---·----· -·-~---·-~·-···------·-----------~· ·---~----,

pr

Unbridling the
Western Film Auteur

Contemporary, Transnational
and Intertextual Explorations

edited by
Emma Hamilton and Alistair Rolls

£
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles.• Frankfurt am Main • New York• Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Contents
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
National-wbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Acknowledgements vii
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960109 EMMA HAMILTON AND ALISTAIR ROLLS

r Introduction. Editors on Auteurs: Thoughts on Auteurism

from the Frontier I

Cover image: Peter Coad, Scene 122 - Final Landscape from The Tracker.
Reproduced with kind permission from the artist. ALEX DAVIS
<www.petercoadart.com.au>
2 The Star Auteur: Jimmy Stewart Out West 25
Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.
TOMUE
ISBN 978-1-78707-155-1 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-156-8 (ePDF) 3 Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's
ISBN 978-1-78707-157-5 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78707-158-2 (mobi)
Inglourious Basterds 45
© Peter Lang AG 2018
EMMA HAMILTON
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 4 'Probably a White Fella': Rolf de Heer,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OXl 3LU, United Kingdom
The Tracker and the Limits of Auteurism 65
oxford@peterlang.com,www.peterlang.com

Emma Hamilton and Alistair Rolls have asserted their right under the MATTHEW CARTER
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors 5 The Post-apocalyptic Frontier: Reappropriating Western
of this Work. Violence for Feminism in Mad Max: Fury Road 85
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. MAREK PARYZ
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without 6 Narrative (Il)Logic and the Problem of Character Motivation
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. in Sergio Corbucci's Revenge Westerns !05
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Printed in Germany
44 ALEX DAVIS

Stackpole, P. (1945). 'Life Comes Home with Jimmy Stewart: Movie star who became
TOM UE
a war hero visits his home town oflndiana, Pa. before getting Army discharge'.
Life, 24 September.
'Stewart Leaves Army, Wants to Do Comedies'. The Harifbrd Courant, 29 September 3 Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin
1945.
Wolfe, C. (1991). 'The Return ofJimmy Stewart: The Publicity Photograph as Text'. In
Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds
C. Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry ofDesire, pp. 92-106. New York: Routledge.

ABSTRACT
Quentin Tarantino has readily been conceptualized as a modern (perhaps post-modern)
American film auteur. He has experimented wirh film as a motif, used it as a means to travel
through time and space, and conceived of rhe medium as a way to construct narratives
rhat are unpredictable to borh the audience and the auteur. Tarantino's oeuvre reflects his
preoccupation, in particular, wirh Western tropes - from his use of music as character and
his fascination wirh violence, masculinity and bromance to his more recent experimenta-
tions with instantly recognizable Westerns such as The Hateful Eight (2015) - which he

II regularly combines with other genre elements such as Japanese samurai, mob films and war
films. This chapter will examine Tarantino's film Inglourious Basterds (2009 )1 as a case
study of the ways he uses his auteur status ro render complex genre conventions, particu-
larly those of the Western and film noir. Ultimately, Tarantino brings together countless
and ofi:en contesting genre elements in a single film; in so doing he spurs the audience to

I' consider their viewing practices as ethical and social processes.

I
i
'Maybe they'll make a film about your exploits; Shosanna (Melanie Laurent)
tells Fredrick (Daniel Bri.ihl) in response to his account about being alone
in a bell tower in a walled-off city where he hunted down soldiers, an event

All references to Basterds, unless indicated orherwise, are to the film and not rhe screen-
play. I thank audience members at the 31st Annual Southwest/Texas Popular & American
Culture Associations conference at Albuquerque, New Mexico. For many kinds ofhelp,
I am grateful to Philip Horne, John James, Joan Marshman and Sue Matheson. David
Fleischer read rhe final versions of rhis chapter wirh characteristic care. I thank Frank
Tong for his research assistance and the Social Science and Humanities Council of
Canada, Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund, University College London, McGill
University, and rhe University of Toronto Scarborough for rheir support.
 ~~~~~~~~~~-- ..........
~~~--

