Quentin Tarantino: A French New Wave Filmmaker
“It’s as if a French poet took an ordinary banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines.”
Pauline Kael, Godard Among The Gangsters, The New Republic, 10/09/1966
Ever since he broke onto the scene with Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking has divided critics and audiences alike. Some see him as a visionary who applies revolutionary genius to create singular genre-redefining pieces, while others dismiss him as a hack and a plagiarist. In fact, it might be best to view him as though he was a cinematic equivalent of the famed cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, which assumed a cat trapped in a box with a vial of poison that could break at any time. Logically, the cat can be considered simultaneously dead and alive. Similarly, Tarantino might be seen as both a genius and a plagiarist at the same time. Or more appropriately, he is best considered a bona fide French New Wave filmmaker.
In order to appreciate this comparison, one should remember what made French New Wave so ‘new’ after all. Long story short, this movement originating within a tight-knit community of critics and filmmakers entailed a mostly unprecedented appraisal of cinema as an art form and a source of inspiration equal in stature to literature and theatre. Up to this point, film was seen by aficionados of high art as a lowly upstart – entertainment for the unwashed masses – rather than a respectable artistic endeavour. Thus, Godard, Truffaut and others saw the six decades-worth of cinematic legacy as a nearly bottomless well of inspiration much more interesting to draw from than the more traditional sources. However, they held the cinematic mainstream structure in contempt at the same time, as they thought it had calcified into a stencil that filmmakers relied on as a crutch to hide a lack of artistic spark. The works of New Wave filmmakers celebrated cinema by redefining and reharmonising it with unrivalled bravado, and up-ending any traditions that may have crystallised within it.
Quentin Tarantino grew up enveloped by cinema; he ingested movies in the way a black hole consumes matter. It was merely a matter of time before he would pick up a camera himself. And when he did, it was completely natural for him to tap into the roiling sea of various cinematic inspiration that was his mind and use it to create something new and singular. This rendered him an organic – and perhaps unwitting at the start – candidate to pick up the torch left by Truffaut and Godard and continue their work not by merely mimicking their style and approach, but by thinking about cinema the way they did. What the stalwarts of nouvelle vague had to invent and rationalise in academic terms, Tarantino viewed mostly organically. For him, the notion of making movies was naturally inspired by the idea of borrowing from other filmmakers, rather than seeking inspiration outside the universe of cinema.
Tarantino was interested in peeking in between the frames of classic movies, picking up the scraps of film stock left on the editing room floor and turning what other filmmakers viewed as garnish or tangents to archetypal stories into fully functional films, which mimics exactly how Pauline Kael summarised Godard’s Band of Outsiders in her eponymous review as an attempt at showing the romance between the lines of an otherwise banal crime novel. Thus, the aforementioned Reservoir Dogs is a heist movie without a heist and Pulp Fiction is a collection of vignettes that Fritz Lang or Otto Preminger would condense to single lines of dialogue meant to give depth to their stories and characters; after all, a date with a mob boss or a hit-gone-awry clean-up operation would likely feature as throwaway tangents and not as pivotal elements of the narrative backbone in a traditionally understood film noir. Up to that point, nobody was really interested in what hitmen did on their days off, what they discussed over lunch, or what they thought about Madonna. In essence, he made fully functional, entertaining movies just by asking what happened to the typical characters found in genre films he grew up watching when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. In order to execute on those wild ideas, he would enlist the help of his endless knowledge of cinema and use snippets, tropes and tableaus from underseen gems and obscure genre oddities as building blocks to forge cinematic mosaics. Simultaneously, he completely abandoned the traditional three-act structure cinema had adopted from theatre and embraced a more literary format, i.e. playing fast-and-loose with chronology of events and utilising a formal division of the narrative into distinctive chapters.
While this cut-and-paste methodology of moviemaking has endured throughout his entire career, a keen eye would notice that Quentin Tarantino’s perspective shifted after Jackie Brown. His gaze moved more decisively towards celebrating his varied influences, from spaghetti western to men-on-a-mission war romps and kung-fu actioners. Meanwhile, his experimentation with form and structure ceased altogether. This stylistic evolution can be likened to that of Francois Truffaut’s, whose filmmaking career also exhibited a similar trend. In fact, he was famously, and perhaps undeservedly, chastised for it by Godard who denounced him as a crook who had made one good movie (The 400 Blows) and then just ‘told stories’. However, what Godard saw as a betrayal of the manifesto of le nouvelle vague was simply related to Truffaut wanting to worship his idols differently: by referring to their work in pieces of direct homage, rather than by radically re-contextualising and terraforming the landscape of cinema as a whole.
Therefore, just as Jules And Jim was on some basic level a love letter to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and Finally, Sunday an ode to Alfred Hitchcock’s legacy, similar core inspirations can be found within the films Tarantino has made since (and including) Kill Bill. However, he was more interested in celebrating certain genres and subgenres more than singling out inspirational filmmakers, with a small exception of Sergio Leone to whom he has been tipping his hat more or less consistently. This can be found in subtle musical hints Django Unchained is peppered with, during Shoshanna’s climactic dash through the fields in the opening of Inglourious Basterds, particular staging of shots, symmetry in characterisations (e.g. Hans Landa seems directly inspired by Henry Fonda’s character in Once Upon A Time In The West), overall atmosphere and even enlisting Ennio Morricone as a composer to score The Hateful Eight. In any case, Kill Bill is undeniably an ode to spaghetti westerns, Hong Kong actioners and samurai movies, Death Proof is a love letter to a short-lived subgenre of car movies like Vanishing Point, Driver, and Two-Lane Blacktop, Inglourious Basterds nods decisively towards The Dirty Dozen and spaghetti war movies, and The Hateful Eight is a play on The Thing. And while all of his films have distinct stylistic nuclei, they are also micro-universes of inspirations hidden within particular shots, lines of dialogue, etc. They are kaleidoscopic collages of inspiration assembled by a mad genius who clearly sees cinema differently to everyone else.
This is how Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking portfolio has been celebrating cinema as a game-changing art form: by deconstructing its form, rediscovering forgotten idols and finding beauty in vast expanses of obscurity, which is exactly what the progenitors of French New Wave did in 1960s. They loved movies so much that they defenestrated traditional conventions and re-wrote the rule book for better or for worse. Tarantino has picked up the baton and carried it with pride while ever so slowly maturing. He can be accused of many things – from his ego protruding from the movies he makes all the way to wearing his foot fetish as a badge of honour – but he cannot be accused of disrespecting the legacy of the medium. After all, he adores cinema so much that he had Hitler literally killed by a movie, as well as Sharon Tate’s murderers given a cathartic flamethrower treatment by a washed-up star and his stuntman sidekick in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. This kind of audacity exemplifies perfectly the combination of reverential respect towards film and a revolutionary attitude towards filmmaking that characterised French New Wave, which makes him a living torch-bearer for this movement.
