as the Quentin Tarantino Archives show, with the film’s numerous nods to anything from Kung Fu to Zorro, from The Partridge Family to the Flintstones, all contained by a knowing sense of a viewer’s awareness of its knowingness. When someone gets shot in the head nobody is expected to take it seriously because film and TV have been doing this for decades, and empathy would be a failure of sensibility rather than an accentuation of it. People just aren’t getting the joke. 

    Tarantino may insist that “…the heartbeat of the movie has to be a human heartbeat” (Film Comment) but it is often when somebody’s heartbeat stops that the audience starts laughing. It might be the young black man Marvin in the back of the cab in Pulp Fiction, the German getting his head bashed in here, or the Brittle brothers getting taken out by Django in Django Unchained. Anybody feeling human sympathy is confusing movie feeling with life feeling. Sure, Marvin’s death isn’t relished but it is still part of the movie feeling that Tarantino wants to exacerbate rather than undermine. When he says for example “there’s realism and there’s movie-movie-ness. I like them both” (Film Comment) he confuses two things that have been important to realism but are hardly a definition of it: extended time and the explicit. “Every minute for them [in Reservoir Dogs] in the warehouse is a minute for you. They’re subjected to not a movie clock but a real-time clock” (Film Comment) as also says, “if you ask me how I feel about violence in real life, well, I have a lot of feelings about it. It's one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it.” (Atlantic) 

     Films have often shown time passing all the better to bring out the details of the task to hand, perhaps best exemplified in Chantal Akerman’s domestic focus in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In his comment about violence in life and in cinema, Tarantino acknowledges that when he offers extreme images onscreen he isn’t chiefly concerned with the reality behind them but the generic purpose they can serve. However, this is the same with his approach to time: he doesn’t expand time naturalistically but generically — using the expectations of screen temporality which is usually contracted, and expands it for dramatic purposes. Whether it is the scene at the farmhouse, one where Hans treats Shoshanna to some strudel in a cafe, or the card game that turns violent in the basement bar, Tarantino wants to use time for sadistic suspense, as if aware that cinema’s capacity for sadism doesn’t only, or even especially, rely on the gratuitousness of its violence, but on its capacity to anticipate the worst. Tarantino may often be attacked for its use but central to it is the temporal expansion that indicates a director playing with the audience’s fears and expectations. Expanded time is a tease; it isn’t a phenomenological inquiry into the image.    

             But if this generic insistence is a problem viewers have with Tarantino, then it can’t be isolated to one or two films (making Pulp Fiction a masterful work and Inglourious Basterds a hopeless failure): it is central to the very notion of the Tarantinoesque. If we regard Inglourious Basterds in some ways a more interesting film than the earlier one, it rests on the added awareness Inglourious Basterds has of engaging not just with cultural content but with cinema history, and then provocatively linking cinema’s own with factual history that it superimposes itself upon. This is a conceit and potentially an enormously egomaniacal one at that: taking far further than U-571, Titanic, Gladiator and The Patriotfiddling with historical fact for dramatic exigency. Yet while these other films fiddle with history, Tarantino, to use the sort of demotic language he so likes, fucks with it. As with Christopher Roth’s Baader and Tarantino’s own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino takes a commonly accepted fact and replays it so Hitler dies in a cinema fire, just as Baader gets shot down by bullets and Tate survives while the Manson gang get slaughtered. Nobody can accuse the films of surreptitiousness. One doesn’t need to be a historian to fish out the falsities. Tarantino takes those old saws of fictive poetics (the suspension of disbelief and dramatic license) and wonders how far he can push them once viewers accept they are in his hands. In Gladiator or Titanic, the viewer isn’t in the director’s hands; any authorial vision is subjugated to a story they tell where the messing with facts is to create neater through lines and more delineated character types. James Cameron for example isn’t imposing his sensibility on the viewer, he is pragmatically taking for granted he can get away with a few inaccuracies all the better to move the story along. 