46
TOMUE Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 47

that earned him his reputation as the German Sergeant York. Alvin York was time and space and to give a story greater, and perhaps different, purpose.
a decorated American soldier during the First World War and the subject Nations Pride was conceived for propaganda, as a kind of counter-narrative
of Howard Hawks' 1941 biographical film. Fredrick replies, to the Golem (Donny's [Eli Roth] second alias after the Bear Jew), which
has inspired mixed feelings of fear and aversion in Hitler (Martin Wuttke).
Well, that's just what Joseph Goebbels [Sylvester Groth] thought. So he did and
called it 'Nation's Pride' [Eli Roth, 2009 ]. And, they wanted me to play myself[ ... ] Fredrick's mythical status is repeatedly evoked even before the premiere:
so I did. Joseph thinks this movie will prove to be his masterpiece. And I will be the he has admirers in a French bistro and his fame is known even to Sergeant
German VanJohnson. Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), who, when he aims his gun at Major Hellstrom's
(August Diehl) crotch, threatens, ' [AJt this range, I'm a real Fredrick Zoller'.
Shosanna's and Fredrick's exchange oscillates between event (that is, In these ways, Tarantino gestures towards just how far, temporally and
Fredrick's experience) and narrative (both his account and Nations Pride) spatially, Fredrick's story has travelled. This conversation pointedly sug-
and it speaks to the centrality of film in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin gests the potential for a writer to author a story for different narrative
Tarantino, 2009). Cinema is written into its very texture and meaning. ends - ends that are not always predictable to herself or himself: Fredrick
As Philip Horne writes, brags about his military achievements to Shosanna but only disgusts and
distances her. As Jason Haslam has persuasively argued in his analysis of the
Tarantino takes his lead from exploitation cinema, borrowing the tide (with added
film alongside Ranciere, 'Jnglourious Basterds' representation of cinema is
jokey misspelling) from Enzo G Castellari's combat movie of 1978. He does inten-
sive research, so European and American cinema up to 1944 becomes an informing one that highlights the role of the viewer, and specifically emphasizes the
presence here - Clair's 1he Italian Straw Hat, Danielle Darrieux, Henri-Georges acts of intellectual and other translations in which viewers must engage
Clouzot, Leni Riefenstahl's mountain films, Hawks's Sergeant York. (2009: n.p.) when watching any film' (2.013: 187 ). He continues: 'Inglourious Basterds
[... J doesn't necessarily lend itself to or resist specific readings, as much as it
When asked about his influences, Tarantino tells Mali Elfman: thematizes, through the film's intradiegetic refraction of both audience and
screen, the activity of a spectator's translation and interpretation through
I love those guys' [Robert Aldrich's, Samuel Fuller's, Sergio Leone's] work. You
that person's individual journey' (2013: 188).
better believe they were big influences. Sergio Leone is my favorite director of all
time. I remember when I first started this movie after Jackie Brown [1997 ], one of Recent films, including The Hunger Games series (Gary Ross, 2012;
the things that I wanted it to be was my 1he Good, 1he Bad, and the Ugly [1966]. Francis Lawrence, 2013-15), Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), and
Oddly enough, as much as I love Sergio Leone, my work resembles more [the Italian The Hateful Eight (Tarantino, 2.015), employ metafilmic elements to call
filmmaker J Sergio Corbucci. He is the other master as far as I'm concerned. I think attention to the audience's response to violence for entertainment. The last .
my films are closer to his than to Leone's. (i.009: 163; my insertions)
decade, in particular, has seen a proliferation ofJewish revenge fantasies
- 'films or scenes within films in which avengingJews enact stylized, spec-
Within the film's diegesis, cinema is a prominent motif Kino, the name of
tacular, and typically graphic violence upon their cliched cinematic enemies,
the film's central military operation, means 'film', 'movies', and 'cinema' in
usually Nazis but sometimes Arabs or others' (Magilow 2012: 89 ). An
Albanian, Serbian, and German, amongst many other languages. In fact,
example of what Susan Rubin Suleiman identifies as crisis works or weath-
most of the characters in Basterds work in the movies (Walters 2009-rn:
ervanes (2014: 6 9), Basterds is an especially interesting case study because it
20): Fredrick is an avid filmgoer and now actor, and Shosanna, the owner
juxtaposes, and ultimately questions, genre conventions, in particular those
of the theatre Le Gamaar. More salient to my argument, Fredrick's and
Shosanna's conversation speaks to the capacity of narrative to travel through

