Morelia International Film Festival

Special Guests 2009

Quentin Tarantino

Perhaps no other filmmaker in the last decades has spurred as much controversy and polarized audiences and critics to the degree that Quentin Tarantino has. In the mid nineties, with just two films under his belt--the milestone of independent cinema, Reservoir Dogs, which had its explosive release at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, and the cult hit and 1994 Palme d’Or Winner Pulp Fiction--Tarantino became an instant auteur, hailed icon of post-modern cinema and master of bravura filmmaking. His rise from video-store clerk to international fame as one of the most fiercely talented and innovative directors in contemporary cinema is legendary. There is indeed the Tarantino made out by the press, his fans and critics: the high-school dropout and self-proclaimed film geek whose film training consisted of repeated visits to the movie theater, and several years working behind the counter and voraciously viewing films at the Manhattan Beach Video Archives; the badass filmmaker who made pop culture his universe of reference, and whose archive of comic books, American hardboiled crime fiction, and exploitation film earned him cult film glory; and the provocateur who has not ceased to shock audiences and critics with the violence that characterizes both his aesthetic and his favored themes.

Yet the much condemned “excess violence” attributed to his style is arguably more the trademark remark of his critics than the hallmark of his filmmaking--and the frequent objections to the “gratuitous” use of graphic violence, perhaps a tad misplaced. The use of violence is something Tarantino has long settled as an intrinsic aspect of his aesthetic, as something inherently cinematic (comparable to dance sequences) and a matter entirely of taste. And in fact, the flashiest sequences in Tarantino films are often not the graphic exposés of violence, but the witty dialogues, memorable characters and prodigiously choreographed shot sequences. Yet there is something acutely threatening about his style that cannot be simply dismissed by his detractors as the immature, testosterone-laden sensationalism of a cinephileturned- superstar director.

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If the infamous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs is his first film’s most cited sequence, it should not overshadow what constitutes the film’s most brutal element: a complex temporal structure in which the viewer is subject to experience in “real time” the characters’ agony following a botched heist. Constructed around a suppressed event and propelled by “accidents” and reactions, the film’s nonlinear narrative produces a sense of unnerving unpredictability against the backdrop of a slow and certain death: the blood trickling from Mr. Orange’s (Tim Roth) abdomen serves as the hourglass that imposes the continuous and inevitable progression of death. This narrative density, present in every one of Tarantino’s films, is compounded by the director’s attunement to the rhythms, gestures, and language of characters. He can extract richly nuanced performances from his actors, and imbue his characters with a sharp duplicity--these constantly “get into character” before our eyes, as Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega ( John Travolta) do before taking out the kids in Pulp Fiction, or Mr. Orange as he memorizes his lines before he goes undercover. Tarantino’s films are simultaneously stories about characters, about genres, and about cinema. This is the true perversity of his films—that they persistently violate our expectations, they produce violence in the structure of comedy, they orchestrate moments of tenderness and intimacy in the most unlikely situations and characters. Everywhere, we get glimpses of awkward humanism that betray the calculated professionalism of his ruthless characters. And these unexpected moments of pathos, rather than blood spattering and bang, are what complicate our relationship to the screen and underscore the intensity of his films.

This is the Tarantino that is often eclipsed by his reputation as cinema’s enfant terrible and by the exaltation of his postmodern cache: the gifted storyteller whose profound understanding of character and keen sense of timing inform the visceral force of his films; the man who spent six years studying acting with James Best and Allen Garfield and developed an uncanny ability to invent and inhabit an entire universe of eccentric personalities-- and who has produced some of the most powerful and memorable female characters in contemporary film: Kill Bill’s The Bride (Uma Thurman) Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and, most recently Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) as the vengeful heroine in Inglourious Basterds. There is also Tarantino, the accomplished screenwriter who has arguably, single-handedly revolutionized the medium by rewriting the rules of narrative structure and continuity and infusing filmmaking with novelistic style (he counts among his literary influences Elmore Leonard and J.D. Salinger). And finally there is the cinephile whose erudite understanding of the medium and history of cinema is evident not only in the way he performs an archaeology of film in the text of his films, but also in his efforts to promote talented filmmakers from around the world through alternative distribution ventures, such as his Rolling Thunder Pictures (which introduced, among others, Wong Kar Wai to American audiences). Despite his status as guru of bricolage aesthetics, Tarantino does not live in the past—if he distorts and rewrites genre, it is to create something new and push the boundaries of filmmaking. He has his head turned to the future.
His latest film, Inglourious Basterds, released a couple of weeks ago with great success, not surprisingly is already encountering strong reactions. Treading difficult territory by choosing to rework the World War II genre—a genre traditionally focused on victims’ plight—and transfiguring it into a Western/fantasy of revenge, Tarantino is sure to offend some sensibilities. Some will be horrified at the desecration of “history;” purists will cringe at the sight of hundreds of thousands of feet of nitrate film being burnt to the ground. But just as well, there will be those who will be laughing with Shosanna Dreyfus (and Mr. Tarantino) during one of cinema’s most respectfully irreverent and spectacular endings— a grand finale that literalizes the power of cinema to become something else: a weapon of mass destruction that can blow up the Nazis, end a world war, or...

Mara Fortes.

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