Inglorious Basterds

Death by cinema: media reflexivity in Inglorious Basterds

The concept media reflexivity refers to the way in which films can reflect their own superficiality as representations. This has been done in various ways, and for various reasons, throughout film history. In this short essay, I will discuss the concept as laid out by Robert Stam and Sabine Hake, and examine how their ideas can be applied to the 2009 film Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino).

In writing that ”[a]ll artistic representation can pass itself off as ‘reality’ or straight-forwardly admit its status as representation”, Stam distinguishes between illusionism and reflexivity in film as two poles. The former describes films that fully embrace the spectator into the film’s diegesis, while the latter describes films that remind the spectator that they’re watching a film by “pointing to its own mask”. This idea has different significations. Sabine Hake discusses the ways in which early German film was self-reflexive and finds that many films had a self-promoting quality to them by depicting film production or the film industry. An example of this is the Urban Gad film Die Filmprimadonna (1913) (what’s left of it anyway), that stars Asta Nielsen as a film star who starts to take control of the film production of the film she’s starring in. Furthermore, early German cinema often used masks to cover part of the frame, like the famous keyhole shot where the frame was shaped as a keyhole to enhance the idea of looking through one. This both points at the presence of a limiting frame and actualises the idea of a voyeuristic spectator.

Moreover, Stam discusses what he calls interruptions and discontinuity in film as a form of media reflexivity, an idea that ties back to the Brechtian alienation effect in theatre as brought forward by the playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht, in turn, saw William Shakespeare as a source of inspiration. In his play The Tempest, there is a famous monologue that reflects on theatre as illusion. A film example of the alienation effect would be the last scene in Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) where the spectator suddenly gets to see the filming of a previous scene with the director and cameramen present. Here, the illusion of a closed off world gets interrupted.

Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s sixth feature, and tells the story of a group of American Jews who decide to go to Europe to fight the Nazis during the Second World War. One of the subplots is about the French-Jewish woman Shoshanna who runs a cinema in Paris. As the inner circle of the Nazi party, including Hitler and Goebbels, pass through the city, Shoshanna’s cinema is chosen for a special screening of one of Goebbel’s propaganda films. Shoshanna realises the opportunity she is given, and together with her boyfriend Marcel, conducts a plan: they are to cut the film as to include a video of Shoshanna telling the audience that they’re going to die, before setting fire to a pile of film rolls behind the screen. The plan succeeds, and everyone in the theatre dies. The film lacks interruptions and discontinuity in the Brechtian sense, but I would argue that the film “points at its own mask” by reflecting on the nature of cinema. This is done in various ways.

First of all, the film reflects the materiality and the dispositive of cinema. As in Die Filmprimadonna, we get to see the process of filming, of cutting film, of handling reels and of projecting film. The film also recognises the physical danger of the celluloid film in its fragility and flammability, which has caused a lot of loss through film history. Tarantino is famous for his stubborn belief in photochemical film – all of his films have been filmed on film, and in an interview he states that it is on this condition that he keeps making films. He points out that movies are not actually moving images, but still images that create an illusion of movement, and to him, “[t]he magic of the movies is connected to 35 mm”. In that sense, Inglorious Basterds has a self-promoting quality to it, much like the early German films that Hake discusses.

But the film is not only a reflection on the physical power of cinema, but also the symbolical: the theme of falsifying history through film is reflected in the diegesis as well as in the film itself. As pointed out by Frida Beckman, the film makes for an interesting reflection of the relation between moving images and the way we perceive history and reality, in the way it toys with history and fiction. The commentary that Tarantino makes on the manipulation of history writing is made possible by the fact that (I daresay) no one will believe that Hitler died in a cinema fire – in other words, Tarantino cannot really be blamed for manipulation of history writing. There is a playful, almost childish sense to the film, as if Tarantino and his team wants to demonstrate that anything is possible in cinema. The fact that many spectators were surprised to see Hitler die in the film is telling of our strong belief in images – their verisimilitude have made them the perfect medium for manipulation through history. Perhaps the most common example of this is the powerful propaganda machine that Goebbels was in charge of in Nazi Germany, which is pointed out by Tarantino in the choice of film screened for the Nazis. Inglorious Basterds therefore works as a critique as well as a celebration of the (physical and symbolical) power of cinema.

