I will return to von Trotta’s film in the future, particularly to consider how Heidegger’s philosophy allows us to think (of) cinema. For now, I would like to write some thoughts about another favorite filmmaker of mine, Tarantino.
The question of violence is the specific angle from which I am to discuss part of his filmography in this post and few others to come. I am unsure about the title of this post. Figuring or visualizing fail to conjure up optimally what I am trying to express.
The criticism leveled at Tarantino’s films seldom strikes a balanced position. There is no possible neutrality when it comes to either the auteur or his works. Being enthralled or repelled pretty mush summarizes the more common responses viewers muster at the end of his films. His surreal violent representations in a movie that otherwise purports to be an example of realism, create a schism in the cinematic experience. Viewers rush to make sense of schism morally and emotionally rather than aesthetically.
Tarantino may be many things, but he is foremost a rigorous (as well as overindulgent) cinematic aestheticist. For that reason, his films demand that spectators respond on that level first. The moral and emotional perspectives ought to and will inevitably follow, but they must surrender first place. His films, as does perhaps any piece of representative work, contain some of the parameters by which their very critique will be rendered. That said, we’d be grossly mistaken to file Tarantino as a filmmaker who privileges form or style over narrative and character development. Undoubtedly there are plenty of the two, but his movies are also propelled by sophisticated character substance and narrative flow.
Following Daneyian wisdom, his characters remain always an enigma, and part of materializing that enigma drives the movie satisfyingly away from its starting sequence–away to places of saturated senses and even meaning. Even though there is plenty that thematize and represent the absurd, Tarantino is no Becket: a great deal does happen in his films. Because of this trifecta (character, narrative, and cinematic style/form), one can be simultaneously marveled, troubled, and fully entertained by any one of his 7 movies.
With his last two movies, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Tarantino has proven that his style is hardly merely stylistic bravado, self-indulgent bluff, or manipulative affectation. In fact, one could argue that the crimson dyed sequences of violence in which falling bodies multiply exponentially, represent the most accessible form of violence in his films. If films that regard themselves as dignified or sober portrayals of violence always aim for strictly measured realism, Tarantino’s take on the overtly violent shots, conversely, straddles with discipline between realism and myth, and thus situate such violence firmly in the realm of fictional representation. In other words, such scenes make their artificial character disruptively undeniable.
Either by the use of color, formal style, or basic content, the sequences of overt violence remind the audience that they are not what they pretend to be. And by doing so, these predictably and almost parodic scenes of violence lose their ability to shock, perplex, and ultimately fail to alter the way perception, inside and outside cinema, occurs. We may choose to cover our eyes, but that is precisely because such scenes of gruesome violence are meant to disorder the realm of the visible.
This failure to shock, however, remains in itself perplexing because if Tarantino’s entire filmography can assume comfortably any claim is that it shocks, perplexes, and ultimately does alter how perception unfolds and the realm of visibility is organized; that is, how one views the universe inside and outside cinema. As it was suggested already, however, to the extent that his films confront the inner and outer makeup of perception, they do so in ways other than the loud and excessive scenes of violence, in which blood flows, splashes, and squirts upward and downward, defying gravity.
In Film Fables, Rancière analyzes a diverse gamut of films and filmmakers that have left their footprint in the variegated tradition of cinema. Examining Fritz Lang’s transition from his earlier phase led by M to his later years working for large Hollywood production powerhouses, Rancière argues that a shake-up in the realm of visibility can be evinced. Rancière describes that Lang “replays the same story of the chase of a psychopathic killer at two different ages of the visible: the first in M, where maps and magnifying glasses, inventories and drag-nets trap the murderer and prosecute him in a theatrical court; the second in While the City Sleeps, where all these accessories have disappeared and been replaced by a machine of vision, the television that places Mobley ‘face to face’ with the murderer and transforms an imaginary capture into a weapon for a real capture” (18).
Following Rancière’s thoughts on Lang’s two films, I propose that Tarantino’s films allow us to grapple not only with cinema’s capacity to represent violence (to render it visible) but also with cinema as a constitutively violent medium. Future posts will explore how Tarantino’s films may think and figure cinema as a constitutively violent medium.
Realism 