I hope you're enjoying all the arguments swirling around "Inglourious Basterds" as much as I am -- not just here, but all over the place. Since I posted "Some ways to watch Inglourious Basterds [sic]," I've been reading other people's reviews and comments and interviews about the movie and, hell, even Quentin Tarantino doesn't always agree with Quentin Tarantino about what the movie's up to. (And why should he? Like all of us, he contains multitudes.) It's not about the Holocaust, but it is about the Holocaust; it's not real, but it's real; it's not fantasy, but it's fantasy; it's not history, but it's history; it's not amoral, but it's amoral; it's not moral, but it's moral...
What some people have difficulty with is exactly what others delight in: "Inglorious Basterds" is never situated in one reality or another reality. It's always juggling various combinations of reality and unreality -- history, alt-history, war movie (platoon movie, mission movie, spy movie, detective movie, propaganda movie, European art movie...), cartoon, folklore, satire, comic book, revenge fantasy, etc. -- and the combinations change from one moment to the next. And that, I think, is its subject. I don't think there's anything more to it than QT trying to create movie-moments. He does, and some of them are superb. I don't blame people who find its story and characters thin, or factual liberties preposterous, or generic conventions twisted, or (a-)morality ambiguous, or humor offensive, but he's got no reason to apologize for creating his alternative historical universe in a Hollywood movie -- a world in which all of the above are woven into its warp and woof.
Because "Inglourious Basterds" provides so much to talk about and to interpret, I thought I'd put together some fascinating observations (some of which I wish I'd made myself; some of which I think are off-base, but nevertheless revealing of something about the film) and set them bouncing off one another to get your own analytical juices flowing, starting with QT's (and others') takes on the nature of the world in which it unreels:
"I stop short of calling it a fantasy. I present it in this fairytale kind of thing as far as for the masses to take in, but that's not where I'm coming from. Where I'm coming from is my characters changed the course of the war. Now that didn't happen, because my characters didn't exist, but if they had existed, everything that happens in the movie is possible."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan
"In a sense, 'Inglourious Basterds' is a form of science fiction. Everything unfolds in and maps an alternate universe: The Movies. Even Shosanna's Parisian neighborhood bears a marked resemblance to a Cannes back alley, complete with a club named for a notorious local dive. Inflammable nitrate film is a secret weapon. Goebbels is an evil producer; the German war hero who pursues Shosanna has (like America's real-life Audie Murphy) become a movie star. Set to David Bowie's 'Cat People' title-song, the scene in which Shosanna--who is, of course, also an actor--applies her war paint to become the glamorous "face of Jewish vengeance," is an interpolated music video."
-- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
"It almost feels like [Shoshanna] has no idea she's in a Quentin Tarantino movie."
-- George, Scanners comment
"I like doing a genre movie but breaking it up in a non-genre way -- bringing real life into it. One of the sequences that I really wanted to get into the movie but wasn't able to was a sequence where some characters would be stuck in a minefield and they'd have to get across. Now, we've seen that before, but we've rarely seen it played out how it would be in real life. And there is the same aspect about that in this, as far as the tavern scene is concerned. He has to pull off the German. It's not 'Where Eagles Dare,' where Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood apparently speak German so wonderfully that all they have to do is put on some officers' uniforms, and they can mix it up with the Nazi hoi polloi [laughs]. Since English is standing in for German, we don't buy it. I'm trying to play that scene out for its real -- and hopefully entertaining -- rhythms as opposed to just trying to bum-rush it.
"For instance, in a sequence like that, you've got the scene that's going on up top, and underneath you've got the suspense. The suspense is like a rubber band underneath it, just kind of stretching and stretching and stretching and stretching and stretching. And normally in a scene, you do try to make it as compact as possible, so it just has the most effect, and it's not boring and the air doesn't come out of it. But in a sequence like that -- and pulling it off is paramount in this -- it's like the longer the scene can go [laughs], as long as that rubber band of suspense can keep stretching, the better. That scene is better at 20 minutes than it would be at 8. And also I like the idea of this big build-up to this white-hot, short burst of violence."
-- QT, Inside Movies interview
"I'll concede that when Tarantino recently (and plausibly) faulted Truffaut's 'The Last Metro' as a film about the French Occupation that should have been a comedy, that qualified, at least for me, as a grown-up observation, and one that made sense to me. I just don't see any comparable observations in his movie."
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum
"The idea behind [the Basterds] doing an Apache resistance is, they'll ambush seven soldiers, say, and they kill them and they take their scalps and they desecrate their bodies and leave them for the Germans to find. It's not about those seven guys that they killed. It's about the story that's going to go [around] about the Basterds and how it's going to get into the psyche of the German soldiers."
-- QT, Charlie Rose interview
"In brief, Tarantino has gone past his usual practice of decorating his movies with homages to others. This time, he has pulled the film-archive door shut behind him--there's hardly a flash of light indicating that the world exists outside the cinema except as the basis of a nutbrain fable." [...]
"The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes--articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes."
-- David Denby, The New Yorker
"The metaphor is not lost, you know, in that, via these film prints and via her cinema, Shosanna is intending to put the Nazis in an oven and create her own final solution. I must say, that's an aspect that most people don't talk about with regard to 'The Dirty Dozen,' and to me it's one of the strongest aspects of that film. I don't know how much people contemplated that when the film came out. But now that we're so knowledgeable about the Holocaust, when you see that film now, you can't not see it: they create their own oven for the Nazis. And not just the Nazis: their wives, their girlfriends, all the collaborating-with-the-enemy bitches that are hanging out with them. They pile up those grenades and they douse them with gasoline, creating their own napalm, and they just burn 'em. [laughs] I mean, it's pretty fucked up!"
-- QT, RottenTomatoes interview
"Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral."
-- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
"If the title weren't already taken, it'd be tempting to think of Quentin Tarantino's new movie -- indeed, his entire career -- as 'Infinite Jest.' Inside the fevered junk-pop particle accelerator that is this director's brain, moments of power and banality, meaning and absurdity, all collide into each other, creating movie mash-ups as brilliant as they are pointless. You take a Tarantino film seriously at your risk, which is why 'Inglourious Basterds' is his greatest risk yet: a rollicking action-comedy about -- wait for it -- the Holocaust."