:11111
111111::
111
48
I, TOMUE
I
I
II
111 of the Western and the film noir. 2 In this chapter, I argue that Basterds's
11
!1
evocation of different genres and its use ofpastiche collectively provoke us
11
to engage with the material and to re-examine this metafilm's ethical impli-
cations. I concentrate on the film's opening and Fredrick's and Shosanna's
1
first meeting in the light of their borrowings from different genres, before
attending to the two characters' viewing of Nation's Pride. In so doing, I
reveal how Tarantino uses this embedded film to juxtapose and contrast
two markedly different responses. Ifcinema brings together the Westerner
Fredrick and the femme fatale Shosanna, and the first conversation that
we witness between them is about films, then Tarantino shows us how
exposure to stories does not per se improve us as readers. During the screen-
ing of Nation's Pride, the visibly shaken Fredrick confesses to Shosanna:
'[T]he fact remains [... ] this film is based on my military exploits. And in
this case, my exploits consisted ofkilling many men. Consequently, the part
of the film that's playing now[ ... ] I don't like watching this part'. Fredrick's
laboured language, heavy in conjunctions and repetitions, replicates his
agitation: he is disturbed by his supposedly heroic acts about killing many
Russians when he relives his experiences. Even so, he recognizes neither
these killings nor their onscreen incarnation as acts of gross brutality nor
as being based on real ones from which he cannot walk away. I conclude by
opening out to a wider consideration ofhow, by bringing together countless
and often contesting genre elements in his single film, Tarantino poses our
own viewing of films as both an ethical and a social process.
2
Suleiman identifies this category of contested works as those that 'point to unresolved
ethical and aesthetic issues concerning representations of the Holocaust' (2014: 69 ).
Suleiman offers a succinct and insightful account of some of the criticisms for and
against Basterds and argues persuasively for the role of metacinema in the film.
-----·---·-----------
1
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 49
Narrative and Genre Matters
In an interview with Ryan Gilbey, Tarantino outlines Basterds's narrative
structure:
[T]here definitely is, in the first two chapters, an idea of doing a spaghetti
[W]estern with World War II iconography. I thought that would work its way
through the whole movie, but it actually doesn't. [... ] The second chapter feels even
more like a spaghetti [W] estern insofar as it has that comic brutality, black humour,
gallows humour, the bloodthirsty jokes, the Morricone music. Then the third chapter
becomes something else. But to me, as much as it's filmic, it is also novelistic. The
third chapter is this little French movie, with a touch of Lubitsch, especially in the
Goebbels lunch scene. And there is this aspect with the fourth chapter, where it's as
3
though the movie, the story, really begins. (2009: 18)
Tarantino explains how each chapter introduces new characters who dis-
appear in the subsequent one only to resurface in the film's fifth and cul-
minating act. The tonal differences between the first and second chapters,
to which Tarantino gestures, speak to and effectively blur what Robert
Warshaw has identified as the central distinction between the war film
and the Western when he writes:
At its best, the war movie may represent a more civilized point of view than the
Western, and if it were not continually marred by ideological sentimentality we
might hope to find it developing into a higher form of drama. But it cannot supply
the values we seek in the Western. Those values are in the image of a single man who
wears a gun on his thigh. (1998: 47)
If, on the one hand, the war film is more cultivated than the Western,
on the other, it lacks the values that are inherent to that genre. The
Spaghetti Western draws on but differs from the Western proper through
Tarantino suggests a different ordering to the film in his interview with Elfman: 'If
it were a The Devil's Brigade movie [Andrew V. McLaglen, 1968], that Mike Myers
[General Ed FenechJ scene would be the first of the movie; as he sends them on their
mission' (1009: 161; my insertions).
 50 TOMUE
its incorporation of fantastical elements, its offering 'of a mythic world of
magic and horror, a notable absence of women, and a consequent obses-
sion with masculinity. Ofi:en homage to the Hollywood Western verges
on irreverence, mannerism, and pastiche - with male sadomasochism, for
example, at times pushed to the edges ofparody' (Kuhn and Westwell 20!2.:
n.p.). In effect, the Spaghetti Western is a form of exploitation cinema, like
horror. Tarantino's blurring of genres, as I will suggest, calls into question
the sentimentality and coherence of the war film, the hollowness of the
Western's values, and the gender constraints of the Spaghetti Western.
Tarantino's play on pastiche is established from the film's outset. As the
opening credits roll, we hear Dimitri Tiomkin's and Paul Francis Webster's
'The Green Leaves of Summer' from The Alamo (John Wayne, 1960) as we
read the tides in four fonts - including, as is typical of the Western, Playbill
- and in two colours. The juxtaposition of these different lettering styles
prepares us for a work that is highly self-conscious in its engagement with
genre, as does the tide card: the words 'Chapter One' are suggestive of a
long narrative, 'Once upon a time .. .' of a fairy-tale, and 'in Nazi-occupied
France' of history. The tide card is followed by a widescreen shot of an
impressive landscape with a farm, which foregrounds both its isolation
and the threats that the environment poses, while the date 1941 appears at
the bottom of the screen. This last touch ensures 'an opening that simul-
taneously belongs to the a-historical time oflegend or fairytale and to
chronological, historical time, and that thus seems to indicate that this
a-temporality at the heart of historical time occupies its center' (Peretz 20ro:
69 ). A farmer is cutting at a tree stump, while a woman hangs up laundry.
The remoteness of the dairy-farmer's home in the countryside of Nancy,