Furthermore, the film is self-reflexive in the sense that it recognises the ghost-like quality of film as a trace from the past. As such, film can be compared to the mummy, as Malin Wahlberg writes, in its ability to immortalise its subjects. This is visualised in a scene close by the end of the film when Shoshanna is projecting the film. Goebbel’s favourite actor Frederick, who has a crush on Shoshanna, decides to visit her in the projecting room, but get rejected by Shoshanna. After having forced himself into the room, Shoshanna shoots him, and get shot herself. They both die. Right after Frederick dies, we see and image of him projected on the screen in the cinema, and right after Shoshanna has taken her last breath, the film cuts and we see the enormous face of Shoshanna informing the audience that they’re going to die. They live on like ghosts on the screen after their death.

Finally, the film is self-reflexive of a certain way that film can work both for its film maker and its audience, namely as therapy. The film is a contrafactual, violent reckoning with the horrors of the Second World War, and like so many other Tarantino films, inherently about revenge. Almost as an answer to the caricatures of Jews produced by Nazi Germany, the Jews in Tarantino’s film are the cool heroes of the film, run by Brad Pitt, who eventually win over the Nazis and get their revenge. The concept of catharsis is relevant to mention in relation to this – a term that was introduced by Aristotle to describe how the tragedy (in theatre) could have a cleansing, almost medical effect on people because of the way it brought new realisations to the audience through emotional investment. I believe I’m not the only one who felt a sense of catharsis when Hitler, Goebbels and the rest of the party died in the film, and I am almost certain that this was partly Tarantino’s purpose with the film.

In accordance with Stam, one could argue that the sense of therapy invoked here is foregrounded by the fact that the film is illusionistic rather than reflexive, since it depends on the audience being engaged with the plot to the degree that it almost believes in it in order to get this sense of cleansing. However, it could be seen as an homage to the power of cinema: that we get a sense of cleansing even though we know it to be fiction. I would argue that this film works to demonstrate that Stam’s division between illusionism and reflexivity is not clear cut. The films that Hake discusses, for example, could pass as illusionistic rather than reflexive, since they “don’t straight-forwardly admit [their] status as representation]s]”. However, they do reflect on the nature of cinema, of film-making and of spectatorship. I believe the same goes for Inglorious Basterds. With Tarantino being a true cinephile, the film is not only mass entertainment. It also points at its own mask by reflecting film history, film as therapy, the ghost-like quality of film, spectatorship, the materiality of film and the role of film in our understanding of the past and the present.

Beckman, Frida. “Ambivalent Screens: Quentin Tarantino and the Power of Vision”. Film Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2015): 85-104.

Hake, Sabine. “Self-Referentiality in Early German Cinema“. Cinema Journal 31, no. 3 (1992): 37–55.

Koivunen, Ann. “Terapi”. In Film och andra rörliga bilder – en introduktion, edited by Ann Koivunen. Stockholm: Raster förlag, 2008, 187-202.

Macnab, Geoffrey. “Film vs Digital? In the same way that a new generation of music lovers are rediscovering vinyl, cinema enthusiasts are discovering, or rediscovering, celluloid”. The Independent 31/9 2017. Controlled 12/1 2018. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/dunkirk-film-digital-christopher-nolan-quentin-tarantino-paul-thomas-anderson-lawrence-of-arabia-a7918586.html.

“Quentin Tarantino comments on Digital vs Film”. Youtube 12/5 2011. Controlled 12/1 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BON9Ksn1PqI.

Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Wahlberg, Malin. ”Dokument”. In Film och andra rörliga bilder – en introduktion, edited by Ann Koivunen. Stockholm: Raster förlag, 2008, 221-233.

The Act of Killing

The past inhabiting the present, and manipulated memory in The Act of Killing

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012) is a documentary about the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-66. However, there is no archival footage from the genocide shown in the film. And rather than stating historical facts (whatever that means), the documentary deals with lies and fantasies relating to the genocide, which makes it a kind of anti-vérité documentary. With that being said – can it really be considered a documentary about the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-66?

Linda Williams writes that: “It has become an axiom of the new documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths – the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events.” In this essay, I argue that The Act of Killing is about the past, and more specifically about the ways in which the past inhabits the present. It tells no absolute truth, because the film recognises that there is no such thing in documentary film. Rather, it should be understood as a film concerned with the ways a violent past is remembered and narrated, and in extension, how it is forgotten. I approach film as a memory device, and as a therapeutic medium.

The controversial documentary dives into the largely ignored subject of the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-66. In 1965, the government was overthrown by military groups, and with western aid around one million “communists”, including Chinese workers, intellectuals, farmers and anyone else opposed to the military were exterminated. To carry out the killings, the regime hired local gangsters. The documentary follows some of these gangsters today, who are successful and wealthy old men celebrated as national heroes, and lets them re-enact their killings in any ways they like. They seem to have no trouble talking about their crimes – on the contrary, they are happy to describe their killings in the most intimate detail. Oppenheimer explained that through the process of filming, however, he came to realize that this bragging was “not necessarily a sign of pride, but the opposite”. Anwar Congo, a man who himself estimates to have killed at least a thousand men, becomes the main character of the film, and Oppenheimer explains that he found Congo so interesting because “his pain was close to the surface”. In one scene, he smilingly demonstrates how strangulation by wire is the most effective and clean way to kill, and only minutes later, admits that he drinks and takes drugs in order to get rid of his nightmare.

