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Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: A Manipulation of Metacinema
Abstract
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.
In this collection, the eroticism of the club-swinging and avenging "Bear Jew," the dashed heroism of the "role-playing" French and German females, the patriotic fools and pawns, the amoral yokel, Lieutenant Aldo Raine, and the cosmopolitan, but psychopathic Colonel Landa, are understood for their true functions in what has become an iconoclastic pop-culture phenomenon and one of the classics of early twenty-first century American cinema. Additionally, the book examines the use of "foreign" languages (subverting English and image), the allegory of Austria's identity in the war, and the particularly French and German cinematic influences, such as R. W. Fassbinder's realignment of the German woman's film and the iconic image of the German film star in Inglourious Basterds.
... Among the most disgusting and vulgar examples are "The Night Porter" 61 and "Inglorious Basterds." 62 The rise of Genocidal Studies as a discipline, further consumed the uniqueness of the Holocaust as an unequaled tragedy. 63 It now became, once again, uniquely posed as a role model in a long line of historical tragedies. ...
By invoking the term Visuality, I am quite intentionally referring to the optical encounter with Holocaust representation in today's world. This notion is a reaction to the common adage that states, people don't want to read the book, they want to see the movie. Holocaust representation in this visual sense is primarily encountered in museums, the cinema, and the fine arts such as painting and sculpture. This latter category, by its virtuality as a highly subjective presentation, is better left for another discussion. On the other hand, and while acknowledging the primary significance of Holocaust historical literature, there is little argument that in the present times the most frequent encounter by the public in regards to this subject matter occurs most often in a museum or at the cinema. Therefore it behooves us to examine the public's experience and compare it to the historical realities. The purpose of this work is to examine the historical evolution of the current state of affairs, and it is a challenging task. The final goal is to contribute to the preservation of honesty, historical accuracy, and, most of all the integrity of the memory of the Holocaust.
... Here employees work ten hours a day on two-year contracts under conditions of extreme secrecy and mental stress to cleanse social networks from potentially offensive and illegal violent and sexually explicit content matter (Briegleb 2016). 2 The uprising has been subject to various retellings see the measured words in Chare and Williams 2016, 6-7 and compare for instance to Yahil 1990, 486. 3 In 2009 the ADL for instance, praised Inglourious Basterds as "an allegory about good and evil and the no-holds barred efforts to defeat the evil personifi ed by Hitler, his henchmen and his Nazi regime. If only it were true" (Anti-Defamation League 2009); for a scholarly assessments of the movie's transgressive accomplishments see Dassanowsky 2012. ...
This article examines how historiographic metafiction challenges traditional narratives of history. The author argues that subverting conventions of narrating the past through irony and a plurality of truths, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) can be regarded as historiographic metafiction. Its narratives of the past challenge the traditional History, provide alternate ways of telling history and invite a more meaningful cognitive engagement with history. To explore how the Americanization of the Holocaust sheds light on American racism, the author focuses on the figure of the savage Native American in the film and examines how Native Americans are brought into play through a plot that mixes up the histories of American settlers, African-Americans, Jews, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians and how the film screens Native Americans in the sight of psychoanalytic theorist Kaja Silverman’s terms of the look, the screen, and the gaze. I argue that the screening of savage Native Americans is in a constant process of renewal and the image of Native Americans is ironic rather than simply stereotypical, which contests dominant Hollywood representations of Native Americans either as ignoble savage or noble savage and reveals unheeded history.
This introduction situates the present collection of critical articles both in the historical context of contemporary forms of Holocaust commemoration and in the scholarly tradition of research on Holocaust cinema. The various contributions on fictional and documentary films from diverse countries address a wide range of topics, including the notion of the law and how its courtrooms are staged cinematically or how witnesses are invested with authority. Related to matters of guilt is the issue of intergenerational memory, often addressed when films evoke forms of perpetration and thereby connect forms of affect to larger ethical questions related to memory work.
Recent trials of elderly Holocaust perpetrators have foregrounded an epistemological problem with consequences for future prosecutions: what status do witness testimonies, survivor memoirs, and blurry photographs have as the Holocaust’s final witnesses die off? This article interprets Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015), a Holocaust revenge fantasy whose geriatric protagonist suffers from dementia. Dementia becomes a metaphor for memory’s unreliability and its challenges for Holocaust jurisprudence. Through plot twists predicated upon viewers’ willingness to misperceive familiar tropes of Holocaust cinema as fact, Remember thematizes the need for a jurisprudence based on expertise, not witness testimony, even in an age skeptical of expertise.