France, as emphasized by the extreme long shot of the two characters, evokes
both the landscape with which the Western is associated and its lawlessness,
usually (though not in this case) before the Westerner's arrival. Despite the
appearance, not of the aforementioned Westerner, but of the Nazi soldiers,
this landscape is characteristically Westernesque. In fact, Tarantino con-
siders the landscape of Europe during the Second World War to be 'much
more unforgiving and hostile' than that of the American Western: 'It's
very violent, life is cheap, death is around the corner at any moment.[ ... ]
And something I find very, very interesting about the opening chapter of
Pastiche, Genre and "Violence in Quentin Tarantino's lnglourious Basterds 51
Jnglourious Basterds is that, even with the Nazi uniforms, even with the
motorcycles and the car, it doesn't break the [W]estern feel' (Gilbey 2009:
1 8). The film's Western ambience is also given musical expression by Ennio
Morricone's 'The Verdict' from The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1966)
- a composition that riffs on Beethoven's 'Fiir Elise'.
If the text becomes a contact zone between Tarantino and the films
that he admires, and between the director and the viewer, then this instance
of pastiche also invites a dialectic approach that encourages multiple levels
of interpretation dependent on our individual knowledge of and experi-
ences with previous texts. As Richard Dyer writes, '[Pastiche] is social: it
always accepts and indicates what is really the case in cultural production,
that it exists by virtue of the forms and frameworks of meaning and affect
available to it; it acknowledges itself as being in the realm of the already
said' (2007: 179 ). Pastiche is not repetition and it carries the potential
to contribute to the tradition from which the pastiche emerges and to
encourage conversations. This allusive opening sequence prepares us for
Fredrick and Shosanna, for both of whom Tarantino turns to genre films:
Fredrick is recognizably a Westerner in his first meeting with Shosanna,
who, in turns, invokes the femme fatale. For Warshaw, the Westerner is
the synthesis of imagery and mythology:
What does the Westerner fight for? We know he is on the side of justice and order,
and of course it can be said he fights for these things. But such broad aims never
correspond exactly to his real motives; they only offer him his opportunity. The
Westerner himself, when an explanation is asked of him (usually by a woman), is
likely to say that he does what he 'has to do'. (1998: 38).
The same holds true for Fredrick, whose military 'achievement' enhances
his career and supports a cause that is fundamentally wrong - even if he,
as Warshaw writes of the Westerner, 'defends, at bottom, the purity of his
own image - in fact his honor' (1998: 38). If'[t]he Westerner is par excel-
lence a man ofleisure' (Warshaw 1998: 37 ), then it is fitting that Fredrick
meets her for the first time in front ofLe Gamaar (and, for that matter, for
the second time in the French bistro). That Tarantino sides this culturally
significant figure with Nazism suggests only more emphatically the ironic
distance between what Fredrick looks like - he never appears out of his
52 TOMUE
uniform - and what he does, inviting us to question the Western genre, its
codes and its ideologies, and Fredrick's role and status.
The disparity between Fredrick's appearance and his actions invites
comparison with Colonel Landa's (Christoph Waltz) and his. In response
to the farmer LaPadite's (Denis Menochet) delayed and reluctant answer
that he is nicknamed 'Jew Hunter', Landa declares:
Precisely! Now I understand your trepidation in repeating it. Heydrich apparently
hates the moniker the good people of Prague have bestowed on him. Actually, why
he would hate the name 'the Hangman' is baffiing to me. It would appear he has done
everything in his power to earn it. Now I, on the other hand, love my unofficial title,
precisely because I've earned it. (Emphases in film)
Landa's self-identification as a detective, which is corroborated by his yellow
calabash pipe, and his subsequent role as the prince from Cinderella - he
restores and helps the German star Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane
Kruger) to her misplaced shoe - obviate his participation in ethnic cleans-
ing and in her murder. Landa will reject his nickname by the film's end:
'I'm a detective. A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty,
so naturally I worked for the Nazis finding people. And, yes, some of them
were Jews. But Jew Hunter? [Snorts] Just the name that stuck: Whether
Landa's conversation with Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and Utivich
(B.]. Novak) reflects a change in his attitude or shows him to be an oppor-
tunist who is willing to swap sides for his military pension and benefits,
for a Congressional Medal of Honor, for American citizenship, and for
property on Nantucket Island, the film's opening - more specifically, the
rumours that LaPadite repeats and our witnessing ofLanda's discovery and
massacre of Shosanna's family - prevents us from identifying him as any
detective.4 We too should read Fredrick's military actions more critically:
4. Tarantino himself supports our reading of Landa as an opportunist: '[Landa J's not
a rabid Third Reicher. The Nazis aren't a religion for him; he's a very practical man.
As he says, he's a great detective. [... ] Patriotism and fidelity to the party are not
his strongest objectives. But he's a detective, and it's obvious he's a damn good one'
(Gilbey 2009: 20 ). For Eyal Peretz, Landa has no real identity and this enables him
to adopt any role, though even he reaches his limits as actor and director I controller
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 53
he is not merely a good soldier; even in the hollowness of his values he is
a Westerner.
For all Fredrick's claims that he is not just a uniform, he is shown as
not much more than one. In Tarantino's screenplay, Fredrick tells Shosanna
about his family in their meeting at the French bistro:
I come from a home of six sisters. We run a family-operated cinema in Munich. Seeing
you run around your cinema reminds me of them. [... ] My sisters are all I need. It's