         One might find Tarantino’s take the height of arrogance and Cameron’s a compromise that needn’t be seen as a sign of hubris. But from another perspective, Tarantino’s may appear the more modest, despite the turbo-tongued self-regard he often shows in interviews as he isn’t shy of an opinion. Whether it is David Lynch disappearing "... so far up his ownass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different”, or that “Kubrick was a hypocrite,” or “I love Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin’s and Curtis Hanson’s Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock” (IndieWire), he tells it as he sees it. However, there is also an awareness that his work comes out of the craft of others, that when he shoots a sequence he isn’t obliviously working a scene of suspense, romance or action as though there hasn’t been a weight and welter of forebears. He wants to make conscious to the viewer his own self-consciousness and then in Inglourious Basterds, to a lesser degree in Django Unchained, and to a higher degree again in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, makes the viewer see that not only is a shot a clear choice, but a story choice is as well. Nothing makes that choice more apparent than when you take historical fact and turn it into the most wayward of fiction. He then contains both the formal awareness and the historical chutzpah within a dense relationship with cinematic allusion. 

      This might seem like a defence of Tarantino’s work; it is more a need to argue that rather than seeing Inglourious Basterds as one of his worst films, and as bad as Pulp Fiction is good, it is instead perhaps truer to say it isn’t so very different from his 1994 hit but much more coherent if we accept that consistency isn’t just about plot. In Pulp Fiction, the story utilises numerous pop elements without much discrimination and without making these elements integral to the idea of the film. Characters knock off references but they don’t live by them, while central to Inglourious Basterds is that people are not only going to live and die in a cinema but that cinema underpins the war effort from both sides. After the rise of Hitler, “Goebbels controlled every aspect of the industry through the Ministry’s Reichsfilmkammer, overseeing film financing, the evaluation of scripts and casting and monitoring audience reactions” (Historia), while during the war years the UK and the US also used cinema in fiction and documentary form for propagandistic and patriotic purposes: Fires Were Started, In Which We Serve, The Purple Heart and a title we might feel Tarantino would use: We’ve Never Been Licked. Inglourious Basterds isn’t just cinephilic; it is also about cinema’s role in the war effort as a British film critic is in cahoots with a German actress to bump off Hitler, while at the same time, a young French cinema owner has her own plans for taking out the tyrant. The film may remain both facetious and vainglorious as it thinks nothing of creating a broad, humorous tone during France’s darkest days under occupation (Bresson, Melville and existential dread are nowhere to be seen), and it undeniably rewrites history offering the can-do spirit of American gun culture of the late 20th/early 21st-century. But as Muriel Spark says in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: "for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like." The difference between Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds isn't so vast, but from a certain perspective and the one we have addressed here, Inglourious Basterds is the better film.  

    

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Inglourious Basterds

Playing on History

Here is the irony. From a certain perspective, nobody did more than Quentin Tarantino to kill off the sort of sincere, searching and in some ways realistic tradition that 70s American cinema had cultivated. As one of the key figures of that era, Paul Schrader reckoned: "When I first saw Tarantino's Pulp Fiction...I turned to my wife during the screening said, 'Everything I have done is now outdated.' I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. It's a very important film in film history." (Sight and Sound) Schrader offers it respectfully, but also mournfully, as well he might, with numerous films post Pulp Fiction keen to acknowledge that cinema could be self-reflexive, manipulative and callous, seeing its characters as ciphers not only for the mechanics of plot (that was always often the case) but for the knowing viewer who would insist that character identification was a sentimental throwback to an era when people took plot and character seriously. Tarantino more than anyone in the mid-nineties proposed cinema was a game, and anyone foolish enough to see in it the sort of existential probing Schrader saw as vital to his work was a naive fool.

"I like movies that mix things up. My favorite sheer cinematic sequences in Pulp Fiction... play like, Oh my God, this is so fucking intense, all right; at the same time, it's also funny." Tarantino adds, "half the audience is tittering, the other half is diving under the seat. The torture scene in Reservoir Dogs works that way, too. I get a kick out of doing that. There's realism and there's movie-movie-ness. I like them both." (Film Comment). Some might wonder how much realism Tarantino seeks when having a cop strapped to the chair as a hoodlum taps his toes to a pop song before carving off the man's ear. But what he undeniably wants is the discomfort of a scene that would usually be played straight, played diagonally. It is as if Tarantino has thought not what does it feel like being tortured, but how do movies usually show torture on film and how might he put a twist on it. He will have seen A Clockwork Orange, Marathon Man and Salo, and mused over how he could do it differently. Tarantino may say "the starting point is, you get these genre characters in these genre situations that you've seen before in other movies, but then all of a sudden out of nowhere they're plunged into real-life rules" but it is often more the reverse. He manages to make real-life situations look like generic moments.