This ties in with theories developed by Sigmund Freud in the 1920s. He illustrates how memory and perceptions work by comparing the mind to a Mystic Writing-Pad, a combination of a celluloid and a waxed paper where one writes on the rewritable celluloid paper while the text gets imprinted on the wax paper. Contrary to writing on a paper or with a piece of chalk on a slate, the Mystic Writing-Pad enables both erasing and rewriting, while at the same time leaving a permanent mark. Freud argues that the wax represents the unconscious and the celluloid paper represents the conscious, and suggests that while the conscious is ever invaded with flickering impressions that are replaced with new impressions, some leave a more permanent trace in the unconscious, including trauma. As will be elaborated on further on in this text, the film examines how the violence, fear and brutality of the genocide in Indonesia is oppressed by the perpetrators and the nation as a whole, but that it nevertheless has made a permanent mark in the collective wax paper.

Acting and re-enacting are central themes in the film, as well as the iconography of images. The gangsters were (and are still) big fans of American films, and as Congo explains: “When I was young, I always watched American films and imitated them. I watched them so intently… I felt like I was in the movie! […] I’d see such cool ways of killing. And I copied them.” Perverse fantasies that sprang out of movies influenced killing techniques and the gangster’s personal style, as well as informing the cultural memory of the genocide: by themselves and others, they are throughout the film referred to as gangsters, or “free men”, which also has political implications since the military regime were (and still is) pro-western. The past is in other words heavily romanticised. One of the gangsters, Adi, even admits that “That film is designed to make them look evil […] Of course it’s a lie.” When the gangsters are asked to re-enact their killing in any ways they want, the result is a bizarre mix of film noir, western, gangster film and musical: this is their fantasy. Through filmic iconography, they make sense of the past. This points as two things: how moving images can work to manipulate, or at least shape memory, and how feelings are held oppressed through this manipulation of memory.

In his landmark documentary Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann refused to use any archival footage from the Holocaust, an event he believed to be unrepresentable in images. Lanzmann was convinced that archival footage would add no further understanding of the Holocaust, on the contrary, he believed that it would weaken the understanding of such a complex event, in our fixation with images as a source of truth. Instead, he depicted overgrown railroads that once transported people to the camps and interviewed people living near the camps, letting them describe their memory of the burning smell. “The Holocaust comes alive not as some alien horror foreign to all humanity but as something that is, perhaps for the first time on film, understandable as an absolutely banal incremental logic and logistics of train schedules and human silence”, Linda Williams writes. In its everydayness, the film demonstrates how the past haunts the present.

Williams elaborates on this notion by pointing at a specific scene in the film. The director staged a scene with the Jewish survivor Simon Srbnik, who used to run errands for the Nazis at a concentration camp as a boy. In this scene, he is surrounded by people from a town nearby from where he worked, who remember him as a child and who rejoice in his survival. The tone changes, however, when one of them starts telling an anti-Semitic tale of a rabbi and a SS-solider. Williams argues that this scene effectively shows how the ideas that enabled the Holocaust are reproduced in the present, and how Srbnik’s trauma can be caught in his gaze at this specific moment.

There is a similar scene in The Act of Killing. Congo’s neighbour Suryono, who is to play a victim in the film, has an idea that he wants to share and tells the traumatic story of how his stepfather was killed when he was young. Suryono laughs almost compulsive while telling it, but even the gangsters fall silent in this scene – they seem to realise that the story is not at all funny to Suryono, even though he assures them that he’s not criticising them and that he just wants to contribute to the film. The scene continues, and after the group has rejected Suryono’s idea for the film, he goes on to play the suffering victim with such credibility that the spectators recognise Suryono’s oppressed emotions. In other word: embedded as a funny anecdote, we get a testimony. And embedded in a fictional character, we get genuine emotions.

