DJANGO UNCHAINED (Dir.

Quentin Tarantino, 2012, US) - Re-imagining Slavery [Major

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx

The exponential critical discourse on Quentin Tarantinos Django Unchained poses an equally
difficult task for anyone who wishes to write comprehensively about the film since it is ongoing,
myriad like and most significantly caught up in a tide of reactionary criticism that threatens to
obfuscate debates predicated on race and violence. Whatever I am about to say about this film has
to be contextualised within a discourse that is both contemporary and immediate. Sometimes,
looking back at a film with some critical distance is usually one of the least problematic and most
objective ways of trying to determine the cultural worth of a film. Django Unchained is currently
being discussed as part of a wider filmic interest in slavery but both this and Spielbergs Lincoln are
films written and directed by white middle class film artists, thus posing important questions to do
with representation. Although Tarantino has previously made films with black characters, mainly
played by Samuel L Jackson, Spielbergs experience with slavery in terms of his film career has
been more direct and visible; The Colour Purple andAmistad testifies to his interests in dealing with
the guilt of Americas past crimes. What follows are observations which are not necessarily
debating an existing discourse but instead trying to delineate critical junctures which could prove
to be valuable in separating fact from fiction.

1. Film or Mash-Up?

Jackie Brown - QT's last film?

Since Jackie Brown in 1997, the films Tarantino has directed have all been tributes to exploitation
cinema and while it may be snobbish to deny Django Unchained the label of a film it seems
impossible to do so when the very foundations of Django Unchained are constructed on an
intertextual mode of address that shows totality. Intertextuality has been present in the films of
Tarantino since his debut with Reservoir Dogs but the difference between his early films including
Dogs, Fiction and Brown is that the action is framed against a recognisable and contemporary real
world America. Such implicit allusions to reality have gradually disappeared in his most recent
films. Kill Bill, Deathproof, Inglorious Basterds and now Django Unchained take place in a reimagined America and Europe of the past. Whereas Dogs, Fiction and Brown uses an urban noir
landscape of Los Angeles that recalls the lexicon of American crime cinema, the actions of
characters are grounded in a reality associated with traditional assumptions about fictional
narrative cinema. Taratino's last four films including Django Unchained are extended homages to
favourite genres and styles of filmmaking that have shaped his perceptions as both a fan and
director. If anything Django Unchained is the ultimate fan mash-up made solely to indulge the
nostalgic fantasies of its director at the expense of a cine-illiterate audience. If a video mash-up
cannibazlises other films, music and pop culture to create a discontinuous narrative then a film like
Django Unchained goes one step further, transforming past ideologies by decontextualising them
so they become mere interpellative markers of a postmodern aesthetic. Tarantino speedily moves
from one cinematic allusion to the next, testing the limits of cultural capital and propagating
originality is nothing but another romantic myth. As a fan, Tarantino opens Django Unchained with
Corbucci and ends with Leone while the middle is filled out with Ford. Here are some examples of
the way Django Unchained plunders and raids film history to create the ultimate western mash-up:

Django (1966, Sergio Corbucci)

The original opening titles to Corbucci's Italian western.

Note the reproduction of the exact same font style.

The Searchers (1956, Ford)

Ford's film deals with racial politics.

The narrative of Django Unchained seems more indebted to Ford's

Mr. Tibbs drive up to see Endicott, a wealthy plantation owner...

...is mirrored in the sequence which sees Django in his newly transformed
persona of the Bounty Hunter rides past the field slaves of a plantation
owned by Big Daddy.
Once Upon a Time In The West (1968, Leone)

This is a flashback device revealed later to be Frank (Henry Fonda).

Tarantino pays homage by using it as POV shot for Stephen's character.

The Big Silence (1968, Corbucci)

Arguably Corbucci's greatest western and the wintry backdrop finds its way...

...into the journey of Django who trains to be an ace gun slinger.

Taxi Driver (1977, Scorsese)

Bickle's sliding gun contraption which he makes for the final bloodbath...

...is used by Schultz in the slaying of Candie.

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966, Leone)

Tuco's final contempt for Blondie is muted by Morricone's blistering score...

...and Stephen's outrage is interrupted by Django's dynamiting of the mansion.

The western triptych of Leone, Corbucci and Ford is very much a personal admiration of three
distinctive auteurs who helped to define the genre and the overarching narrative trajectory of his
own film. It would be wrong to simply extrapolate and isolate western allusions since
representations of slavery in the film are also predicated on blaxploitation cinema. Whereas the
western intertextual discourse may be easier to decipher the obscurity of the references to
blaxploitation cinema points to the privileging of populist, hegemonic genres over those such as
blaxploitation defined more closely on grounds of ethnic identity and racial politics. The dearth of
research and studies completed on blaxploitation compared to the western makes Django
Unchained even more problematic to read since the intertextuality becomes locked in a wider
debate concerning Eurocentric mainstream film academia. Such critical disparity between the
western and blaxploitation is underlined by the mainstream critical reception to the film which has
failed to fully acknowledge and discuss the more racialised intertextual referencing made by QT in
his film. Such a view certainly supports the argument that black American cinema is rarely
discussed in the mainstream and that when it does appear on the cultural radar no one quite
knows how to write or respond about it adequately.