-- Ty Burr, Boston Globe
"No, it really isn't [about the Holocaust] at all. I mean, my thing is, the idea that leads you in, and this is how I work with storytelling in general -- it's more of the thing of the bunch of guys on a mission. Like a '60s movie, like 'The Devil's Brigade' or 'Dirty Dozen' or something like that. But that's the way I normally do stuff. I start off with a certain genre, and then, that's the jumping-off point. Now, I intend to expand the genre, sort of blow the doors off of it. But the starting-off point is that: there's a bunch of guys, and there's a mission. I actually think that this movie's closer to something like E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," with a community of characters, an overall 'big story' that leads somewhere and a mix of invented characters and historical figures."
-- QT, San Francisco Sentinel interview
"Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think Inglourious Basterds is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, Inglourious Basterds makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp -- as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality."
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum
"I set up scenes and I jerk you off to have a climax. And in this movie I jerked you off and I fucked with the climax... At some point those Nazi uniforms went away and they were people being burned alive. I think that's part of the thing that fucks with the catharsis. And that's a good thing."
-- QT, after a Museum of Jewish Heritage screening in Manhattan
"Tarantino is creating an alternate propaganda here. This last image of the burning theater more than anything recalls the evil of the gas chambers (its setting accusing moviegoers, us, of participating in the same celebration of killing the Nazis did), and any pleasure we take in the film's climactic destruction of the Germans complicates our usually automatic dismissal of any justifications heard in the past by Nazi apologists who say they were swept up by the populist frenzy at the time since we, the viewers, are also guilty of the same.
"It just may be that some critics are right in accusing 'Inglourious Basterds' of luridly exploiting a horrid chapter in humanity's history. But at least it does so without hypocrisy."
-- Tony Dayoub, Cinema Viewfinder
"Why would they condemn me? I was too brutal to Nazis?"
-- QT, Atlantic interview
"For the last 30 years, all the movies coming out about World War II, whether it be feature films or TV movies... lots of TV movies... they really focus on the Holocaust and the victims of World War II. That has been the diet for the last 30 years. But even during the war, when they were actually fighting the war, and even during the '60s, you know, with the guys-on-a-mission movies, there was no crime in telling a thrilling story. You didn't feel like an idiot, for example, when you said, 'I had FUN watching "The Great Escape," ' even though Nazis mow down and kill people. I have a great time watching that movie. It's very entertaining. And that doesn't make my movie better or worse, but it's something that has been lost in the last 30 years of the telling."
-- QT, San Francisco Sentinel interview
"Holocaust deniers should love that 'Inglourious Basterds' purports killing Adolf Hitler because its unreal fantasy not only flouts history but it vitiates the last half-century of post-Holocaust moral contemplation and historical reckoning. Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel's life's work is not hip. Hip is watching a Jewish-American (played by Eli Roth) take a baseball bat to a Nazi's head. "It's the closest we get to going to the movies," Brad Pitt approves in a lead role that amounts to a cameo. [...]
"Only the most gullible film geek will think QT is confirming cinema's righteous social influence."
-- Armond White, NY Press
"Man, I go to do a WWII movie and it ends up being a love letter to cinema. I cannot not!"
-- QT, Charlie Rose interview
"It's axiomatic that in Tarantino's films, every shot, scene, line is resonant with previous cinema. Why should that be a sin? It's called virtue when James Joyce packs every word, sentence, scene in 'Ulysses' with history, myth, art, everything in Western civilization's cultural grab-bag that might enrich and empower his novel. So when David Bowie growls 'putting out the fire with gasoline' as, pre-conflagration, scarlet-gowned Shosanna applies her makeup Mata Hari-style (conjuring Dietrich's doomed German spy in Josef von Sternberg's 1931 'Dishonored'), Tarantino's allusions complete an aesthetic circuit that enlarges the screen's sphere of illumination."
-- Kathleen Murphy, MSN Movies
"Tarantino acknowledges history the way he, and many of us, have experienced it--through the lenses of filmmakers and historians both fine and faulty--and it becomes for him a way to reflect on cinema's place as a propagandistic force throughout history, to restructure and build upon the standard tropes of WWII motion picture iconography (while virtually ignoring the most obvious one, the battle scene), and make space for the emotional force of revenge, in a far more ambivalent way that either he or his detractors seem to care to acknowledge."
-- Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly rule
"The movie is presented as fantasy, but it's about much more than revenge. What Tarantino seems to be fantasizing about is this: What if Jews had succeeded in scaring Germans, in being known to pose fearsome physical threats to those who harmed them? What if, in effect, Jews had succeeded in getting into the heads of the German leadership? (A key scene shows Hitler obsessing over the Basterds.) Would it have altered the behavior of the German government and its officials and soldiers in ways that could have led more quickly to Germany's defeat? And what would it have meant for Jews to do so? Would it have meant renouncing a crucial aspect of Jewish identity? What, for that matter, is Jewish identity? [...]
"The problem with the film is that Tarantino isn't really up to the task of offering interesting answers to such questions; moreover, he's so wrapped up in his big ideas that, for once, he doesn't make the film well."
-- Richard Brody, The Front Row / The New Yorker
"['Inglourious Basterds' is like] being plunged cold into the brain of a total nut who knows exactly which shelf he put the VHS tape of who-knows-what junk on but can't quite remember whether Hitler really existed or whether he was invented by Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator.' "
-- Philippe Azoury, Libération (via Richard Brody)
"I'd always thought about the whole "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France" -- but that didn't necessarily mean it was a fairy tale. I don't really look at 'Once Upon a Time in the West' as a fairy tale per se, even though there's a fable-like aspect or a folkloric aspect to it. I think that would be a closer way to say it -- like folklore almost [laughs]. That wasn't the plan all along though. I thought that I would honor history.
"But when I got to that point in the piece, I literally had to stop and ask myself, 'What am I doing? My characters don't know they're part of history. My characters don't know that there are things that they can do and things that they can't do. I've never ruled any of my characters like that, a now's not the time to start.' So ... my characters change the outcome of the war. That didn't happen because my characters didn't exist. But if they had existed, everything that happens is very plausible. And when I say 'my characters,' I don't just mean Aldo (Pitt) and the Bear Jew (Eli Roth). I mean Frederic Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). If he had done what he did at that time in the war, Goebbels very well would have made a movie about him [laughs]."