There will be more to say about this later, but if Tarantino can be attacked for turning cinema into an ironic form over an existential inquiry, he can also be defended as a director who at least knows more than most contemporary filmmakers where his images come from. He has learnt from masters and, while this makes his work often derivative, it makes it self-consciously so. An overhead shot, a slow zoom, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree camera movement, a piece of music, will be deliberate. No film perhaps better exemplifies this retreat from realism and the absorption of cinema history than Inglourious Basterds, a work Peter Bradshaw gave one star to as he reckoned "it fails as conventional war movie, as genre spoof, as trash and as pulp." (Guardian) Jonathan Rosenbaum found it "a film that didn't even entertain me past its opening sequence, and that profoundly bored me during the endlessly protracted build-up to a cellar shoot-out..." (JR) These are remarks we are inclined to half-agree with, and yet the other half wishes to claim that Tarantino is an important halfway house between the retreat from film as a medium that captures reality, and the further retreat that proposes cinema images are no more valid than any others. Martin Scorsese notes that "as recently as fifteen years ago, the term "content" was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against 'form.' Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. 'Content' became a business term for all moving images." (Harper's)

The director may have little interest in reality, and even wants to counter it historically with filmic self-assertion in most of his recent work (Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). He does, however, respect the history of the moving image, and film's paramount place. How this manifests itself can be seen as infuriatingly self-regarding or generously acknowledging forebears, but here are a handful of those nods, some more obvious than others. The opening sequence, when the Nazi Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz) turns up at the farmhouse that we and Hans discover are harbouring numerous Jews under the floorboards, owes more than a little to the opening of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. So much so that Tim Voorburg in a brief essay brings out three similarities. People work around the homestead and somebody appears on the horizon; the young and the women leave so that the men can talk, and the villain find it easy to consume food or drink while the other man sits nervously.

Tarantino doesn't just copy the scene: he tops it. When Landa and his cohorts are seen in the distance, we see them when one of the farmer's daughters pulls the sheet aside. The conversation between the two men starts in French and moves into English: Landa can force the farmer to reveal those who are under the floorboards without those under the floor knowing what they are talking about, and switches back to French so that Landa can claim he is just leaving, after finding nothing, before his men come in and fire numerous shots into the floor and killing all but one of the underground inhabitants. But as well as this, Tarantino takes Hitchcock's comment about putting a bomb under the table, where an apparently mundane conversation can become suspenseful when we know what is at stake, as the camera travels down from the farmer's chair to the people holding their breath under the floorboards. At the end of the scene with everybody else presumably dead, we see one woman escape from under the house and run through the fields. The film shows us her in the distance in a shot some critics have proposed comes from a similar one in another Leone film, Once Upon a Time in the West, but is generally accepted to be a homage to The Searchers as we see from the interior to the exterior the woman escaping through a door frame. Tarantino manages to homage ingeniously; not merely copying masters but adding a little surplus aesthetic value to the original good.

We notice it again later in the film when the girl we saw escaping determines to avenge those deaths. Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), now owns a cinema and reckons, when Hitler, Goebbels and others in the high command come to Paris to watch a film that she can use that flammable material, celluloid, to burn them all to death. It is a special screening of a film about a youthful German hero Zoller who also stars in it and is infatuated by Shosanna. The sequence starts with her standing against a circular window in a shot that seems to blend elements of Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist) with Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty, but also his slicker more erotically inclined work like The Voyeur). The music is David Bowie's Cat People (Putting out the Fire), a song that Schrader asked Bowie to write for the film of that name. Later in the scene, she leaves her room in an overhead shot that passes along the ceiling and the camera picks her up again in the hall in a shot very similar to a camera movement near the end of Taxi Driver; a film of course Paul Schrader wrote.

