Ambivalent Screens: Quentin Tarantino and the Power of Vision

With a central problematic concerning the role of fiction in relation to reality and a provocative falsification of the historical events of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) contributes importantly to analyses of the relation between perceptions of the image and conceptions of the real. Tarantino’s film, as we will see, is highly invested in the role of vision both in the metacinematic sense of its blatant self-referentiality and as a thematic for the narrative and the mise-en-scene itself. From the very opening scene, in which the daughter of a French dairy farmer hears an approaching Nazi vehicle and lifts the corner of the bed sheet she is hanging up to dry and thereby invites both herself and the audience to see the Nazi intrusion into her reality, to the final scene in which two of the protagonists look straight into the camera, Tarantino’s film may be understood as an invitation to look at seeing itself. Just as Tarantino, as always, paints a cinematic universe highly invested in its own role as such, where the importance of appearances, roles, acting, an