-- QT, Inside Movies interview
"[Re:] complaints from certain critical circles that 'Inglourious Basterds' "disregards history". I have indeed followed this to some degree, and that particular bit of hypocrisy is something I find especially confusing. For one thing, films based on history often disregard history -- what do these critics think of 'Amadeus' or, for that matter 'JFK'? -- without quite the rending of garments that Tarantino's film is inspiring -- "akin to Holocaust denial"??? Who said that? And did they offer one ounce of logical reasoning to justify a statement that is nonsensical on its face?
"Plus, let's look at the history Tarantino distorts. In essence, he says that the Allies still won World War II, but V-E day came maybe a year earlier, and for different reasons. I'm sure I don't need to remind you, Dennis, that there is an entire subgenre of science fiction called "alternate history", which imagines what the future, or the present, would be like if major historical events had not happened, or had happened differently. There is also an entire sub-genre of alternate history that deals with what would have happened had Hitler won World War II. To my knowledge, the publication Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle or Len Deighton's SS-GB or about half the ouvre of Harry Turtledove, or countless others, have been met without a peep from critics about their offensive disdain for historical record."
-- Bill R., The Kind of Face You Hate
"The whole idea of bringing down the Third Reich, assassinating Hitler, and ending the war in the way that I do was a concept that I knew would appeal to Jewish American friends of mine. They read the script and they'd go, 'Yeah, wow! Great! That's a wonderful fantasy. I've thought about that forever." [...]
"It wasn't until I started talking to the Germans that I realized that it was their fantasy, too, at least for the last three generations. Then at the premiere in Berlin, I could tell the audience couldn't wait for the moment when Hitler gets shot. They were cheering."
-- QT, Parade Magazine interview
"Tarantino makes no claims to historical truth, but it helps to ground his story in facts. In truth, something similar happened -- legions of Jews hunted down and murdered Nazis during and after the Holocaust. Several noteworthy books, like Rich Cohen's 'The Avengers' (Knopf, 2000) and Howard Blum's 'The Brigade,' (HarperCollins, 2001) have covered their story in full. Those books, in addition to interviews with historians and aging Jewish soldiers suggest, however, that the 'real face of Jewish vengeance,' to borrow a line from the film, is both more frightening and more pained than anything in Tarantino's film.
" 'There really was a very wide range of responses to the Nazis,' said Deborah Dash Moore, a historian at the University of Michigan and author of 'GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation' (Harvard University Press, 2004). Of the 500,000 Jewish Americans who fought in the U.S. military during World War II, there were those who 'used the cover of war to take revenge,' she said. 'They shot civilians. They lined Germans up and shot them,' just like the Nazis had done to Jews. [...]
"In [Dash Moore's] book, there is a more troubling case too: Samuel Klausner, a religious Jew who said he dropped a bomb on a German town that he knew was not a military target. In a letter home to his parents, he wrote: 'This evening there is one less town in Germany. I dropped my own personal bomb right in the center of town.... I took great pleasure dropping that bomb,' he wrote, 'even though I knew it would not hit any military target.' He justified his actions like this: 'It was just a small part of a repayment for 5,000,000 Jews.' "
-- Eric Herschthal, The Jewish Week
"More than multi-leveled pop-culture references and cross-hierarchical cinephilic fervor, the Tarantino project has always been, at heart, about wish-fulfillment, largely of a fairly adolescent variety....
"With 'Basterds' we have Tarantino doing wish-fulfillment on a world-historical stage--rewriting the end of World War II. This takes the kind of chutzpah, both conceptual and logistical, that only a past master of grindhouse cinema could muster. In almost anybody else's hands the outrageousness of the various scenarios enacted in this epic would be an insult to history, but here they're not, because although the stage of this film might be world historical, 'Inglourious Basterds' is finally not about history, or reality, or any such thing but about movies, which is all that any of Tarantino's movies have ever been about.
"And it is, for all that, or maybe because of all that, a picture that is sometimes genuinely and breathtakingly moving."
-- Glenn Kenny, Some Came Running
"I wasn't quite sure how to feel about "Inglourious Basterds" for a while after I saw it, and I think the reason is I was instinctively trying to dig deeper beyond the veneer (or facade?) to find something I could feel about. [...]
"As a post- (post-post?) modern exercise in artifice, though, my admiration for this film comes down to the fact that I've never seen anything else quite like it. It's at turns epic, cartoonish, darkly funny, talky, slow, suspenseful (at least artificially), and on a few occasions, mind-blowing. And totally f***ed up insane. But I kind of enjoy and admire insane."
-- Kris Pigna, Scanners comment
For a perspective on Tarantino's view of movies vs. reality, Jonathan Rosenbaum quotes from a 2003 interview QT did with Rolling Stone:
Q: Has 9/11 or the war on terror had any impact on you personally or creatively?
A: 9/11 didn't affect me, because there's, like, a Hong Kong movie that came out called "Purple Storm" and it's fantastic, a great action movie. And they work in a whole big thing in the plot that they blow up a giant skyscraper. It was done before 9/11, but the shot almost is a semiduplicate shot of 9/11. I actually enjoyed inviting people over to watch the movie and not telling them about it. I shocked the shit out of them...I was almost thrilled by that naughty aspect of it. It made it all the more exciting.
"I actually like the parallels that the Basterds are, for all intents and purposes, suicide bombers going into the theater to blow up the premiere and the fact that it is a military-slash-civilian endeavor that they are blowing up."
-- QT, Museum of Jewish Heritage screening
"It's a metaphor about the power of cinema, but at the same time it's literal -- the power of cinema is going to bring down the Third Reich."
QT, Toronto Globe and Mail interview at Cannes
I think the most ridiculous aspect of this whole argument is the intelligence-insulting assumption that because someone sees a film in which history is altered they will forget the distinction between factual recordings and fictionalized narratives and automatically assume that whatever Quentin Tarantino's film depicts actually happened, or that they will let the hypothetical consideration that Hitler was killed by a band of Nazi-killing Jews inhibit their ability to acknowledge that fascism is bad and that the Holocaust happened. The logical leap is absurd and seems to imply that the majority of people who see INGLORIOUS BASTERDS are literally unable to think critically or rationally. Since when does imagining a story - especially one as obviously unreal as this one - amount to belittling real occurrences? Do our imaginations promote fascism by not sticking to the obvious facts?