Known for making movies about movies, writer-director Quentin Tarantino reached new heights of Oscar success with the intertextual war film Inglourious Basterds (2009) and the allusive representation of slavery in Django Unchained (2012). This chapter examines both films through the lens of industry recognition by looking at how the history of writing awards at the Academy indicates a shifting relationship to the kind of multi-sourced, cinema-focused adaptation that Tarantino undertakes. The categorization of Tarantino’s writing under ‘Original Screenplay’ shows how contemporary awards culture defines both adaptation and originality, while his success with awards voters has started new cycles of prestige and pushed industry focus away from conventional representations of war and white-centred representation of race relations.
The western, one of Hollywood’s great film genres, has, surprisingly, enjoyed a revival recently in Asia and in other parts of the world, whilst at the same time declining in America. Although the western is often seen as an example of American cultural dominance, this book challenges this view. It considers the western from an Asian perspective, exploring why the rise of Asian westerns has come about, and examining how its aesthetics, styles and politics have evolved as a result. It analyses specific Asian Westerns as well as Westerns made elsewhere, including in Australia, Europe, and Hollywood, to demonstrate how these employ Asian philosophical and mythical ideas and value systems. The book concludes that the western is a genre which is truly global, and not one that that is purely intrinsic to America.
Rossellini’s seminal image of the Austrian deserter in Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945) has continued to shape Austrian characters and their difference from the German in Italian auteur film. Giacomo Lichtner’s view that Italian film ‘absolved’ its society for the myth of the brava gente (the good or ‘better’ people) parallels Austria’s avoidance of dealing with its Nazi past until sparked by national discourse. Austria is thus a viable stand-in for Italian cinema’s examination of its own historical trauma. Visconti’s Austrian in Senso (1954) and his ‘Austrianization’ of the German in Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice) (1971) have added a ‘topos Austria’ to Italian film, which is deconstructed by Fellini’s abstraction of the ‘Habsburg mythos’ at the onset of the First World War in E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On) (1984). Cavani breaks the filmic taboo of finding Nazi perpetrators among the victimized Austrians in her film Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter) (1974) and articulates the memory of the Nazi era and post-war repression in Vienna, seeking to represent a wider European experience.
This essay considers two appropriations of the Samson narrative (Judges 13–16)—Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009)—in light of their controversial critical heritages. Both in Milton Studies and Tarantino criticism, scholars and critics
are sharply divided on the ethical implications of the ‘terrorism’ plots the two works advance. Considering the striking parallels
between these two historically and generically distant texts and their reception, the essay argues that only focused attention
on the works as appropriations/adaptations allows us full access to their complex ethics.
Film scholarship has largely failed to address the complex and paradoxical nature of the films of Sam Peckinpah, focusing primarily on the violence of movies such as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs while ignoring the poetry and gentility of lesser-known pictures including The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner. Serving as a necessary corrective, Gabrielle Murray's This Wounded Cinema, This Wounded Life: Violence and Utopia in the Films of Sam Peckinpah offers a better understanding of the work of this landmark director through close readings of both his famous and less-famous works.
Placing them in their proper context—both aesthetically and mythologically—Murray eschews the usual debates about screen violence to discover the ways in which Peckinpah's films provide intense, kinetic explorations of life and death. Amid the often-discussed bloodshed, this bold new study comes to find the complicated utopian impulse that exists at the heart of even Peckinpah's most violent work.
A new edition of a classic work that originated the “embodied cognition” movement and was one of the first to link science and Buddhist practices.
This classic book, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the “embodied cognition” approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science—claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, The Embodied Mind introduced a new form of cognitive science called “enaction,” in which both the environment and first person experience are aspects of embodiment. However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action. Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the book shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the book's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience.
This revised edition includes substantive introductions by Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch that clarify central arguments of the work and discuss and evaluate subsequent research that has expanded on the themes of the book, including the renewed theoretical and practical interest in Buddhism and mindfulness. A preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the originator of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program, contextualizes the book and describes its influence on his life and work.
This book argues that postmodernism, especially in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is a deeply engaged response to the Holocaust. In turn, this thought illuminates a number of issues in our understanding of the Holocaust. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, Reading and the Holocaust, concentrates on testimony and literature, and argues that testimony is a new and singular genre with its own generic characteristics. It clarifies issues of memory and literature and analyses and defines post-1990 Holocaust fiction. The second part, Holocaust Histories, argues that there are two different understandings of truth at work in the discipline of history, and that the history of the Holocaust brings this to the fore: later chapters explore this by looking at the work of one leading Holocaust historian, Saul Friedländer, the limits of historical explanation, and at Holocaust denial. The third part, The Trace of the Holocaust, turns to philosophy and argues in detail that the work of Levinas is a response to the Holocaust and evaluates its success. Chapter 10 evaluates Derrida's thought as post-Holocaust philosophy and focuses on the idea of the trace. Chapter 11 looks at philosophical attempts to explain Nazism and reveals the limits of philosophical discourse. The final chapter turns to the idea of the human and looks at ways in which the human has been thought after the Holocaust. The conclusion turns to issues to which this overall discussion might lead.