It would be a justifiable claim to say this is all very well but isn't it superficial cinephilia, showing that Tarantino has seen a heck of a lot of films? Tarantino is often a technically brilliant director but he also works within the confines of cinema's possibilities, as though life is no more than a vast reservoir for dogs like Tarantino to draw upon for generic manipulation. However, we can also see it as a respect for a contained history that cinema is an accumulation of images that needs protecting from the content surrounding it. The director takes this seriously enough to protect film in its very materiality, insisting on making all his films on celluloid and also by owning cinemas that only show films in 35mm or 16mm. If some will differentiate between film and TV, Tarantino goes further by distinguishing between digital and celluloid. "It's just television in public. That's how I feel about it. I came into this for film." (Digital Spy)

If Tarantino undeniably respects film history, where does he stand on history, generally? He may claim that there is a political dimension to his work, and in no film more so than Inglourious Basterds: "the tragedy of genocide. I'm dealing with the Jewish genocide in Europe, but my Jews are going native and taking the roles of American Indiansanother genocide. Then there's a King Kong metaphor about the slave trade, that's another genocide." (Time Out) Stella Setka uses this quote amongst others to explore Inglourious Basterds as a film chiefly about re-representing the Holocaust, but isn't it more an opportunity for Tarantino to give his ongoing interest in grievance and revenge a patina of historical significance? Rather than seeing Tarantino especially concerned with historical reality, and how it has been presented, does he not absorb useful elements of history into his generic scenarios to bolster the revenge scenario? Thus Inglourious Basterdsisn't about the camps (they are nowhere to be seen) but about the Jews used as people with better reasons than most to want revenge. As the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Marvin Hier says: "the film has a certain release factor. If only we would have been privileged to see the Nazis defeated early on...I find it to be quite exciting...the plot I thought was quite ingenious." (OpinioJuris)

But Hier isn't proposing Tarantino's film is of much use historically; more that it might be cathartic a point Setka makes in her essay where she reckons Jewish people are usually presented as weak and defenceless in Holocaust narratives and here as Nazi hunters (albeit led by a part-Native American, Aldo Rey (Brad Pitt)) get to take out the high command that led six million Jews to their death. But this is cartoon heroism and cartoon villainy, given dignity and depth less by the historical reality it invokes than the cinematic history it deploys. There is far greater love here for cinema history than there is for the depiction of events, and this goes much further than playing with the facts so that the film can kill off history. It needs to turn reality into movie tropes.

There is an aspect of this in almost any film, and you only have to see unvarnished reality on screen in an Andy Warhol work to see how shaped and manipulated almost everything else in film happens to be. But few more than Tarantino push this retreat from life into the self-consciousness of the generic, and perhaps central to the director's appeal is his ability to create a facetious play on moments that would seem familiar in one context but that Tarantino offers in another. The early sequence with Hans Landa plays like the appearance at your door of a pedantic, petty bureaucrat you can't quite get rid of quickly enough. He seems the sort of person who has time on his hands and is happy to waste yours. In most circumstances, you accept the intrusion and sometimes stupidly offer the hospitable: a drink that leads him to stay far longer than you would like. But of course, Tarantino offers this officiousness in Nazi uniform as the director plays with the mundanity of Landa's general presence, with the menace that the uniform implies. The viewer is caught between irritation and despair, annoyed by his fussy presence and fearful for those it turns out the farmer is hiding. In Leone's scene from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, there is no such facetiousness, no contrast between the mundane and the menacing. It is all menace.

This facetiousness is there in a different form in other scenes too. When one of the Aldo Ray's team takes out a Nazi he does it with all the panache of knocking a ball out of the park in a game of baseball. The Nazi sits unwilling to help the hunters by pointing out key locations on a map, and out of the tunnel exits Sergeant Donny 'The Bear Jew' Donowitz, a tunnel that might not be at the stadium of the New York Yankees but that Tarantino all but invokes as Donny comes out of it, wields the bat, knocks the German soldier's head in and celebrates like he has scored a home run. We see it once more when Zoller tries to chat up Shosanna. He is the clumsy, gauche youth intimidated by this forthright young woman and yet she begins to notice whatever attention he wants to give her, he is getting far more from others as he is asked for his autograph. This is the reluctant youthful star, someone who doesn't quite have the confidence to seduce a girl but has a reputation for confidence elsewhere. We discover, of course, that he is a war hero responsible for protecting a village from invading allied troops, taking out hundreds. He wants to impress a girl and does it with a modest list of his accomplishments, offering the number of people he took out over three days. He is a little like Oldsen in Local Hero who announces one by one the many languages he speaks. But here the discrepancy between the clumsiness and the facility is all the more pronounced by the hundreds who have died due to his skill set.

