Quentin Tarantino

by Ed Gallafent

Quentin Tarantino is one of the best-known living American filmmakers in the world, and the story of his career has been the subject of a number of books and articles. But what do his films mean? In this new study, Edward Gallafent does not look at Tarantino’s story but at the films themselves. He asks to what extent Tarantino can be seen as a specifically American filmmaker, with the kinds of preoccupations and interests that have formed part of Hollywood’s traditions, and also how he explores the expressive possibilities of current cinema. The book concentrates on the main feature films of Tarantino’s career so Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction , Jackie Brown , and the two volumes of Kill Bill . Apart from Kill Bill the films are not treated individually, but in terms of some of the subjects that connect them together, such as success and tradition, their notorious deployment of violence, and Tarantino’s approach to his interest in presenting events out of chronological order. The book also covers adaptations of Tarantino’s work, looking at the screenplays of True Romance and Natural Born Killers as well as the films made from them, and compares Tarantino’s approach to adapting Elmore Leonard with that of another important American filmmaker, Paul Schrader. The aim of the book is to explore these topics and to take the reader back to what the American critic Robert Warshow called the ‘actual, immediate experience of seeing and responding to the movies’. It is designed to appeal both to those who were excited by the films on first seeing them in the cinema and to those taking the opportunity of reconsidering them on the screen or on DVD.

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Luis Reséndiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

está bien a secas, y probablemente esté más que bien, pero la lectura de otros libros donde se aborda lo mismo la forma que la recepción que la interpretación y el sistema de producción y la narrativa me hacen sentir que cualquier libro donde la concentración esté únicamente en la lectura interpretativa --cuidada, por otro lado, como quien genera un sistema de signos en torno a la obra de QT-- está cuando menos un poquito mocho. mea culpa, por supuesto.