In this manner, we get glimpses at the past through the creation of the film within the film and its fiction. Furthermore, the past also gets reactivated through scenes of self-examination. When watching a scene in which he plays a victim, Congo suddenly goes quiet and then asks the director if the people he killed felt the way that he felt in this scene. Later, in the last scene, when revisiting the place where he earlier in the film happily demonstrated different killing techniques, Congo starts to retch as if to throw up. When the manipulated memory of the genocide has been externalised onto a technological medium, film, it becomes a tool of self-examination for Congo, by forcing him to enter another subjectivity. Moreover, it functions a sort of a therapeutic medium, not unlike like the violent films that Alex in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) is forced to watch while injected with drugs in order to reshape his neurological and psychological reactions to ultraviolence. In an article about moving images as therapy, Pasi Väliaho discusses how a virtual reality-programme designed for soldiers with PTSD can help reach the organism’s internal milieus of the soldiers and therefore have a therapeutic effect. Väliaho writes that “[t]he reality of images in this process becomes a matter of biology and the evolution of the species, instead of being anthropological and communicative”.[12] In the scene where Congo keeps wanting to throw up, the images he has seen of himself as a victim seem to have acted on him to the degree that the outcome is not only psychological but also physical, as if the film managed to reach into his unconscious.

In all its uniqueness, The Act of Killing has similarities to Shoah in its refusal to use archival footage to depict a historical event. Still, it is about a specific, traumatic part of Indonesia’s history. Both films examine how the past is narrated and made sense of, and how it lives on in the present. The Act of Killing thematises the role film can play in this narration, in the realisation of the gangster’s perverse fantasies for the film within the film. Furthermore, in the scenes with Congo in the end, it demonstrates how film as a memory device and as a therapeutic medium can bring back oppressed memories, and help reconsider a given narration.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Freud, Sigmund. “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad”. In The Archive, edited by Charles Mereweather. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006, 20-24.

Guynn, William. Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe. New York: Colombia University Press, 2016.

Harkins-Cross, Rebecca. “Performing History, Performing Truth: The Act of Killing”. Metro Magazine 180: 90-95.

Swimmer, Jeff. Documentary Case Studies: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest (True) Stories Ever Told. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

Väliaho, Pasi. “Affectivity, Biopolitics and the Virtual Reality of War”. Theory, Culture & Society 29 (March 2012): 63-83.

Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memory: Truth, History, and the New Documentary”. Film Quarterly 46, no 3 (spring 1993): 9-21.

The Fits

(Mycket spoilerkänsliga läsare varnas) Elvaåriga Toni (Royaly Hightower) och hennes äldre bror spenderar stor del av sin tid på den lokala träningsanläggningen. Utöver att träna boxning hjälper de till med att tvätta blodiga handdukar, fylla på vattendunkar och torka golv. Efter att fascinerat ha sneglat på den lokala dansgruppen Lionesses som tränar i samma lokal, väljer Toni dock att lämna den testosteronstinna boxningsringen och istället börja dansa. För att platsa i laget krävs att man närvarar vid tre stycken tretimmarspass i veckan, utöver hemmaträning. ”Stop thinking like an individual and start thinking like a team,” deklarerar en av de äldre tjejerna innan hon demonstrerar en avancerad koreografi som Toni och de andra nykomlingarna förväntas lära sig på stående fot. Lionesses är vana att vinna tävlingar och tänker inte låta segertåget bromsas av några taffliga nybörjare. Samtidigt behöver de förstärkning.

The Fits är en fascinerande tät film. Korsklippningen mellan dans och boxning får mig att tänka på en jämförelse som har gjorts mellan Darren Aronofskys två filmer Black Swan (2010) och The Wrestler (2008). Filmerna handlar om en ballerina respektive en wrestling-stjärna, och jämförelserna har visat på hur dessa två utövare av till synes helt olika sporter egentligen är väldigt närliggande i sin kroppsliga påfrestning. Filmerna skildrar två extremer som innebär ett tämjande av människans fysiska begränsningar. I The Fits, om än på amatörnivå, visas också på släktbandet mellan två kroppsliga praktiker. När Toni tränar boxning liknar det en koreografi i slagschematiken. Hon måste slå enligt en viss rymt för att undvika slag och för att själv slå vid rätt tidpunkt. Dansen som hon sedan övergår till är kraftfull, på gränsen till aggressiv, inte helt olikt boxningens slagstil. I pauserna tävlar tjejerna mot varandra i dance battles, där man en mot en visar vad man har att gå för. Under ett träningspass får plötsligt en av de äldre tjejerna ett slags spasmiskt anfall och åker akut in på sjukhus. Inte långt senare drabbas ännu en av dansarna, och sedan ytterligare en. Utan att låta kameran dröja vid de enskilda anfallen särskild länge är det likväl deras diffusa uppenbarelse som filmen kretsar kring (vilket titeln förstås skvallrar om). Anfallens psykologiska verkan, snarare än deras fysiska existens, betonas. Redan vid det andra anfallet åker en mobilkamera upp för att fånga den märkliga händelsen på film, vilket åskådliggör hur anfallen reproduceras bland de unga dansarna. Man återberättar anfallen för varandra och spekulerar i vad de kan bero på. För ju mindre myndigheterna kan påvisa något orsakssamband, desto mer blir det något som alla får tolka bäst de vill. Musiken spelar en viktig roll här i sin mystik och i känslan av att något i tillvaron glappar.

