Quentin Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is currently winding down its theatrical run in Korea and heading towards the world of home video. In the past few months there has been a great deal of discussion about the film, primarily in terms of its treatment of revisionist history and its problematic reversal of Jewish victimhood. But in recently watching the film a third time, I was more interested in thinking about how the film is constructed. For a mainstream Hollywood film that grossed a large amount of money, the style and narrative form appear to be somewhat unusual, not unlike Tarantino’s first big success, 1994′s PULP FICTION. On closer examination, however, the style of the movie is not very unusual at all, despite initial appearances. In fact, the only thing slightly unusual about the film is in its narrative form, not in Tarantino’s directorial choices. 

One of the most common observations about INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is how few scenes there are, especially for a movie two and a half hours in length. And indeed, the five chapters of the narrative are basically dominated by 5 main sequences. In total, there are approximately 15-20 scenes in the whole film, and many scenes are very long, especially the opening, which is 19 minutes and takes up the entire first chapter, “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France”. Because of this unusual narrative form, many viewers get the impression that the editing of the scenes is also rather slow. On first viewing I had this impression myself, that Tarantino was letting these long dialogue scenes play out in a series of long takes. In other words, it seemed as if Tarantino was simply an observer, patiently recording these conversations before giving us a heavier amount of editing in the few climactic action set pieces. But this is an illusion, caused by the simple length of the scenes and the way in which Tarantino follows the “invisible” style of editing, where most of the cuts occur through the use of eyeline matches and shot/reverse shot dialogue exchanges. The average shot length of the film is less than 7 seconds, which is slightly longer than the Hollywood average today (which is closer to 4-5 sec) but not a huge variation. Even more surprising is that there is only one shot in the entire film that is more than 60 seconds in length, and even this shot simply uses camera movement instead of editing to give a different perspective on the action (see stills below).

Thus, within these long scenes, Tarantino is tightly controlling the audience and manipulating their response. Now, the argument can be made that all films do this, even those with less editing, since the director is always using some method to guide the viewer. But a tightly edited film that moves continuously from one character looking at another, constantly orchesrating theses exchanges through cutting, does have a stronger degree of manipulation, especially since this can feel “invisible” and “natural”, when of course it is extremely artificial. I think part of the success of Tarantino’s cinema is how he stitches or sutures the viewer into his scenes and is able to keep the audience in that situation and have this tension build. In other words, he is a great classical director, but hardly the innovatative stylist some claim him to be.

I should add here that the extreme amount of cutting in Hollywood cinema today is not the only way cinema can be constructed; it isn’t even the only way popular cinema can be constructed, although within American cinema there are very few exceptions to this rule. One would be Paul Thomas Anderson, whose THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) did attempt an alternative to classical style in at least some of the sequences and has an average shot length of around 12 seconds. Tarantino has discussed THERE WILL BE BLOOD (see clip here) and claimed it challenged him to make greater work. But in fact, Tarantino has not really changed his style or tried anything different or unique with INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS; if anything, he has become more classical, which is perhaps its own type of innovation in today’s Hollywood. Within American cinema as a whole, even with the more critically acclaimed films and directors, such as the Coen Brothers or Martin Scorsese, there remains a clear focus on heavy amounts of editing, perhaps feeling that an audience would not accept a slower editing pace. But this does not have to be the case, as the example of Korean cinema shows. To give one example, Lee Chang-dong’s SECRET SUNSHINE (2007) was very successful in Korea, finishing in the Top 15 Korean films of that year. The average shot length is over 20 seconds, something unheard of for a popular film in America. Of course, within a smaller national context that does not have a huge budget and does not need to appeal beyond the domestic market, SECRET SUNSHINE can be more stylistically diverse. And many Korean films are of course just as tightly edited and constructed as those of Hollywood, including two of Tarantino’s favorites, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. But that the option to slow down the editing pace is possible is a very positive sign of a cinema that permits a greater stylistic variation, one that Hollywood cannot accept.

Thus, my basic conclusion is that Tarantino is a very conventional director, and I don’t necessarily mean this as a negative. Tarantino is a fine craftsman, but his strength is less with his directorial style and vision than with his narrative construction and dialogue. It is in the storytelling area that he is a real innovator. In this way, perhaps he remains a quintessentially American filmmaker, despite all his borrowings from world cinema.

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