I don’t know if I understand the film, but I’m sure it understands me. Subversive, volatile, fascinating, even funny, Tarantino’s alternative take on World War II is a feast for the senses and the self. Set roughly after D-Day, but just before the liberation of Paris, it meets our discomfort with the iron-jawed assurance that we don’t just need to see what we’re seeing; we want to see it.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” Tarantino has said. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”1

The outlandish cartoon that he’s created solidifies his position as a cinematic circus conductor. Yet, to reduce Tarantino’s film to the shock-and-awe campaign that critics too eagerly evoke is to miss the point entirely. This film begs to be understood, yet its originality has managed to separate from its meaning. Whether intentionally or not, Basterds marks a point of cinematic reflection that has been a long time coming, a sure sign of the generational disconnect that has been slowly taking place.

I can trace an evolution in Holocaust cinema, all culminating in Tarantino’s work of hyper-reality. Holocaust films offer us a collective chance to reflect on the historical moment. But the fascination and the danger of Holocaust cinema reside in the process of rewriting, when the cinematic and the historical come together and our connection with history is questioned. Recent Holocaust texts illustrate the decay of memory that occurs with every passing year and every passing survivor, and Tarantino speaks for us as the voice of the distant, for those who, in the years since the Holocaust, have watched history detach itself from the tangible.

In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that images are “a way of imprisoning reality… of making it stand still…One can’t possess reality. One can possess (or be possessed by) images.”2 Alain Resnais muses on this fact in his 1955 documentary Night and Fog (France), produced just ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps. In a mere 35 minutes, the film manages to cut to the heart of Nazi ideology and the horrors behind closed camp doors.

Using black-and-white archival footage, depicting the arrival of the exiled Jews by train, Resnais cuts through the lucid dark of the countryside with the razor tint of a switchblade. As he merges these images with color footage of the camps in their postwar fog, we are suddenly privy to the haunting stillness of an indifferent landscape, where once occurred such atrocity that we scarcely speak its name.

“I would have nightmares,” Resnais recounts of his time assembling the film. “It wasn’t until my time [at Auschwitz], interestingly enough, that I was freed of the demons…there was no longer interpretation; [the images] were gone and I was faced with reality.”3

"Schindler’s List." (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Able to magnify a reality that might otherwise be ignored, film can also clarify the incomprehensible. We bear
witness to a creator’s subjectification of reality, and through this reach our own conclusions about the larger event. But in doing so, a potential paradox of catharsis and exploitation is realized. Resnais’s film, while offering a collective release by bringing attention to the atrocity, borders on this tendency. What the film does do unquestionably is ask us to consider the temporality of reflection—namely, when we look back and why.

The ten-year gap between the liberation of the camps and the release of Night and Fog allows for a particularly self-incriminating form of retrospection. Ewout van der Knaap once boldly reflected on the film’s cultural impact at the time of its release.”It was with the analysis of [Night and Fog], the process of viewing it, digesting it, that [our collective culture] was able to understand the Holocaust—that others had the ability to experience it. It created a sense of memory…it can thus be regarded as a litmus test for the state of collective memory.”4 Where Sontag speaks of the fleeting essence of memory and its relation to celluloid, Knaap claims that Resnais’s work granted us nothing short of reality, the ability to truly reflect on the horror of the Holocaust as an event.

Typically, film adaptations of history rely on the viewer’s application of their memory for the text’s progression. But Night and Fog instead works to create the memory, using its timeframe to grant a collective understanding of the event.
This was the moment the horrors of the Holocaust invaded not just Jewish history, but collective culture, where cinema transformed it into the people’s atrocity, asking us to consider the role of our collective memory, and what it means to reflect back with questions of accountability.

And then, we moved on.

"Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog). (Alain Resnais, 1955 France)

The further we got from the war itself, the more our texts had to adapt. Each film wrote about the savagery of those twelve years, and the body of work gradually became more homogenous. Take for instance Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), which crafts a fictional narrative around the realities of the camps. Spielberg, who shot almost entirely on location—even going so far as to use the actual Auschwitz gates—goes a step beyond Resnais. He refuses to simply allow us to reflect on the memory, and opts instead to recreate it, depicting the atrocity “as it happened.”