why I like your cinema. It makes me feel both closer to them and a little homesick
at the same time. (2009: 50)
By denying Fredrick a fuller backstory, Tarantino makes him even more of a
uniform. He may be a self-made man and not the son of someone especially
famous, but he is known only for his marksmanship, his dean-shaven good
looks, his costume, his interest in cinema, and his persistent desire to win
Shosanna's affections. Shored up by Goebbel's film, Fredrick is preposi-
tioned to see himself as the star of his own Western and the natural object
of admiration. Shosanna's attempts to show her inability to reciprocate his
interest, therefore, provoke deep feelings of insecurity in him. His unwanted
advances are motivated at least as much by his thirst to win Shosanna and
to protect his endangered image as they are by his actual romantic interest.
The film draws on more genres than just the Western, and as Eyal Peretz
has convincingly argued, 'Tarantino transitions among a multiplicity of
genres/frames, and it is only in doing so that a genre is allowed to appear as
genre, that is as a specific frame, for any given frame always stands in rela-
tion to other possible frames' (2010: 66). Just as Tarantino questions the
Western through Fredrick, he spurs us to reconsider the film noir through
Shosanna. Shosanna's decision 'to apply her sexuality to homicidal plots'
is characteristic of the femme fatale (Boozer 1999-2000: 20 ). Tarantino's
staging of Fredrick's and Shosanna's first meeting - he sees the boyishly
attired Shosanna perched on top of a ladder as she changes the letters on
the marquee of Le Gamaar - invokes the femme fatale:
of all frames twice in the film: first, when he kills Bridget out of rage; and second,
when he is marked by Aldo Raine (2010: 67-8).
'1' 1'
l1!,
111
11 54 TOMUE
'
111 The iconography is explicitly sexual, and often explicitly violent as well: long hair
(blond or dark), makeup, and jewellery. Cigarettes with their wispy trails of smoke
can become cues of dark and immoral sensuality, and the iconography of violence
I (primarily guns) is a specific symbol (as is perhaps the cigarette) of her 'unnatural'
phallic power. The femme fatale is characterized by her long lovely legs [... ] Dress -
I orlack of it - further defines the woman. (Place 1980: 43-5)
1
Shosanna's well-covered legs in this scene, her smoking in the next, and
her make-up and attire (a poppy-red dress) in the final one are much in
keepingwithJaney Place's terms. Shosanna's plot is motivated by her desire
for revenge and not 'in the service of greed' (Boozer 1999-2000: 20 ), an
important change that speaks to Tarantino's adaptation of the genre. 5
For Sylvia Harvey, the family is regularly 'the vehicle for the expression of
frustration' in the film noir:
[T]here is another level of analysis beyond that of theme where things are not what
they seem at the surface level of narrative and plot. One of the fundamental opera-
tions at this concealed level has to do with the non-fulfilment of desire. The way in
which this underlying frustration or non-fulfilment is translated into, or expressed
at, the thematic level in film noir is through the representation of romantic love
relations, the family and family relations. (1980: 23) 6
Jack Boozer offers an incisive account of the changes brought to bear on the character
type and the changing social-economic climates on which it offers reflection. As he
reveals, ' [t ]he history of thefemmefatale's representation signals the increasing asser-
tion of consumerist ambition and sexualized money power over all other principles.
The representation of her obsessions point increasingly to an alienated expressivity
that can only reiterate lust in the terms of the dominant signifier' (1999-2.000: 32-3).
6 The family is a plot device that is familiar in both the Western and the film noir,
wherein the roles accorded to men and women are similarly unequal. According
to Warshow, 'in Western movies, men have the deeper wisdom and the women are
children. Those women in the Western movies who share the hero's understanding
of life are prostitutes (or, as they are usually presented, bar-room entertainers) -
women, that is, who have come to understand in the most practical way how love can
be an irrelevance, and therefore "fallen women"' ( 1998: 37 ). The Spaghetti Western,
as Kuhn and Westwell have argued, privileges masculinity and often verges on male
sadomasochism. Place sees a similar structure at work in the film noir, where 'women
are defined in relation to men, and the centrality of sexuality in this definition is a
key to understanding the position of women in our culture' (2.012: 35).
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 55
In the screenplay, Fredrick's volunteering of Shosanna's theatre for the
premiere of Nation's Pride likely stems from her complaints that French
cinemas operate under a curfew, that she had not filled her theatre since
the war began, and that a big engagement would help it. Tarantino's omis-
sion suggests more forcibly that Fredrick is motivated by his desire for her
goodwill rather than her theatre's survival. Even if Fredrick does not con-
fess to physical and emotional loneliness as a foreigner in a country that
his has now occupied, he continues to seek in Shosanna what Harvey has
termed 'an ideological safety valve':
Presented as prizes, desirable objects [women J seem to offer a temporary satisfaction
to the men of film noir. In the (false) satisfactions that they represent, they might be
seen to prevent the mood of despondency and loss, characteristic of these films, from
being translated into an understanding and analysis of the conditions that produce
the sense of alienation and loss. (l 9 8 o: 2 7)
Ironically, domesticity and validation, the values that Fredrick seeks in
Shosanna, emphatically in the screenplay and more subconsciously in the
film, are precisely what Landa and the officers under his command have
deprived her of and what she finds in her lover and willing accomplice
Marcel (Jacky Ido). Shosanna routinely shuns these roles, and, as in the
film noir, 'the ideological safety valve device[ ... ] breaks down[ ... ] because