JE: Well said. Artists and entertainers have always re-worked history. I don't understand some of these objections, either -- especially when the movie is so heavily stylized -- so clearly NOT "real" -- in every particular. Besides, Spielberg's "1941" (based on a real incident!) probably has more to do with the particulars of WWII than "IB" does. The fact that, say, "Mississippi Burning" made two white FBI agents the heroes of the investigation into the actual murders of three real civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner) is pretty damned offensive -- but not nearly as offensive as the cartoon racism in every frame of Alan Parker's film. But that film was just a straight-out Hollywood "prestige picture," a "historical drama," not a movie-movie fable full of devices that emphasize its MOVIEness. It took itself dead seriously, and expected its audience to. I can understand that some people think "Inglourious Basterds" is frivolous or isn't worth doing, but "Holocaust denial"? Now who's trivializing?
"I like doing a genre movie but breaking it up in a non-genre way -- bringing real life into it." - QT
That statement more than any other perked up my mind's inner ear. "Inglourious Basterds" (at any given time) seems set inside one genre convention or another, yet many of its scenes seem like the ones that are hidden in between the scenes you expect to see in those genre movies. I think Daniel Brockman got to that point well in a comment in the other IB post:
The same thing, in a certain way, even takes place in the tavern scene. At this point, the movie has taken on the "spy movie" genre, and yet half of the scene is more about off-duty Nazi soldiers casually celebrating a recent pregnancy. The interesting thing is that despite this moment of "real life" inserted into what would otherwise be a conventional scene, the movie (to me) at no point ever actually feels real -- but then that's what's so bewildering, fun, and sometimes frustrating about IB, too. It's so many different things at any given time, but those juxtapositions keep it from ever being any one of those things completely.
But again, I think that alone is deserving of praise. In that interview with Charlie Rose, Tarantino said something along that lines of how (and I'm paraphrasing here, don't remember the exact quote) "a million other directors making a million other WWII movies could not have made this movie." And even if they did, how many of them could have pulled off such madness this well?
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On an (I think!) interesting tangent, QT's explanation of how he inserts "realism" into genre conventions and cliches also makes me think about how the same approach done in two different ways for two different purposes can have such wildly different results. When he talks about the mine-field scene he couldn't include, he says how "we've rarely seen it played out how it would be in real life." That's exactly how I would describe much of the comedy in, say, "Pineapple Express" -- an over-the-top action movie starring two stoners who have no business being in an over-the-top action movie.
For example, the car chase scene: Saul suddenly gets the idea to make a sudden stop, expecting the pursuing cop to blow past them. We've seen it hundreds of times in movies (no doubt that's where Saul got the idea from), but here, the cop stops just as quickly and immediately begins shooting at them. It's a great joke, and it's arrived at by the same method Tarantino uses in IB -- subverting conventions and cliches by starting with one, and simply playing it out within some semblance of reality.
I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make with that, but eh, throwing it out there.
Jim-
First of all, really like your own articles about this. They are thoughtful, provocative, cogent, pick your modifier. Really good stuff.
I'm not a fan of this movie...yet. But I may become one after catching part of it one day on while watching TV. Have you noticed that, thanks to savvy business strategies , all of QT's films have an incredible second life on cable, where viewers have a chance to look at them repeatedly and hone in on certain scenes, nuances, colors, shots, etc.? In some ways, his stuff feels built with TV in mind; there's nothing like six stupid commercials in a row to make David Carradine's "Clark Kent is Superman's comment on the human race" speech really sing. But my basic issue with this movie is that I found it pretty dull, and my own (very short) review at www.memphisflyer.com tried to explain what kept me watching it. Well, turns out there's a lot of people with very strong feelings about QT and his entertainment value, so me and the cyber-community have been discussing it getting too troll-like with personal attacks for most of the day. I've linked your blog on the site, so my hopes are that fans from everywhere can get together and chat some more and eventually discover the definitive absolute Truth about this work.
I find it sort of sad, though, that far fewer folks would ever get this worked up about something like the new Dardenne Brothers movie. Or Crank: High Voltage.
For me, both the strengths and weaknesses of "Basterds" stem from the fact that, as Jonathan Rosenbaum, mentions, it refers not to any historical reality but to movie depictions of that reality (Nazis, the Holocaust). We're smack dab in Baudrillard territory now where signs no longer have any direct source in "reality" but only to the web of previous signs in other fictional constructions. You could shrug your shoulders and say "Well, that's post-modernism." Or is it post-post-modernism? I lose track. But one doesn't have to embrace pop culture/movie history as the be-all and end-all of existence. It's just that QT chooses to do so.
And that's fine. It can produce a marvelous entertainment. But it also leaves me wanting something more... "real." Something with some heft to it, something that will stick to the gut. I don't see any of that here. And again, that's fine. That's what he meant to do. But it's part of the reason that, for example, the violence in the film had absolutely no impact on me.
Is it interesting to see the way he appropriates images from other Nazi/Holocaust movies? Sure. We've seen a few movies where the head Nazi-sadist in chief casually guns down a Jew without even looking to aim. QT reverses that in the first "Basterds" scene when they shoot the one prisoner who makes a run for it, and uses it again when they shoot Landa's assistant at the end with nary a glance or a thought.
Does it have any real impact on me? Nah. Which, yet again, is fine. But QT's hermetic "wish fulfillment" parallel universe (built out of his own favorite quote and "homages") has its limits, particularly if you don't dig the whole righteous revenge vibe.
JE: It's not a Jewish revenge fantasy -- it's a semotician's wet dream!!! Seriously, this is good stuff, Chris. And, as I say, I don't disagree with your description of QT's movies as "hermetic." They are essays about movies, and the ones I enjoy, I enjoy on that level.
Oh, and on the subject of the movie somehow giving credence to Holocaust deniers, there seems to me to be a logical fallacy within the statement itself.