But to whom is he speaking? Resnais’s film addressed both the survivors of the war and its aggressors. It spoke to a country that, just ten years prior, had been affiliated with the Nazi regime. Spielberg crafted a film for neither the war’s survivors nor its collaborators, but rather an audience that craves the kind of conclusion that Resnais couldn’t give us, because the war never gave it to us either. It sacrifices its convictions for its viewer, resigning itself into a liberal-guilt film that parades its Nazi-turned-hero as not just a moment of cinematic revision, but collective redemption.  But the camera can never truly capture the history, the memory. It never went in those rooms, never witnessed those crimes. Yet we still crave the kind of simplification that the image provides.

Sontag once analogized this impulse to a model of consumption: “To consume means to burn, to use up—and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more.”5 Claude Lanzmann, the creator of the nine-hour Holocaust documentary series Shoah (1985, France), once stated that if he were ever to find a single reel of footage documenting the gassing of a Jew, he would burn the footage immediately. I never understood why, what the reasoning would be to destroy the footage of the atrocity itself.

But I realize now, as he did then, that the collective memory of the event enforces the need for something more than a recording. In the same way that my reflection can never articulate the films I’m writing about, none of the films can convey the horrors to which they refer. Instead, it’s the memory that must be preserved. The tastelessness of recreating the events bypasses cinema’s actual power to contextualize our relationship to history.

Then on the eighth day, God gave us Tarantino.

His sixth feature, Inglourious Basterds, depicts an alternative World War II, where the cinema plays a pivotal role in the defeat of the Third Reich, both in the narrative and outside it. In just over fifty years from the time of Night and Fog, Tarantino gives us the polar opposite reflection of Jewish history, the postmodern spin on memory and its malleability. If Night and Fog depicted the ambiguities surrounding spectatorship, then Basterds represents the absolute necessity of the spectator.

Consider its controversial finale. We see Lanzmann’s vow brought to life when 350 nitrate film reels are set ablaze in a movie theatre as the Nazis and Hitler himself (played with Chaplin-like excess) watch a propaganda film of their own making, Nation’s Pride. We watch them watch a fictionalized account of their history, and here Tarantino is aligning these two sets of spectators: the aggressors of the very war he’s referencing, and those that digest the history itself.
This is Tarantino’s most blatant affirmation of the film’s position as fantasy, one that could only take place in the movie theater. Resnais’s film took our detached relationship to history as a means to reflect. Tarantino’s film uses that detachment as a means simply to avoid the history itself.

But perhaps this is the most cinematically moral act of them all. Sontag cites the risk in remembering, stating that “heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together…to make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”6 Maybe this is Tarantino’s sideways attempt at Holocaust reflection in the postmodern age, crafting a way for us to truly reflect and remember: by choosing to forget.

It is now, when we have been divided from the history itself, that Tarantino is able to do what he has done. And it is in this way that Inglourious Basterds is not just unique, but necessary: a triumph of collective desire. The goal becomes simply to digest and find solace in what Tarantino himself dubs a fantasy. And it is just that, a fantasy that only film can offer.

I watch these films—Night and Fog, Schindler’s List, and Inglourious Basterds (the reflection, the revision, and the rewrite)—and am struck by how my memory uses them. These films teach me the power of conflict, both in the past and in my relation to it. They attempt to speak on a history, on a fleeting moment in time. But they speak to us, for us, about us, granting us the bemused awareness of an unavoidable truth: terrible things did happen. Resnais knew this when he gave us the memory. Spielberg knew it when he used it against us. Tarantino knew it when he blew it up.

———————————————————————————————————

1 Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger.” Atlantic (2009). Web.
2 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Pp. 353-354. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
3 Knaap, Ewout Van Der. Uncovering the Holocaust: the International Reception of Night and Fog. London: Wallflower P., 2006
4 ibid.
5 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Pp. 367. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
6 ibid.

Waltz, a 53-year-old veteran actor of the European market, co-wrote the film’s script and may play a minor role in the film which is a loose adaptation of Meike Winnemuth and Peter Praschl’s novel, “Auf und Davon.”

Waltz’s impressive turn in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II revisionist picture has drummed up considerable interest from major studios stateside.  He is set to star in December’s “The Green Hornet” as well as “Water for Elephants,” which is slated to begin production this summer.

The central setting of “Up and Away” is a television dating game show.  The female host who also runs the show must deal with her adverse feelings about romance, which are more interested in its marketability than emotional impact. “When you make feelings a commodity, it’s not a feeling anymore,” Waltz says.