It is an aspect that has always been there in Tarantino's work: the minor detail meeting the magnitude of event, whether it is the gang in Reservoir Dogs discussing tipping and minimum wage before the heist, or Vincent and Jules bickering about Big Macs before a hit in Pulp Fiction, the director makes light of the serious by creating two registers more or less simultaneously. As he says of a scene in Pulp Fiction: "It was never a conscious decision, playing on the idea of big men are actually little boys with real guns, but it kept coming out and I realized as I was writing Pulp, that actuallyfits. You can even make the analogy with the scene with Jules and Vincent [John Travolta] at Jimmy [Quentin Tarantino]'s house, they're afraid of their mom coming home. You spilled shit on the carpetclean up the mess you made from screwing around before your mom gets home." (Film Comment) Such moments give to his films their anomalous originality, deriving a basic form from chiefly Hitchcock and Leone and making the work self-reflexive by the mix of the minor and the major the detail and the plot demand. Yet he adds to this in Inglourious Basterds a newfound historical inflection and makes the movie references that have always been there both a far more integral part of the plot, and also more nuanced and broad in their application. It isn't only that at one moment he uses music from Ennio Morricone's score for The Battle of Algiers, or at others offers Leni Riefenstahl's name on a marquee, a character named Emil Jennings, and references to Pabst. It is also there in the person behind one of the assassination attempts on Hitler's life who is a film critic (Michael Fassbinder) and the person he is liaising with, a famous German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). It makes sense they would know each other, and that their spying would be covered by their roles in cinema.

With its ironic tone, its self-reflexivity, its bad-ass Nazis and no less bad-ass Nazi hunters, all things considered the film should be deemed by Tarantino fans a masterpiece, and anybody who gives a Tarantino film five stars may be regarded surely as a fan. On Pulp Fiction's rerelease, in 2014, Bradshaw gave it five stars, saying "Don DeLillo began the 90s by warning that the US is the only country in the world with funny violence. Maybe Pulp Fiction was the kind of thing he had in mind. Unmissable." (Guardian) Yet as we have noted he gave Inglourious Basterds only one. Bradshaw seems to like funny violence but not in the later film. Both reviews contain the De Lillo quote, but in Inglourious Basterds Bradshaw says that "here the boringness is just boring, and the violence doesn't get gasps of shock, just winces of bafflement and distaste and boredom. Tarantino just seems to have lost his cool, lost his mojo." (Guardian) But this sounds like a critic who wants to reveal he is always tapping into the zeitgeist. Pulp Fiction is a five-star movie that captured its moment; Inglouiorus Basterds shows Tarantino as a has-been.

Inglourious Basterds suggests however that Tarantino has not so much lost his cool but found a form to make manifest his love for cinema at the same time revealing better than all his prior work the limitations of this love. There has always been the problem that Tarantino has no great interest or understanding of life, and when Caryn James says the film's "opening episode [is] rooted in classical realism (a rarity for Tarantino) [and moves] to an ending that is pure movie fantasy (much more typical)", we can agree with the rarity of realism generally and find it no more evident at the beginning of this film than in its conclusion. Unless character and situation pass through the prism of the filmic, the director isn't interested, which is why we have noted the way he can take a common scene from life and turn it into an uncommon one in film. One can attack Tarantino for this but that would be close to a category error, like asking Disney to make neo-realism. Yet Bradshaw sees Pulp Fiction as masterful as he finds Inglourious Basterds inept. However, it seems all that has changed is the emphasis: that in the more recent film he has become even more sadistically determined to extend the time between a character's realisation they will die and its manifestation, and proposing that just as he often takes what he needs from life-like situations to make them generic, he then wishes to do the same with historical events as well. This is Tarantino outdoing Tarantino, and why wouldn't anybody who starts out being a fan of the director want even more of it? If someone likes Pulp Fiction for its contrived approach to set-pieces, its determination to see everything through the lens of prefabricated images, no film more self-consciously works with both than Inglourious Basterds.