the women are not, finally, possessed' (Harvey 1980: 27 ).
Fredrick and Shosanna at the Movies
The remainder of this chapter examines Fredrick's and Shosanna's responses
to Nation's Pride, insofar as it constitutes both a central pastiche and a
point of convergence for the Western and the film noir that the two char-
acters come to emblematize. At the premiere, we get not one or two, but
five reaction shots of Fredrick, the character who hunted down Russian
soldiers, and the film's leading man. As he watches his actions depicted on
screen, he is shown to be disturbed. In the last shot, in response to both
i:!i
!IJ
:i
/!1
56 TOM UE
1J
the film and Hitler and Goebbels laughing as they enjoy it, Fredrick leaves
i
to look for Shosanna. While Nation's Pride elicits a strong reaction from
him, he does not become a more moral viewer than those of the embed-
r ded film, who applaud at every soldier Fredrick kills and at his carving a
swastika. When he finds Shosanna, he does not behave with significantly
more respect towards her, ignoring her increasingly forceful rejections:
SHOSANNA: I am sorry, Fredrick, but -
FREDRICK: - So, I thought ... I'd come up here and do what I do best ... annoy
you. And from the look on your face, it would appear I haven't lost
my touch.
SHOSANNA: Are you so used to the Nazis kissing your ass ... you've forgotten what
the word 'no' means? No ... you can't be here! Now go away!
As she tries to close the door, he pushes his way in, knocking her back into
the room.
SHOSANNA: Fredrick, you hurt me.
FREDRICK: Well, it's nice to kn ow you can feel something. Even if it's just physical
pain. I'm not a man you say 'go away' to. There's over three hundred
dead bodies in Italy that, if they could, would testify to that! After
what I've done for you ... you disrespect me at your peril!
Fredrick views Shosanna's refusals as both a threat and a challenge, and he
effectively realizes what Laura Mulvey, following Freud, has described as
'castration anxiety':
The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: pre-
occupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman,
demystifying her mystery) counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment of saving
of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else
complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning
the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than
dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). (i.009: i.i.)
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 57
Shosanna is elusive to Fredrick, who never learns about her past: he knows
only that she inherited the cinema from her aunt. Although his troubled
feelings carry the potential to make him reflect on his accepted ideologies,
as well as his past, present, and future actions more critically, he only sees
his military performance as an indication of his individual power, and the
deaths as being just that. The film, in a reversal of the castration threat
posed by Shosanna, serves as validation, invigorates his self-worth, and
makes him more aware of how dangerous he is.
By contrast, Nation's Pride elicits a markedly different response from
Shosanna, and this is best illustrated by a close examination of the screen-
play of the scene after Shosanna shoots Fredrick when her gaze oscillates
between the audience watching Nation's Pride and her victim:
Her eyes go.from the audience ...
... up to the screen ...
... which holds Fredrick Zoller in a tight, handsome closeup.
1heface on the silver screen breaks the young girl's heart ...
... She looks to his body, lyingface down on the floor, bloodflowing.from the holes she
put in his back ...
... His body moves a little, and he lets out a painful moan .. .
... Dying though he is, at this moment Fredrick is still alive .. .
Shosanna moves to him ...
... She touches him, and he lets out another moan ...
... She turns his body over on its back ...
... He's holding a luger in his hand ...
... He fires twice ...
Bang Bang.
Two bullets hit her point blank in the chest ... (Tarantino i.009: 156)
While Shosanna has no qualms about killing Fredrick and everyone else
in the theatre, the juxtaposition of his face on screen and his dying body
clothed in a white uniform, with his many medals concealed from her -
images set against the extradiegetic and deeply moving score ofMorricone's
'Un Amico' from Revolver (Sergio Sollima, I973) - renders her susceptible
to Fredrick's attack. As much as Tarantino insists that he 'ha[ s] never for-
gotten while [he] was watching a movie that [he] was watching a movie'
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(Elfman 2009: 164), the entranced Shosanna's response owes partially to
the 'hermetically sealed world' that the film experience offers:
, Mulvey has identified as women's 'traditional exhibitionist role', one in
[T]he extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates
the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shitting patterns of light
1
and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation.
Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening
and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion oflooking in on a private
world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly
one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to
the performer. (Mulvey 2009: 17)
But Shosanna is likewise moved by Fredrick's body: she ought, after all, to
have seen the film multiple times to know where to place her coda. The
juxtaposition of the two characters' reactions suggests the importance of
remove - specifically artistic remove - from an object and the independence
to see it more clearly or at least in a different light, and they are central to
Tarantino's use of film as a moti£ Whereas Fredrick's viewing of Nation's
Pride brings out his excessive pride and his small regard for Shosanna, hers
makes the theatre proprietor more sensitive, sympathetic, and ultimately
vulnerable, especially towards her oafish suitor.
In the embedded film, Fredrick asks rhetorically, after killing a large
number of soldiers: 'Who wants to send a message to Germany?' Shosanna
films and grafts her own 'message' onto the film. Through a dose-up in the