So since it’s going to be a German film made for German audiences will we get to see it over here in America?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Fox International President Sanford Panitch has found success in a non-traditional distribution model of making movies for specific local territories without the intent of worldwide marketing.  “Maybe there’s an opportunity for ‘Up and Away’ to travel, but that’s not the business model,” Panitch says. “We are making the movie for the German audience — and it’s a big enough market to matter, the fifth biggest in the world.”

Best Picture

“Avatar”

“The Hurt Locker”

“The Blind Side”

“District 9″

“An Education”

“Inglourious Basterds”

“Precious”

“Up”

“A Serious Man”

“Up in the Air”

Actor in a Leading Role

Jeff Bridges, “Crazy Heart”

George Clooney, “Up in the Air”

Colin Firth, “A Single Man”

Morgan Freeman, “Invictus”

Jeremy Renner, “The Hurt locker”

Actor in a Supporting Role

Matt Damon, “Invictus”

Christoph Waltz, “Inglourious Basterds”

Woody Harrelson, “The Messenger”

Christopher Plummer, “The Last Station”

Stanley Tucci, “The Lovely Bones”

Actress in a Leading Role

Sandra Bullock, “The Blind Side”

Gabourey Sidibe, “Precious”

Helen Mirren, “The Last Station”

Carey Mulligan, “An Education”

Mery Streep, “Julie & Julia”

Actress in a Supporting Role

Penélope Cruz, “Nine”

Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Crazy Heart”

Vera Farmiga, “Up in the Air”

Anna Kendrick, “Up in the Air”

Mo’Nique, “Precious”

Animated Feature

“Coraline”

“Fantastic Mr. Fox”

“Up”

“The Secret of Kells”

“The Princess and the Frog”

Directing

James Cameron, “Avatar”

Kathryn Bigelow, “The Hurt Locker”

Quentin Tarantino, “Inglourious Basterds”

Lee Daniels, “Precious”

Jason Reitman, “Up in the Air”

Foreign Language Film

“Ajami”

“El Secreto de Sus Ojos”

“The Milk of Sorrow”

“The White Ribbon”

“Un Prophète”

Original Screenplay

“A Serious Man”

“The Hurt Locker”

“Up”

“The Messenger”

“Inglourious Basterds”

Documentary Feature

“Burma VJ”

“Food, Inc.”

“The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers”

“Which Way is Home”

“The Cove”

10. Tyson (James Toback)
The Baddest Man on the Planet bares his soul, and every minute is riveting. Whether you love him or hate him, “Tyson” will give you a new perspective on one of the most polarizing athletes in history.

9. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)
A beautiful and heart-wrenching film about the tropes of love and lust. Alexis Zabe’s breathtaking cinematography accents the poignancy and drama in the excellent performances by actual residents of the Mennonite community.

8. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
Both Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog are at their most bizarre and nonsensical in this hilarious tale of a good police lieutenant turned bad by the gnawing vice of addiction.

7. An Education (Lone Scherfig)
Carey Mulligan’s powerhouse performance anchors the brilliant ensemble cast in this gem of a coming-of-age drama.

6. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson’s brilliant return to form. His adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book is funny, endearing, witty, and incredibly creative. His best movie since “The Royal Tenenbaums” and the best animated film of the year.

5. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
Tarantino pulls off the unthinkable — he makes a Tarantino movie out of the Holocaust…and it’s brilliant.

4. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
A grim, gorgeous, gripping drama about the violence and malice that overtake a small German town as World War I approaches. Haneke’s best film to date.

3. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
The psychology, drama, hate, fear, brotherhood, and addiction of war has rarely been captured with such authenticity.

2. A Serious Man (Coen bothers)
The Coens score another gem with this hilarious Job allegory that explores deep existential questions through Joel and Ethan’s unique style of comedy and sadism.

1. Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani)
It’s beyond neo-realism. Bahrani’s work feels more real than, well… reality. It’s that good. Roger Ebert was right on the mark when anointed Bahrani, “the new great American director.”

Bauby's painstaking communication system

25. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel)
The true story of French magazine editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, while paralyzed, wrote an entire book literally with the blinks of his eye.  Its dazzling, innovative camerawork breaks new ground on the creative cinema front.

24. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)
Spielberg’s tribute and farewell to the great master, Stanley Kubrick, who languished on the project for decades. A visually stunning and emotionally mature imitation of Kubrick’s sensibilities that runs on all cylinders.

23. Vera Drake (2004, Mike Leigh)
Imelda Staunton’s powerhouse performance drives this delicately and expertly told examination of the polarizing subject of abortion.