Nevertheless, those who like Tarantino for the self-consciousness of those images might prefer this to be absorbed into the film so that they respond to the cleverness of what he is doing without feeling obliged to absorb themselves in the very cinema that Tarantino is acknowledging. It is one thing to have the vaguest of notions about torture scenes in film when you sense Tarantino riffing on them in Reservoir Dogs, but imagine if to comprehend the scene it would be useful to know of Rossellini's Rome, Open City, Bunuel's absurdist one in Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and Godard's protracted one in Le Petit soldat, let alone Marathon Man etc? It would be an exaggeration to say that Tarantino expects this kind of knowledge, but when we hear the music from The Battle of Algiers, White Lightning or Dark of the Sun or see shots from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Taxi Driver and The Conformist, they seem to carry a far greater cinephilic appreciation, one that perhaps started with combining music from one film (Across 110th Street) with images from another (The Graduate) in Jackie Brown, while also casting two stars from the seventies that were relatively little known by the late '90s: Pam Grier and Robert Forster. If Pulp Fiction is for many Tarantino's masterpiece, it rests partly on the proliferation of pop-cultural references rather than cinematic ones, as the Quentin Tarantino Archives show, with the film's numerous nods to anything from Kung Fu to Zorro, from The Partridge Family to the Flintstones, all contained by a knowing sense of a viewer's awareness of its knowingness. When someone gets shot in the head nobody is expected to take it seriously because film and TV have been doing this for decades, and empathy would be a failure of sensibility rather than an accentuation of it. People just aren't getting the joke.

Tarantino may insist that "...the heartbeat of the movie has to be a human heartbeat" (Film Comment) but it is often when somebody's heartbeat stops that the audience starts laughing. It might be the young black man Marvin in the back of the cab in Pulp Fiction, the German getting his head bashed in here, or the Brittle brothers getting taken out by Django in Django Unchained. Anybody feeling human sympathy is confusing movie feeling with life feeling. Sure, Marvin's death isn't relished but it is still part of the movie feeling that Tarantino wants to exacerbate rather than undermine. When he says for example "there's realism and there's movie-movie-ness. I like them both" (Film Comment) he confuses two things that have been important to realism but are hardly a definition of it: extended time and the explicit. "Every minute for them [in Reservoir Dogs] in the warehouse is a minute for you. They're subjected to not a movie clock but a real-time clock" (Film Comment) as also says, "if you ask me how I feel about violence in real life, well, I have a lot of feelings about it. It's one of the worst aspects of America. In movies, violence is cool. I like it." (Atlantic)

Films have often shown time passing all the better to bring out the details of the task to hand, perhaps best exemplified in Chantal Akerman's domestic focus in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In his comment about violence in life and in cinema, Tarantino acknowledges that when he offers extreme images onscreen he isn't chiefly concerned with the reality behind them but the generic purpose they can serve. However, this is the same with his approach to time: he doesn't expand time naturalistically but generically using the expectations of screen temporality which is usually contracted, and expands it for dramatic purposes. Whether it is the scene at the farmhouse, one where Hans treats Shoshanna to some strudel in a cafe, or the card game that turns violent in the basement bar, Tarantino wants to use time for sadistic suspense, as if aware that cinema's capacity for sadism doesn't only, or even especially, rely on the gratuitousness of its violence, but on its capacity to anticipate the worst. Tarantino may often be attacked for its use but central to it is the temporal expansion that indicates a director playing with the audience's fears and expectations. Expanded time is a tease; it isn't a phenomenological inquiry into the image.

