<em>Inglourious Basterds</em>: The Best (Not a) Shoah Movie of 2009

Quentin Tarantino’s recent film Inglourious Basterds is cinema embedded in cinema. The film takes multiple focuses but centers chiefly on a film theater in German-occupied Paris run by Shosanna Dreyfus, a young Jewish woman living under an assumed identity after escaping the mass execution of her family. Shosanna is romantically pursued by a young German soldier named Frederick Zoller who had become a war hero after saving his unit through his expert marksmanship and who had subsequently become the subject of Nazi propaganda film. The young soldier, enamored with the young theater owner, convinces her to allow the premiere of the film about him to take place in her theater which Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler will attend. Although, Tarantino has been quick to point out that Inglorious Basterds is not a film about the Shoah but more of a “guys-on-a-mission movie” it is difficult to see how the film can escape representing the Shoah given the central role that Nazi ideology, propaganda, and state sanctioned violence against Jews plays (Horn, Jordana, “Glorious Bastard: Tarantino Talks About His Not-A-Holocaust-Movie,” The Jewish Daily Forward, August 21, 2009) Tarantino is his attempt not to represent the Shoah, has represented it. But how has he represented it?

Tarantino places “killing Nazis” at the center of his filmic discourse. Through the use of cinematic techniques such as montage and “breaking the fourth wall”, Tarantino blurs the lines between “killing Nazis” and “Nazis killing” in two central scenes. In the central scene of the movie where Hitler and his high command have gathered in Shosanna’s Paris theater to the view the premiere of the new propaganda film featuring Frederick Zoller, Tarantino takes a surrealistic turn and uses cinematic montage to turn the tables on the audience. While the doors of the theater are being locked, the building set ablaze, hidden explosives are ticking towards ignition, and the weapons of Tarantino’s Basterds are trained on Hitler’s high command, the Nazi propaganda film depicting similar acts by Nazi soldiers plays in the background. The cinematic frames alternate between the eruption of gunfire in the theater and in the propaganda film. The delight on the faces of Nazis in the propaganda film while they are killing and the delight on the faces of those killing Nazis in the theater becomes difficult to separate as the speed of the frames increases. The propaganda film then becomes the vengeful and mocking face of Shosanna reveling in the deaths of her persecutors.In the final scene of the movie Lt. Aldo Raine carves a swastika into the forehead of the captured SS Col. Hans Landa. While he works his grisly craft the camera focus shifts and breaks the fourth wall so that the audience perspective become the perspective of the Nazi. Tarantino catches the audience on the horns of these images in order to bring into relief the human taste for revenge and the natural proclivity for violence. In this way, the film serves as a surrealistic attempt to represent the un-representable. Instead of spelling out the horror of the Shoah in narrative discourse and images, Tarantino creates a cinematographic experience in which the audience is able to experience the sensuous phenomenon of hatred, revenge and violence that serve as visceral cues to the essence of the historical experience in a more acute way than narrative does. In the end, the hands of the audience and the hands of the Nazis look the same – bloody.