The statement is (as I understand it, but maybe I'm interpreting it wrong): 1) "Inglourious Basterds" rewrites history and 2) doing so undermines the horror of the Holocaust. But if you have to start with the acknowledgment that the movie is re-writing history (or in other words, with saying "Yes, of course the Holocaust happened and Hitler wasn't killed in a movie theater, but what if..."), then how is anything being undermined? You literally have to acknowledge the historical facts about World War II before you can watch IB in any way that isn't completely delusional.
But then, you'd have to be completely delusional to be a Holocaust denier in the first place...
"you'd have to be completely delusional to be a Holocaust denier in the first place"
True, but I've found it's not in the way you might think. Many of the people who practice this sort of thing avidly don't really care about the truth of history or any of that; they do it mostly as a way of rehabilitating Hitler and Nazism. Which is in itself as delusional as it gets; the whole business of the veracity of the Holocaust is nothing but a cover story for something much uglier.
The other night I watched "Valkyrie", which is as straight-arrow in its storytelling as "IB" is ostensibly not. There is also a bit of what-if in that movie: had the plot to kill Hitler succeeded, the war might well have ended a year earlier. I liked the fact that the movie explores the whole problem of killing Hitler -- get rid of him, and there's still too many people left to run the whole apparatus of the Nazi state -- and doesn't just approach it with the simpleminded conceit that all you have to do is get rid of the bad guy at the top and all the evil magically disappears.
Just saw this film for the second time tonight; first I had the suspicion that it was the finest film of the decade, and I think another go 'round has proven it. There are a hundred reasons for this, but I'd like to whittle it down to three (because it's late and I'm tired) as they relate to various points made in the above quotations (as you have said, there are multitudes. There may be so much they have the force of a strong tide.)
1. "In a sense, 'Inglourious Basterds' is a form of science fiction."
- Of course this is true, if we consider what a scientist has at his disposal; ingredients to form a hypothesis. I'm not sure what QT's hypothesis is yet, maybe that film is more powerful than most people would like to admit. Anyways, he is absolutely clear about what ingredients can change the course of history through fiction. Not just bullets, but clothing (blood red), drink (milky white), and film nitrate (a smokey gray). What I am saying, in my way, is that he uses objects we might know, accentuates them as perfectly as any film I've ever seen has, and executes his experiment. He is a scientist.
2. "It just may be that some critics are right in accusing 'Inglourious Basterds' of luridly exploiting a horrid chapter in humanity's history. But at least it does so without hypocrisy."
- Also absolutely true. Every film exploits the horrid, unless you watch only completely innocuous ones. QT earns his right to this because he does not even claim to be an authority; IB is quite clearly about the *idea* of WW2 - and thus it's many artistic manifestations - and in an even broader way, about how a fact ceases to be regarded as truth once it is introduced into fiction. I would argue that it has more fairness and nobility towards the horror than Saving Private Ryan, which quite plainly painted the German army as the "other". Here he includes at least two scenes giving the Nazis a rare humanity: the brave soldier who would rather be beaten to death than betray his brothers, and the cowardly family man who makes a deal for his own life on the day of his son's birth, and is then unfairly betrayed. There is nothing lurid about that.
3. "...the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes."
- Wrong, wrong, wrong. There is more heart and soul here than in a thousand other pictures. No emotional disconnection whatsoever. The French farmer weeps for his betrayal. The German at the end of the Bear Jew's bat is defiant to save his soul. Hans Landa is infused with both hatred and love for his prey; he hates because it is his job, but he loves because that hate gives him a reason to live. He lets some go who he could easily destroy, perhaps because to have no one left to chase would cause him to be nothing, until he finds a way to finish the war and take credit for it, retiring as the ultimate hawk, who preyed on and fooled everyone.
And 'pure sensation'? Of course it's pure sensation. That's what movies are. They do not literally crawl from the screen and interact with us. They must stop at the edge of our senses; only in QT's universe can a film burn down it's own theater.
Thank you.
JE: On the contrary, thank you! I wonder if I will be more deeply moved by it the next time I see it -- particularly by the farmer in Chapter 1 and Shoshanna in Chapter 5. In the past, as I wrote in my initial piece, I have been moved by QT's filmmaking (that red dress of Shoshanna's is still killing me), but the emotional dilemmas of the characters have not particularly affected me because they seem to be more like tidy screenplay devices than matters of flesh-and-blood. And I say that as somebody who thinks "IB" is a terrific movie-movie.
This issue has already been addressed a little by some of the comments.
To assert that Quentin Tarantino is a Holocaust denier is completely absurd. Look at the basic structure of the film. The very first scene is the only depiction of Holocaust genocide in the whole film. And, it's the least ironic scene. Every other scene from that point out will come complete with quotation marks, but not the first. The killings are brutal, and hardly entertaining. He acknowledges right off the bat that the Holocaust did indeed happen. He depicts it, and then reacts to it for the rest of his movie.
And what is that reaction? It's certainly not the maudlin reflection that most want out of any treatment of the Holocaust. Quentin Tarantino's filmic reaction to this genocide is blazing anger. Sure, it's a movie-movie anger, but it's not sadness and it's not any holier-than-thou reflection on how we should never let this type of thing happen again. While I'm not a Hebrew (or a part of any other persecuted people group), I have to imagine that anger and the desire for revenge is one of many emotions felt by them when they recall this event. And why not? Why shouldn't they be angry that one man was able to convince a nation that it was their duty to snuff out an entire race of people? Why shouldn't they get a cathartic kick out of seeing him riddled with bullets?
Reading too deeply into Tarantino's film misses the point of them by a long shot, but even a cursory glance at "Inglorious Basterdes" reveals a filmmaker that's well aware of the historical reality of the Holocaust - even if he's not going to directly address it.
Two things I've yet to see brought up elsewhere:
1) Of all the fuss made about how loose Tarantino plays with WWII history, I have yet to read anyone point out how Basterd's portrayal of film criticism seems completely anachronistic also. Would a Parisian really claim that the French love directors a decade before Bazin and the popularization of auteur theory? Were there books of film criticism dedicated to Pabst pre-WWII? These aren't rhetorical questions, if someone has an answer, I'm genuinely curious, because I was under the impression that director-centered film criticism was not really common until post-WWII.