movie screen, she responds, 'I have a message for Germany. That you are
all going to die. [... J And I want you to look deep into the face of the Jew
who's going to do it![ ... ] Marcel, burn it down.[ ... ] My name is Shosanna
Dreyfus, and this is the face ofJewish vengeance: 7 Here, as in the case of
Bridget, who masterminds Operation Kino and who unhesitatingly shoots
7 As Jason Haslam suggests, Tarantino converses with Victor Fleming's 1he Ulizard
ofOz (1939) in this instance. Where the earlier film warns us against conflating the
image with the real and encourages us to 'look behind the curtain [... ] [and not to J
mistake real courage, intelligence and affect for the mere images thereof: Tarantino's
argues for the significance of the image, from the surface of which 'the viewer can
construct and find a space for intellectual engagement and hopeful social transfor-
mation' (2013: 193).
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 59
the new father, Sergeant Wilhelm (Alexander Fehling) notwithstanding
his pact with Aldo, Tarantino can be seen as rewriting and reversing what
which they are visually and erotically coded for gazing upon and display
(2009: 19). As John Rieder puts it,
Tarantino manages the climactic moment of the revenge fantasy itself [... ] as a gro-
tesquely brilliant realisation of what Laura Mulvey calls the anti-diegetic power of
femininity-as-spectacle to freeze the narrative progress - literally halting the film-
within-a-film, figuratively slaying the fictive audience with her petrifying, Gorgon
gaze. Her power to do so is based, from the moment of her meeting Zoller, on her
ability to attract and hold the 'gaze' of male desire and to subvert it to her own ends.
It all amounts to something like a textbook demonstration of the co-dependence of
sadistic and scopophilic pleasures in narrative cinema. (2011: 53)
8
We might compare Tarantino's decisions here with those of Rob Marshall
in his film musicals Chicago (2002) andNine (2009), both of which hone
in on as much as they offer commentary on the display of women and their
treatment as ideological safety valves. The former opens with an extreme
close-up of an eye, to which the camera zooms in, and it is not until a
while later, through a kind of delayed decoding, that we see that the eye
belongs to Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), who is watching Velma Kelly
(Catherine Zeta-Jones) perform the musical number 'All That Jazz' in a
1920s nightclub. If this opening segment sensitizes us to Roxie's aspirations
to perform, then the repeated image of the eye punningly calls attention to
the processes of perception and reception and the centrality of their roles
to individuality and subjectivity, and it makes porous the walls between
Roxie, who watches Velma, and us, as the film's viewers. Momentarily, we
8 Mulvey identifies 'two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures oflooking
in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in
seeing another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second,
developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identifica-
tion with the image seen' (2009: 18).Jason Haslam argues thatBasterds 'undertakes
the task of rebuilding a distance between culture and history that allows simulta-
neously for the reintegration of pleasure and for the creation of a critical - because
subjective and unpredictable - intellectual engagement' (2013: 181).
111,
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60 TOMUE
i
see Roxie on stage, wearing Velma's dress and finishing her line by con-
tributing the pivotal stress 'Jazz' - a filmic decision that forcibly demon-
strates how easily Roxie can and eventually does replace and displace Velma.
Marshall's concern over the substitutability of the individual reverberates
in Nine, where Claudia (Nicole Kidman) the actress declines her director
Guido's (Daniel Day-Lewis) offer to make her emblematic of'the muses,
the incredible women that made Italy what it is today. A country run by
men ... who are themselves run by women, whether they know it or not'.
Claudia refuses to join 'the women behind the great men' and asserts,
decisively: 'I'd rather be the man.' Elaborating further, during her musical
number 'Unusual Way': 'These women who come off their pedestals for a
kiss, they're just fantasies'.
Tarantino himself offers a number of ways for reading the film's con-
clusion: 'On the one hand, it's a really juicy metaphor, the idea of cinema
bringing down the Third Reich. On the other hand, it's not a metaphor at
all, it is actually what's happening: 35 mm film is bringing down the Third
Reich! I can honestly say that when I conceived of that ending, it was
one of the most exciting moments of inspiration I've ever had as a writer'
(Gilbey 2009: 18). He suggests an alternative, though equally compelling,
possibility:
[L Jet's contemplate that pile of film stock for a second now. What if that pile of
film - and I don't talk about it in the movie, but let's think about it now - what ifit
is Shosanna's collection of 35 mm films that've been banned by the Nazis? Let's say
that's Grand Illusion. Let's say that's Mayerling, Duck Soup, Ihe Kid. Let's say it's all
those. If that's the case, then it's almost as if Papa Jean Renoir himself is helping to
bring down the Nazis! OK. But now, let's look at the other possibility. Let's say those
are all Goebbels' films. You're looking at 300 prints of Nazi propaganda, so now it's
Goebbel's own creations that are bringing down the Third Reich. ( Gilbey 2009: 19)
The greater narrative interest on Shosanna's face, on her words, and on
Marcel who is setting fire to her heavily flammable collection of over 350
35 mm nitrate film prints in the theatre, may spur us to overlook the fact
that, for the first time in the film, both Fredrick and Shosanna are speaking
neither French nor German, but English, so that their words seem directed
not to the German audience members of the theatre, but to an extradiegetic
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's lnglourious Basterds 61
English-speaking audience (that is, us). This shift in language gives the film
and its message even greater urgency and it effectively breaks down the wall
