Memory and history unchained: Narration strategies in Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012)

Abstract

In this thesis study, Tarantino’s two films, Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012), were analyzed in terms of narration strategies. These films, which could be described as Historiographic Metafiction shaped by postmodern perspective, stand out as examples to distinctive storytelling frequently employed by Tarantino. Narratives in these films bend the social traumas in cultural memories and the narratives found in history. In this study, these films, in which Jews capture and kill Adolf Hitler in 1940s, a black hero rides a horse and takes revenge on white slave owners in 1860s, were subject to a film analysis on the use of memory, space and characterization. The current study on these two films, which challenge audience’s knowledge of history and ways of seeing it, has demonstrated that Tarantino’s films are not just pastiches where the director arbitrarily collaged the concepts, events and motifs selected from written and cinematic history. On the contrary, they are metafictions which first expose the conventional ways of knowing and seeing, and then create an alternative to these forms of narrative. However, these metafictions are not merely “unreal”. Instead, memory and history can function as instruments to reshape the present, freed from simply being a burden of the past on the present.