22. Grizzly Man (2005, Werner Herzog)
Herzog finds yet another fascinating subject in this complex, twisted odyssey into the dark recesses of the mind of a madman.  At once an incredible document of nature’s beauty and a cautionary tale of its dangers.

21. Mystic River (2003, Clint Eastwood)
Clint Eastwood’s directorial masterwork. A thrilling police procedural/murder mystery driven by fantastic performances and punctuated by a heartbreaking examination of the nature of friendship.

20. Elephant (2003, Gus Van Sant)
A highly nuanced and meditative look at the Columbine shootings.  Unflinching and fearless storytelling by a virtuoso storyteller.

Michael Fassbender as IRA leader Bobby Sands

19. Hunger (2008, Steve McQueen)
A disturbing, unflinching work of art about the horrific prison conditions suffered by Bobby Sands and his fellow IRA members in 1981 Britain. One of the most assured directorial debuts in recent memory.

18. Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2 (2003-2004, Quentin Tarantino)
Pure style. Pure thrill. Pure fun. It doesn’t get any better than this for hyper-exaggerated, pulpy entertainment.

17. Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze)
A surreal and truly funny look into the nightmarish world of a writer.  How hard is it to write a screenplay? Charlie Kaufman should know.  Nicolas Cage’s best performance since “Raising Arizona.”

16. Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan)
Dark. Original. Hilarious. Nolan’s most unique and innovative work.  It redefines what we thought cinema could be.

Benicio Del Toro embodies Che Guevara

15. Che (2008, Steven Soderbergh)
A lot of people skipped this one thanks to its 4½ hour run-time.   Too bad, considering it’s the best work from both Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro to date.

14. City of God (2003, Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund)
Stylized portrait of life in the slums that manages to be both unbearably grim and rivetingly beautiful.

13. Into the Wild (2007, Sean Penn)
An elegiac ode to the importance of both community and self-exploration.  Penn proves he can be as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.

12. The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)
Not only the best Batman film ever made, but the greatest superhero movie of all-time.  Nolan manages to seamlessly insert the exaggerated characters of a comic book into the gritty world of a realistic crime drama.

11. Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)
Tarantino pulls off the unthinkable — he makes a Tarantino movie out of the Holocaust…and it’s brilliant.

10. The New World (2005, Terrence Malick)
As stirringly evocative, contemplative and astonishing as any of Malick’s previous work.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview -- Oil Man

9. There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Two modern masters, P.T. Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, unite to create a gripping, visceral meditation on the true foundations of America — not freedom and tolerance, but (for better or worse) unfettered capitalism and puritanical religion.

8. Amélie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Whimsical, sweet, hilarious and utterly dazzling.  Aided by the adorable Audrey Tautou, Jeunet taps into a rich well of creativity, humanity and new-wave charm to create one indelible image after another.

7. Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman)
Sometimes maligned because people unfortunately “just don’t get it,” Kaufman’s grand opus is a fully realized, heartbreaking, inspiring, nuanced, intricate work of genius. Though not fully appreciated yet, this brilliant piece of art will someday take its rightful place in the pantheon of great cinema.

6. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (2000, Edward Yang)
Perhaps the most human film on the list. Yang adeptly and deliberately composes a sonata of realistic family relationships that breathes an air of sympathy, understanding and love into the often contentious atmosphere of the family unit.

Souleymane Sy Savane in Bahrani's brilliant "Goodbye Solo"

5. Goodbye Solo (2008, Ramin Bahrani)
It’s beyond neo-realism.  Bahrani’s work feels more real than, well… reality.  It’s that good.  Roger Ebert was right on the mark when anointed Bahrani, “the new great American director.”

4. No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen Brothers)
A stunning, uncompromising study of the nature of fate, violence and evil… friendo.

3. Mulholland Drive (2001, David Lynch)
A neo-noir thriller in true Lynchian fashion.  Bizarre, frightening, tragic and full of mind-bending mystery.   A masterpiece of mood and tone.  Pay close attention to Lynch’s unique command of film grammar.  Movie-making at its best.

2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)
An emotional epic. An odyssey of the mind and soul that’s full of poignancy, heartache, and jubilation. Gondry redefines visual storytelling without losing sight of the humanity at its core.