that separates the film and us. Throughout Basterds, Tarantino constantly
parallels our viewing of the film with the German's viewing of Nation's
Pride, most emphatically via the recurring motif of hunting in both films.
As Shosanna prepares for the premiere of Nation's Pride, she draws a
single line of rouge on her cheeks, much like the standard issue image of a
Native American hunter, and this gesture evokes Fredrick's hunting in the
bird's nest. This parallel is lent support by a subsequent scene in which she
wields a hatchet as she and Marcel threaten a film developer to process her
35 mm print, and by the cinema balcony, which becomes a kind of bird's
nest for the Basterds Donny and Hirschberg (Samm Levine) as they prey
upon the German viewers watching Nation's Pride - though all of these
characters are in Shosanna's nest. 9 The parallel is further supported by the
refrain of 3oos. Where Fredrick claims to have killed over 300, Shosanna's
cinema seats 350 and she uses over 350 films to carry out her revenge. If
pastiches are social, then the ones inBasterds enable Tarantino to confront
ethical concerns where Jews become the hunters and Nazis the hunted in
a comically (ifgrotesquely) distorted past. As the devastation plays out on
the theatre screens of both Nation's Pride and Basterds, our watching of
the film may evoke the Germans' watching of the former. However, our
experiences are fundamentally different. As Matthew Boswell writes, 'the
film conforms to the humanist grounding of Holocaust impiety and blasts
open the binary logic of othering- good and evil, us and them, human and
monster - that is adhered to by Landa and Raine alike' ( 2012: 176). We do
not identify with the reductive image of the German audience members
represented in Basterds, with Fredrick, or even with Shosanna, and the
violence represented in the film repeatedly challenges us to be more critical
9 Tarantino suggests another parallel in his interview with Ella Taylor: 'Aldo has
been fighting racism in the South; he was fighting the Klan before he ever got into
the Second World War. And the fact that Aldo is part Indian is a very important
aspect of my whole conception, of turning the Jews into American Indians fighting
the unfightable, losing cause. Also, the dichotomy of this southern hillbilly and his
verbiage bouncing off them is interesting' (2013: 155).
 62 TOMUE
in our enjoyment of the Western and the film noir, their codes, and their
gender ideologies, and it tests and contests our own viewpoints. As Charles
Taylor suggests, the difficulty of the film is married to its subject matter
(2010: 106). Tarantino's revenge fantasy may open with 'Once upon a time;
but he challenges us to be more responsible viewers. In so doing, Tarantino,
to use his terms, offers a new chapter that denies us the closure promised
by 'happily ever after' and that ultimately provokes us to develop a more
ethical vocabulary for thinking about history through the counterfactual.
Filmography
Alamo, The. Dir.John Wayne. 1960.
Big Gundown, The. Dir. Sergio Sollima. 1966.
Chicago: The Razzle-Dazzle Edition. Dir. Rob Marshall. 2002.
Django Unchained. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2012.
Hateful Eight, The. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2015.
Hunger Games, The. Dir. Gary Ross. 2012.
Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The. Dir. Francis Lawrence. 2013.
Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I, The. Dir. Francis Lawrence. 2014.
Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, The. Dir. Francis Lawrence. 2015.
Inglourious Basterds. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. 2009.
Nation's Pride. Dir. Eli Roth. In Inglourious Basterds. 2009.
Nine. Dir. Rob Marshall. 2009.
Revolver. Dir. Sergio Sollima. 1973.
Sergeant York. Dir. Howard Hawks. 194r.
Wizard ofOz, The. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939.
Pastiche, Genre and Violence in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 63
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The Tracker and the Limits of Auteurism
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ABSTRACT
Rolf de Heer, a Dutch-Australian migrant and writer-director, has created some of the
most incisive and well-known films in contemporary Australian cinema, including but not
limited to The Tracker (2002), Ten Canoes (2006), Twelve Canoes (2008) and Charlie's
Country (2013). His oeuvre examines, in particular, the nature of relationships between
colonized and colonizer and challenges us to reconsider the nature of the Western itself
and how its tropes apply to international contexts, the historicity of the Western, and the
genre's connections to themes ofidentity and origin mythology. While de Heer's status as
an auteur exists relatively unchallenged amongst film critics, this chapter uses the de Heer
film The Tracker to explore not only the ways in which de Heer fits within traditional defini-
tions of'auteur' but also, and perhaps most significantly, the potential limits of auteurism,
given the extent to which de Heer was bound by contextual and historical discourses, star
power, studio systems and other factors. Further, while a great deal of scholarly attention
has been directed towards understanding the changing representation and reception of
First Nation Peoples in the American Western film genre, less attention has been paid to
the representation oflndigenous Australians in Australian Westerns. This chapter examines
the ways in which such representation intersects with history, auteur and international
genre entanglements, to various effect.

This chapter will examine the Dutch-Australian directpr, writer and pro-
ducer Rolf de Heer's 2002 Australian Western film 'Jh~ Tracker, utilizing
the lens of auteur theory with a view to considering 'whether, in telling
colonial settler histories, there are 'limits' to auteurism. It will interrogate
three potential limits to de Heer's authorship of The Tracker: the historical
context of the film production; the star - actor David Gulpilil - as auteur;
and whether there are ethical implications to authoring stories that focus
on experiences oflndigeneity as a white Australian, implications that may