2) I have yet to see Mulholland Dr. or Inland Empire cited as movie-movies that take place in a similar plane of reality, where all things vacillate between contrived genre set-pieces and horrific explostions of violence and emotion. I doubt Tarantino was inspired by either of those films, but if I had to pick one movie in the past decade that Inglourious Basterds reminded me of the most, it would be one of those two.
Well, you gotta admire Rosenbaum for going out on a limb like that in a way that is credible. Seriously.
Rosenbaum, like our beloved Armond, has been known to make some incredible statements about movies, but I can usually see where he's coming from. SOMEBODY was bound to call "Inglourious Basterds" a Holocaust-denying film eventually.
I may be completely wrong about all of this, but wasn't there a ton of anachronisms and faulty historical information in this film? I've never seen a picture of a German uniform from that era that had one of those red and white miniature-flag-looking things over the middle button. Did people use intercoms in the early forties? In the scene with Mike Myers there's a map on the wall that shows the French border with Spain a couple hundred miles north of where it ought to be.
Once again, I could be wrong about all of those. But it wouldn't surprise me if the only things in this movie that are historically accurate are the bits about movies.
This selection of quotes confirms, for me, something that I've thought about the film since I saw it: It's a rorschach test. Nearly anything you say about it is both true and untrue. The movie inevitably turns into a mirror and what you choose to commentate on reflects more on the critic than the movie itself. It's a lot like "A Clockwork Orange" that way... it forces philosophies and fears and prejudices out into the open, forcing you to reveal some fundamental truth about your worldview. You could say it's about nothing or everything and you'd be equally right.
Still haven't seen it yet, but LOVE that you quoted Whitman. One of my all-time favorite quotes, well, that and a line from Road House.
A while back, Jim, you wrote a piece were you quoted several paragraphs from different critics about the movie Speed Racer, and then asked us readers to guess whether the quotes were positive or negative reviews.
Well you could do that with that Libération quote : it's a positive 3 stars review, but it didn't seem so at first. The translation is accurate but the lack of context is misleading (Azoury refers only to the ending in the theater). That said :
"['Inglourious Basterds' is like] being plunged cold into the brain of a total nut who knows exactly which shelf he put the VHS tape of who-knows-what junk on but can't quite remember whether Hitler really existed or whether he was invented by Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator.' "
Well it's seems that it's precisely Rosenbaum's problem, but I'm ready to argue that while QT sometimes acts like kind of a nut, and surely can locate his VHS of random "nazisploitation" flicks, he knows historical reality, but simply isn't interested in reproducing it. It's cinema, the art of illusion. In any case, this particular universe "Once Upon A Time... in Nazi-occupied France" is too far removed from history books for it to negate any reality of our world. Well, Rosenbaum is perhaps enquiring about the state of the Holocaust in this movie universe.
In the same review, Azoury writes : "... The only kind of movies that scares Tarantino, the one he never could muster the courage to confront and against which he is defenseless, is the documentary" [NOTA : I tried to conserve the "fight" metaphor, but the sentence is a little stilted, now. Me no translator].
Not quite right : he's simply not interested by factual accuracy. I think Tarantino could make a documentary, but it would probably be a lot of fantasies (à la Guy Maddin in My Winnipeg) stylishly directed. However, he'd probably get bored if he were assigned to do something along the ligns of cinéma vérité. That would choke and kill his filmmaking.
Watching Inglourious Basterds made me remember one of the central ideas of Hans Jurgen Syberberg's Our Hitler: A Film From Germany. Since Hitler was born of a cinematic century, and proceeded as though the Third Reich was itself a work of cinema, the only way to confront and understand what he did is through cinematic means and techniques. It was the task of that film to remove the larger-than-life persona of Hitler and the Third Reich from the realm of cinematic myth by creating a counter-myth that seized upon the weaknesses and all-too-human foibles of the main players in the Reich and counterposed them against the images that had been made of them, to point up their absurdity and divest them of their power. Tarantino seems to want to do something similar: confront Hitler on his own turf through Cinema, but he does so less by weakening the personas of the Third Reich players, than by reinforcing their malignity. This first bolsters the mythology of his own characters which are used as a counterweight to that of Hitler, et al. Second it justifies the violence perpetrated against them by his own larger-than-life heroes. Unlike Syberberg's deconstruction which arguably saps the Reich of its mythological power, Tarantino, in attempting to do the same, starts a cinematic arms race that eventually turns "good" and "evil" into "GOOD" and "EVIL", finally melding into "MAD".
JE: Thank you for remembering and invoking "Our Hitler"! It's actually on DVD now.
I like the Whitman insert in the first paragraph. Nice one, my friend.
"...the emotional dilemmas of the characters have not particularly affected me because they seem to be more like tidy screenplay devices than matters of flesh-and-blood. And I say that as somebody who thinks "IB" is a terrific movie-movie."
Emotional connection, I can't argue with that. It's either there or it isn't. Maybe it's the only thing about watching movies that can't be passed from viewer to viewer through persuasive rhetoric. The most emotionally affecting movie I've ever seen is Lynch's ERASERHEAD, whereas most viewers would probably say the opposite, that it's one of the coldest, most emotionally sterile of movies. It was there for me with IB as well, not for you clearly, but yes it is a terrific movie-movie either way.
JE: Lynch's work, whatever you think of it, comes from deep down in his psyche. That should be apparent! The baby-horror in "Eraserhead" is a great portrayal of primal fear and disgust (and the guilt that goes with it). QT says he considers his films very personal, but that he buries the personal stuff inside genre. I take him at his word, I just don't feel it when watching the movies.
My whole take of the movie is that it's a celebration of Bush-ism. It's in favor of a very rudimentary moral code of "an eye-for-an-eye" justice and "good vs. evil". It's against intellectualism and pretty much all and any form of meaningful introspection.
The two things that I'm most taken with are the fact that Stiglitz isn't really given a plausible reason for defecting. Nobody cares. Nazi=bad and that's all there is to say on the subject.
And also that Shoshanna BURNS FILM to get revenge on the Nazis. Anybody who would burn film to kill somebody puts killing above film on the hierarchy of things they love. The idea that film isn't an idealogical weapon that can win hearts and minds, but is rather a practical weapon that is extra-flammable because it is printed on silver nitrate is very American and not all at French.