"The Royal Tenembaums" are the picture of dysfunction

1. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, Wes Anderson)
Anderson’s greatest achievement.  At once hilarious and tragic, “Tenenbaums” explores the dysfunction and artificiality in us all through the unique vision of a unique auteur.  It is Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” completed, but better.  Not to mention it features Gene Hackman’s greatest performance.

Variety reports that the eccentric director, attending the fest to support his WWII Jewish revenge flick, “Inglourious Basterds,” wanted Uma Thurman’s character, The Bride, and her daughter Beebe, to have at least 10 years of peace before being entrenched in another blood-soaked episode.  This would theoretically pin the project down to 2014.

When asked about the possibility of another “Basterds” installment, Tarantino explained that he has plenty of material for another movie and that future prequels or sequels may be in the works at some point.

He did, however, point out that he would like to do at least one project before the next “Kill Bill” film saying he’s thinking about a “re-imagining” of a western or a pre-depression era gangster flick in the vein of a “Pretty Boy Floyd.”

With an opening chapter drenched in classic and spaghetti western homages, notably John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” a mid-section riddled with tributes to Jean Luc-Godard and German Expressionists like Paul Wegener and Fritz Lang, a third act that invokes George Orwell’s “1984,” Howard Hawks’ “Sargeant York,” and Jacques Tourneur’s and Paul Schrader’s versions of “Cat People” respectively, and an entire premise based on Enzo G. Castellari’s “The Inglorious Bastards,” which itself is based on Robert Aldrich’s “The Dirty Dozen,” Tarantino not only rewrites the Second World War but encapsulates, distills, and reworks virtually the entire history of cinema into an audacious, riveting, revisionist’s fairy-tale in under 160 minutes.

Of course, references to other films or literature alone, sans context, don’t result in great cinema.  But the ingenious, intricately thrilling way that Tarantino subtly — and sometimes not so subtly — weaves hundreds of disparate narratives, eras, sensibilities, genres, and themes into a brilliantly realized, masterfully rendered work of art is an unparalleled feat.  The Basterds aren’t the heroes here, film is.  And that’s no metaphor, actual film stock itself becomes the literal hero of this movie in a thrilling climax that takes place in — you guessed it — a cinema.

But as pervasive as the idea of film’s effects on real events and political, racial, and socio-economic issues is throughout “Inglourious Basterds,” it is but one of this clever onion’s many layers.  Let’s take a look at the idea of identity, for example.  Virtually every character is hiding something.  Nothing is as it seems.  Think of the theater owner, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) for instance, who’s been living incognito her entire life, or Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), who blows his cover as a German officer with a three-fingered gesture, or Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) whose briefs mentions of a civilian life in Tennessee combined with that telling scar around his neck reveal a dark past. Even the settings themselves have secrets. The very first scene, which may be the best thing Tarantino has ever shot,  sets the stage.  While an unbearably tense Mexican Standoff rages above, the farmhouse reveals its secret below the floorboards.  Later, the cinema itself becomes a deceptive character with secrets in both the projection room and behind the screen. And let’s not forget about the ubiquitous usage of language as an agent of deceit. Deception proves to be a powerful tool in Tarantino’s hands, employed largely to illuminate and contextualize the role of identity in the human experience.

“Inglourious Basterds” has taken a lot of heat for it’s most controversial theme: revenge.  Not only revenge, but how this particular depiction of Jewish revenge alters documented history and, in effect, can be said to deny the Holocaust.  That conclusion may be drawn by some intelligent, discerning viewers, but is ultimately the result of projecting a nefarious glare on the narrative that simply isn’t there.  The film’s deliberate construction and overarching themes suggest quite the opposite.  Tarantino, infamous for his fantastical, ultra-excessive bloodthirst, once again invites us to join the party. We happily oblige, and just at that moment when we begin to feel the primal urges of savagery, and crave vengeance, he turns on us and condemns our gleeful, violent indulgences.  Has the bad boy of cinema suddenly had a change of heart?  Has he gotten bogged down in the circular banality of moral relativism?  I don’t think so.  The difference here is the nature of the violence.  The cartoonish and excessive violence of the “Kill Bill” films isn’t representative of any conceivable reality and is employed purely as an element of aesthetics.  Here, the violence is brutal and horrific. Tarantino is reminding us of the difference between film and reality.  Sure, cheer on the hilariously gratuitous violence in film, but make no mistake, real violence has real consequences.  For if cinema becomes a place where we can no longer indulge in humanity’s greatest aspirations or its most vile of urges, it will have lost its purpose.