But if this generic insistence is a problem viewers have with Tarantino, then it can't be isolated to one or two films (making Pulp Fiction a masterful work and Inglourious Basterds a hopeless failure): it is central to the very notion of the Tarantinoesque. If we regard Inglourious Basterds in some ways a more interesting film than the earlier one, it rests on the added awareness Inglourious Basterds has of engaging not just with cultural content but with cinema history, and then provocatively linking cinema's own with factual history that it superimposes itself upon. This is a conceit and potentially an enormously egomaniacal one at that: taking far further than U-571, Titanic, Gladiator and The Patriotfiddling with historical fact for dramatic exigency. Yet while these other films fiddle with history, Tarantino, to use the sort of demotic language he so likes, fucks with it. As with Christopher Roth's Baader and Tarantino's own Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino takes a commonly accepted fact and replays it so Hitler dies in a cinema fire, just as Baader gets shot down by bullets and Tate survives while the Manson gang get slaughtered. Nobody can accuse the films of surreptitiousness. One doesn't need to be a historian to fish out the falsities. Tarantino takes those old saws of fictive poetics (the suspension of disbelief and dramatic license) and wonders how far he can push them once viewers accept they are in his hands. In Gladiator or Titanic, the viewer isn't in the director's hands; any authorial vision is subjugated to a story they tell where the messing with facts is to create neater through lines and more delineated character types. James Cameron for example isn't imposing his sensibility on the viewer, he is pragmatically taking for granted he can get away with a few inaccuracies all the better to move the story along.

One might find Tarantino's take the height of arrogance and Cameron's a compromise that needn't be seen as a sign of hubris. But from another perspective, Tarantino's may appear the more modest, despite the turbo-tongued self-regard he often shows in interviews as he isn't shy of an opinion. Whether it is David Lynch disappearing ... so far up his ownass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different", or that "Kubrick was a hypocrite," or "I love Brian De Palma's Hitchcock movies. I love Richard Franklin's and Curtis Hanson's Hitchcock meditations. I prefer those to actual Hitchcock" (IndieWire), he tells it as he sees it. However, there is also an awareness that his work comes out of the craft of others, that when he shoots a sequence he isn't obliviously working a scene of suspense, romance or action as though there hasn't been a weight and welter of forebears. He wants to make conscious to the viewer his own self-consciousness and then in Inglourious Basterds, to a lesser degree in Django Unchained, and to a higher degree again in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, makes the viewer see that not only is a shot a clear choice, but a story choice is as well. Nothing makes that choice more apparent than when you take historical fact and turn it into the most wayward of fiction. He then contains both the formal awareness and the historical chutzpah within a dense relationship with cinematic allusion.

This might seem like a defence of Tarantino's work; it is more a need to argue that rather than seeing Inglourious Basterds as one of his worst films, and as bad as Pulp Fiction is good, it is instead perhaps truer to say it isn't so very different from his 1994 hit but much more coherent if we accept that consistency isn't just about plot. In Pulp Fiction, the story utilises numerous pop elements without much discrimination and without making these elements integral to the idea of the film. Characters knock off references but they don't live by them, while central to Inglourious Basterds is that people are not only going to live and die in a cinema but that cinema underpins the war effort from both sides. After the rise of Hitler, "Goebbels controlled every aspect of the industry through the Ministry's Reichsfilmkammer, overseeing film financing, the evaluation of scripts and casting and monitoring audience reactions" (Historia), while during the war years the UK and the US also used cinema in fiction and documentary form for propagandistic and patriotic purposes: Fires Were Started, In Which We Serve, The Purple Heart and a title we might feel Tarantino would use: We've Never Been Licked. Inglourious Basterds isn't just cinephilic; it is also about cinema's role in the war effort as a British film critic is in cahoots with a German actress to bump off Hitler, while at the same time, a young French cinema owner has her own plans for taking out the tyrant. The film may remain both facetious and vainglorious as it thinks nothing of creating a broad, humorous tone during France's darkest days under occupation (Bresson, Melville and existential dread are nowhere to be seen), and it undeniably rewrites history offering the can-do spirit of American gun culture of the late 20th/early 21st-century. But as Muriel Spark says in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. The difference between Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds isn't so vast, but from a certain perspective and the one we have addressed here, Inglourious Basterds is the better film.


© Tony McKibbin