How does the post-modernism fit into that? The baffling thing about the film is that it's textually so complicated and it demands that you engage in it and question and re-evaluate your initial response. But the values of the work are so base. It's a very challenging film, but challenging in the most superficial way. In terms of semiotics, it's a brilliant film. In terms of politics and ethics, it's a functionally retarded film. Interesting for the politics and ethics in a reactionary way and for what it reveals about Tarantino and American film culture. But it doesn't really leave anything to CHEW on as far as that goes.
I actually loved the film, but I suppose that I kind of largely agree with the critics. One of the perennial problems that I have with people who study film is that the issues they deal with are purely ones of aesthetics and the various ways that information is organized and conveyed. It's all about style. Nothing about substance. How you say something is more important than what you're saying. That kind of thing is a breeding ground for the kind of moral and political stupidity that can be found in Tarantino.
JE: There's a provocative take on things, Alex! I might agree with much of what you say if I thought "IB" was operating in political terms at all. But Tarantino is looking at it through the prism of genre, as an American war MOVIE: The Nazis ARE the "bad guys." (And then he identifies the Basterds with the Indians in Westerns and their "Apache Resistance.") I don't see any coherent moral or political dimension being developed outside of the movie's movieness.
"Anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong."
Rosenbaum's quote seems pretty strange to me. What is it about fascism that requires such austerity in every treatment? Human beings have done horrible things to each other throughout history. I am at a loss to understand why fascism stands out as untouchable compared to all else. Would Rosenbaum object to a cartoon with a funny Aztec in it, since the Aztecs controlled a vast empire and performed human sacrifice? Does he lay awake at night fuming about the latest pirate movie because pirates were real and murdered people in the past? Surely any criticism of Inglourious Basterds on historical grounds would equally apply to, say, "300" - or for that matter, Shakespeare. Is it less immoral to lampoon ancient history?
"Stiglitz isn't really given a plausible reason for defecting."
This kind of narrative thinking is extremely irritating to me. Why does every motivation have to be explained? Do you dictate the reason behind every choice you make to those around you? Should I give a damn why Stiglitz defects, or why Willy Wonka loves chocolate? If the director chooses to tell you, that's fine (and usually arbitrary), but if they don't, why on earth does it matter? Consider Reservoir Dogs - why does Mr. Pink bother coming back to the warehouse when he could just run away with the loot? Someone could have asked him within the dialogue, but it makes no difference to me if I know or not. All I need to know is that it happens. What a character chooses to do in a plot is important, but why they choose to arrive into that plot in the first place is inconsequential.
I've been thinking since I saw the film that by the fifth chapter of "Inglourious Basterds," as Tarantino marches his characters into a moment that will alter history, that the filmmaker has paved the way towards an exciting future in film. Allusion in Tarantino's prior films have always been rooted in the past, to glorify it, or amalgamate the best moments from the films that Tarantino found his inspiration, reducing his art to something, at its worst, resembled trivia. Here, the allusions finally take his art to exciting new possibilities. In creating his richest, most complex and polarizing work, Tarantino has fashioned a critique on the war films that preceded it: the ones that death-marched straight into the shackles of history and the artistically limiting factors of historical accuracy. When Hitler's body is reduced to cottage cheese by Eli Roth's Bear Jew, my first thought was, "it's about damn time."
To those that are criticizing the film, I've loved reading every word of negative reaction. I love that Metacritic has it scored at a lukewarm '69,' with reviews ranging from '100,' all the way down to the '30's.' The film is currently running the gamut of audience and critical response, which seems to be happening less and less these days. And if you look at any negative response to the film, a positive response in another review will counterbalance it. Such is the greatness of an endearing work of art: it takes so long for people to fully perceive its worth, that it's fun to read all of the differing responses to the recently released work. I think hindsight will reverse much of the initial negativity. I expect to see "Inglourious Basterds" on many year-end lists, and in years to come, I would not be surprised if this film is considered to be Tarantino's true artistic breakthrough.
It occurred to me while reading all these different takes on the film, of another way to look at it. You could look at it as Genre Cinema as a metaphor for WWII in all its madness. It's as if several of the characters, such as Shosanna, the German officer clubbed to death, the German soldier/father and others who seem to be normal people (for the most part), are caught up in a Genre Film (ie WWII). Indeed, they are the victims or at the mercy of the Archtype Characters on both sides of said film, the Basterds as well as the Nazis. When these normal people behave in a normal fashion, such as the bravery of the clubbed officer, or the soldier fearful for his newborn son, they are destroyed. Only when Shosanna starts to play by the rules of Genre herself, assuming the role of the Femme Fatale, does she gain any control, and indeed surpasses all the Archtypes at their own game in the apotheosis of the theatre fire/holocaust. Her "closeup" reflected in the smoke of the fire is an iconic image of the world of Cinema in the truest sense. Taken to an extreme, it could be seen as similar to "Who killed Roger Rabbit", where normals are subject to the whims of the Toons. I find the metaphor of WWII as genre (or cartoon) madness rather intriguing.
Couldn't a person argue that EVERY movie about WWII and the Holocaust is an act of Holocaust denial. Schindler's List was in English, so therefore it wasn't accurate. The Pianist had famous actors in it, so it was nothing like the Holocaust. Saving Private Ryan had a scene where Adam Goldberg held up his Star of David to mock a line of German prisoners. When Spielberg throws in a little hypothetical wish fulfillment, it wins oscars. Give me a break. The only way a film could attempt to deny the Holocaust was if it were a documentary that claimed to be the 100% truth and fudged most of its facts.
Hey, let's get Michael Moore on this one.
The best thing about Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's subconscious realization that the power of cinema is not actually capable of bringing down the Third Reich, but setting fire to one's entire collection of films might do it... if you also burn down the entire cinema... and have a bunch of guys with guns in the room. OK, no. The best thing is probably the cinematography. Also, Christoph Waltz is fun to watch.