Det fina med filmen är att det finns många potentiella läsningar av anfallen och deras innebörd, och att ingen förståelse utesluter den andra. De har av somliga lästs som en metafor för mens och den påfrestning på kroppen som det kan innebära. Tonis kompis Beezy förstår anfallen som könskodade när hon hävdar att det bara är en tidsfråga innan de själva drabbas, något Toni viftar bort genom att konstatera att ingen av killarna (i boxningslaget) har drabbats. ”We’re not them”, svarar Beezy då. Vid ett annat tillfälle funderar samma karaktär på om anfallet kan vara en ”boyfriend disease” – en möjlig metafor för könssjukdomar eller oönskad graviditet. En av de ansvariga vuxna skyller till en början på vattnet, och även om den teorin senare utesluts, pekar den delvis på en verklighet i USA där många fattiga områden har blyförgiftat vatten.

Men än mer intressant är att läsa anfallen mer bokstavligt, som ett gruppsykologiskt fenomen. Tonis bror tycks anta att anfallen är fejkade. Även Toni är till en början skeptisk till anfallens äkthet. Vännen Maia uttrycker att hon vill ha sitt anfall överstökat, strax innan det inträffar. Anfallen är otäcka, men blir också allas stund i rampljuset – ett uttryck för individualitet – samtidigt som den individuella upplevelsen av anfallet blir del av en kollektiv upplevelse. Men även om vi skulle ponera att allt är skådespeleri, så gör det inte situationen mindre verklig för de unga dansarna. Tvärtom – i den tid av efterapande som uppväxten innebär, kan anfallen snarast ses som en gruppritual som vilken annan, verklig i sin overklighet. Måhända en axelryckning för den utomstående (typ Tonis bror), men blodigaste allvar för den som befinner sig i det. Omklädningsrummet, en symbol för grupptryckets praktik, är ett rum vi återvänder till ofta i filmen. Där får Toni ta del av andra ritualer som tatuering, öronpiercing och nagellack.

Spännvidden mellan det individuella uttrycket och det kollektiva är ett centralt tema i berättelsen. Toni slits mellan den universella viljan att tillhöra en grupp och att stå ut i en grupp och känns ambivalent inför den socialiserande process hon utsätts för. I scenen efter att Tonis naglar blivit målade ses hon skrapa bort nagellacket. Att sluta tänka som en individ och börja tänka som en grupp är förstås en dubbeltydig uppmaning. Det att släppa på sin individualitet till förmån för gruppen kan å ena sidan innebära ett osynliggörande och kuvande av individen. Men det kan också innebär en lättnad – man slipper vara utelämnad till sig själv jämt och ständigt – och en gemenskap.

Tonis känsla av distans, eller instängdhet – i sin kropp, sitt jag – illustreras av återkommande bilder där hon tittar genom galler. Första gången genom ett gallerbetäckt fönster när hon spanar på Lionesses för första gången, en annan gång senare i filmen när hon tittar in på en boxningsträning. Men gallren symboliserar något mer än bara instängdhet. Toni tränar vid flera tillfällen vid ett par trappor och en bro som sträcker sig över vid en övergiven räls, också den (bron) täckt med galler. I en av filmens starkaste scener får hon riktigt flyt i sitt dansande när hon tränar på just den bron – en intertext till den berömda scenen i Rocky (1976).

Samtidigt som dansen och de medföljande grupprocesser som följer upplevs som delvis begränsande för Toni, visar denna scen på hur dansen i sig kan bli en utomkroppslig frihetsupplevelse, som når bortom jag och identitet. Däri ligger det intressanta i dansen som filmiskt studieobjekt – den blir dels ett slags konfliktyta mellan ett individuellt och ett kollektivt uttryck, dels en kroppslig disciplin som har potential att ta individen bortom sig själv. Även anfallen kan läsas som en liknande extatisk befrielseprocess. Att förlägga en berättelse om den tidiga puberteten i en dansmiljö är därför effektfullt. För kan inte uppväxt och identitetssökande ses som en enda lång koreografi som man förväntas lära sig, för att sedan i olika hög grad avvika från? Det fungerar åtminstone bra som metafor i The Fits. Toni lär sig koreografin, och gör den till sin.