Seeing is Believing

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds do not share much in common content-wise. Yet when paired together, their aesthetic inventiveness and creativity is damn near astounding when compared to most of the output this past decade had to offer. Both are rooted in well-established genres: that of the musical biopic and the war film, respectively. And yet each takes great pleasure in stretching the parameters not just of the conventions of said genres, but those of traditional cinema itself.

The most pertinent of these elements is historical accuracy. Every year, we are drowned in numerous Oscar-bait Hollywood films ranging from Walk the Line to Saving Private Ryan that come with the “based on a true story” seal of approval. As sincere and well-made as these films can be, they usually end up reducing there subject to a tidy, containable product.

Haynes and Tarantino are two filmmakers well aware of the fact that cinema is an automatically heightening force, and thus unable to capture a completely reality-based experience. By acknowledging this, they in turn are able to reject the unofficial rules both genres are supposed to follow. I’m Not There and Inglorious Basterds are aware of the fact that they are purely cinematic objects, living only on the screen in which they are being projected. So rather than trying to escape this fact, both films heartily embrace it.

Another one of these elements is narrative storytelling. Most of said genres attempt to follow the logical progression of the subject they are tackling, attempting to “get it all in” at a respectable two-and-a-half hours. Characters and events are skipped and altered, making the final product ridden with holes and loose ends, even as it swears to us that we finally “know” the person.

I’m Not There, rather than presenting a unified vision of the Bob Dylan subject, disassembles him into six different entities, played by actors varying gender, age and race. In addition, it gleefully mishmashes its many happenings, wildly crosscutting between several different times, settings and moods so that they coexist, mirror and overlap one another.

Inglorious Basterds gets its point across in a much different but equally radical manner. Telling the story with five “chapters” that range from twenty to forty-five in length, it’s often astonishing in its deliberateness. Characters frequently sit at a table and talk. And talk. And talk. Words are the ultimate weaponry in Tarantino’s universe, a storybook fantasia mixed with espionage procedural.

While I’m Not There’s chief interest is music, literally every frame of the film is imbued with some cinematic recognition. Each of the character arcs come complete with their own individual aesthetic, from the films of Godard, Fellini and Leone to made-for-TV documentaries. The Godard-inspired segments, revolving around an actor named Robbie Clark who portrays “Dylan” in a film, feature plenty of New Wave flourishes, from rapid onscreen inter-titles to direct dialogue taken from Godard’s seminal 60’s work.

Tarantino has always been an undeniably cinematic filmmaker, his movies subsisting off the content of past films. Everything from music to characters to costumes to dialogue is either a direct grab or variation from some other movie, making them each an eclectic refraction of cinema history. Inglourious Basterds is his first work to directly incorporate the act of watching and making movies into the story. Tarantino has crafted a universe where film critic-Lieutenants can use movie extra work as alibis and movie starlet-double agents can have their signed autographs used against them in treacherous double crosses. And, most prominent of them all, a rigged movie premiere brings the downfall of the Third Reich. Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s revisionist history lesson, so crammed with cinema it’s comparable to a warped “Making Of” on the end of WWII.

But this is not to suggest Tarantino and Haynes are being disrespectful in their portrayal of history. If anything, their films are broad extensions of the ability of cinema to be as powerful as any artillery or textbook. The subject of the movie premiere in Inglourious Basterds, a schlock-y production that follows the travails of a German soldier, has the audiences laughing and applauding as he wipes out hordes of American troops, an unsettling reminder of the influence of cinematic propaganda. When hundreds of reels of film later burn the Nazi party to a crisp, it plays as an even more abstract expression of this fact, as it might as well be cinema’s past rising up to leave its mark on history.

Haynes’ portrayal of Robbie’s rise to cross-cultural stardom, and eventual disassociation from his wife Claire amongst the chaos of the Vietnam War, is equally cinema-infused. During their breakup, Claire somberly quotes a fragment of the famous coffee cup monologue from Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a striking indication of cultural influence on their private relationship. Later, Haynes juxtaposes the handing over of their divorce papers with grainy footage of the peace treaty signing signifying the end of the Vietnam War. The on screen representation of the personal and political is made harmonious.

It’s hard to see what the future will hold for these two movies, whether they will be championed among the very films they reference or fade into obscurity among the fog of movies descending at a faster and faster rate. Either way, for the time being, they represent the kind of cinematic daring that is keeping current state of the movie world afloat.