But seriously, it's pretty funny to read QT and other critics occasionally forgetting that this is anything other than a movie-movie (film-film?) made, with love, by and for critics and video rental store employees. It's impossible for any work of art to completely sever all connections with the real world, but any such connections that can be divined from this movie seem to be entirely random, or at least in no way deliberate. Thanks Jim for posting that quote from Eric Herschthal, which sealed the deal in my opinion by convincing me that Basterds really doesn't have anything even slightly new or interesting to say about Jewish revenge fantasies. The Holocaust? Please. Hitler? Hitler is in a lot of movies, but he's not in this one. Nazis? I'm not even sure I saw any Nazis. The main baddie is a brilliant and amoral mercenary - a Nazi in symbol only. The movie literally carves that symbol on his forehead, but the act is as arbitrary as everything else the movie does. I still don't understand why it's named after a bunch of what are essentially bit players (except, maybe for Raine, who is merely endearingly inconsequential).
I'm glad there are people out there who can really dig this sort of thing, but I have to admit that I was mostly bored by Basterds. To me, the fact that people seem to think it's worth talking about is more interesting than anything more that could be said about the movie itself. Basterds marks a new low in my declining interest in Tarantino movies, and I'm now officially afraid to watch Pulp Fiction again. After watching the movies I hadn't seen from Tarantino's list of post-1992 favorites, I'm afraid I'm now liking him more as a critic than as a director.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, or just not enough of a cinephile, but I guess I like my movies to have a little more engagement with something, anything, beyond the movie-verse.
Quentin Tarantino, I believe, is a myth-maker at heart. "Inglorious Basterds" is no exception to that. Personally, I would love to read his rumored 500 page draft of IB. But, maybe that draft is a myth too.
I bring this up, because I took the time tonight to watch both "Kill Bill" films back to back. I had seen both volumes in and out of theaters before, but never gone in for the full four hour and ten minute experience. What I walked away with was not exactly what I had expected.
"Kill Bill" had been envisioned as one film, and apparently shot with that same intention. Since it's been split, I've always viewed the two films as nearly separate entities that sort of share the same story material. My mind had always conceived of them as being extremely different in style. But, aside from the House of Blue Leaves section (which is a complete movie freak-out), the two films are not so far apart. And by joining them together I was able to see more clearly how Tarantino's story compounds and expands on the audience. He designs characters to have either said or implied histories that cover them in an aura that can only be found in movies. And then he situates those characters in plot lines and story devices that are so simple (when stripped of all the filmic gymnastics and references) that they render those characters beyond human.
He revels in negative space like no other director, and yet, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Quentin Tarantino and brevity do not go together. But think of how much he doesn't show. Think of all that he implies about his characters. He wants them to be bigger than life - as big as our imaginations and fantasies. He forces us to imagine Beatrix Kiddo and Bill in a romantic relationship.
How does any of this apply to IB? Some of that has already been discussed. What struck me the most, in terms of mythology, while watching IB was the "Nation's Pride" film. A mythology within a mythology. I'm not sure who would want to sit through a movie that only consisted of a person sitting in a bell tower, picking people off with a gun. Even Nazis might get bored after a while. But the little snippets of "Nation's Pride" that we do see made it seem like that's all their was to it. The supposed glory of one man heroically murdering, high above everyone else. Quentin Tarantino's final act of cutting the movie off, and burning the theater down, seems to undercut the Nazi mythology, and, maybe somehow, his own.
I still don't think that there's much to "learn" from Tarantino's films. His films are designed to bring entertainment to his audiences. From interviews that I've both heard and read, it seems like that's his goal. In the end, I'm fine with that. Some have complained that he's wasting such talent on cheap, mindless entertainments. I, for one, am happy to see someone so talented dedicated to entertaining. Few who try to entertain are as successful at it as QT is.
Godard has done one better with his "Histoire du Cinema", which is a movie about the history of movies using movie clips to create a whole new movie.
Here's a thesis on the Godard's "Histoire du Cinema" that can explains what I said a little better.
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1303/1/WRAP_THESIS_Morrey_2002.pdf
"It just may be that some critics are right in accusing 'Inglourious Basterds' of luridly exploiting a horrid chapter in humanity's history. But at least it does so without hypocrisy."
&
"IB is quite clearly about the *idea* of WW2 - and thus it's many artistic manifestations - and in an even broader way, about how a fact ceases to be regarded as truth once it is introduced into fiction. I would argue that it has more fairness and nobility towards the horror than Saving Private Ryan, which quite plainly painted the German army as the "other". Here he includes at least two scenes giving the Nazis a rare humanity: the brave soldier who would rather be beaten to death than betray his brothers, and the cowardly family man who makes a deal for his own life on the day of his son's birth, and is then unfairly betrayed. There is nothing lurid about that."
OK, so I'm not the only one who noticed peculiarities like that in the film. (And it seems many critics - and QT himself - have touched on how the catharsis of the climax is ruined by the film becoming self-reflexive and those Nazis becoming people, evil or not, burned alive, justified or not, quite cruelly...)
Good to know there are others scratching their heads over these aspects of the screenplay. While I agree, overall, it's a 'movie movie', I don't think you can ignore some of the mixed up feelings happening (at least in more thoughtful audience members) during the above mentioned scenes. I especially liked Nick Faust's recent e-mail to Ebert about 'the unspoken undercurrent' of the film: "The title does not merely name the Jewish Nazi killers; everyone in the film is in some way, from some point of view, a bastard; shameful, even in the face of heroic action and positive results." Indeed.
On the other hand, I feel like QT does these things just to screw with us. However he can grab our interest, he will, for the entertainment value. (The movie's trailer has a very simplistic view of the actions by character's in the movie: "There are no crimes behind enemy lines.")
Even so, intentional or not, the movie deconstructs our ideas of the war movie so that we won't look at any others the same way again. (QT talking about the ending of "The Dirty Dozen" comes to mind.)
Hey, another great review about this movie. I really liked this one.
http://bit.ly/vVAy0
INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is just another one of Tarantino's "Look how much I know about genres" movie. This time, he's using propaganda movies. Its a twist on TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, only, its Jewish soliders made the heros. But, he's using all types of propaganda; Hitler is basically a cartoon much like our own versions of Japanese people in our propaganda movies. Mélanie Laurent's character represents the poor victims who take their revenge on the enemy. Her "movie" at the end is Tarantino basically telling the audience what HE'S doing. He took a genre and twisted it. Which is what he's been doing all his career. It is always fun reading critics trying to make his work more important then it is each time one of his movies is released, though.
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right.,