2008), and Tarantino films feel, duly, like works of cinematic autoeroticism, the filmmaker turning himself on with assembled images big on unabashed fetishry. Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley. 'Aussies manage to shoot cars with this fetishistic lens that just makes you want to jerk off!' he yelped in Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild. His films betray his encyclopaedic knowledge of genre film: of B movies and exploitation flicks, crime capers and car-chasers, kung-fu and splatter horror. He grew up watching the legendary LA cable service Z Channel, got a teenage gig as an usher at a porn theatre, and eventually-famously-worked as a video-store clerk in Manhattan Beach. Tarantino's filmmaking obsessions tend towards genre movies and the refuse of what was once considered culturally 'trashy'. The gleeful use of the most taboo word in the last of these aligns with its own greater issue: audaciously placing the most shameful chapter in American history-slavery in the antebellum South-in the prism of a genre movie. Tarantino has been criticised for being obsessed with the word 'nigger', (3) having used it twenty-one times in Pulp Fiction, thirty-eight times in Jackie Brown, sixty-five times in The Hateful Eight (2015) and over a hundred times in Django Unchained.
His films are filled with silver-tongued devils, from the loquacious hitmen of Pulp Fiction, to chatty arms-dealers (Jackie Brown, 1997), Nazi interrogators (Inglourious Basterds, 2009) and slave-peddling plantation owners (Django Unchained, 2012). He's renowned for his endlessly quotable dialogue and the way he delights in playing with language: having an ear for idiosyncratic turns-of-phrase, folksy homilies, fanciful metaphors and colloquial vulgarities. Where most American filmmakers dabble with studio features, or try their hand at different films, Tarantino has been-well, outside of helming episodes of ER and CSI-a true auteur: writing all of his nine features, and penning them in his singular style, with all his characters speaking like Tarantino characters. Tarantino has remained, in many ways, unchanged.
(2) The film catalysed the indie movie movement, inspired endless imitators, and stands, in hindsight, as the definitive film of the decade. It won the prestigious Palme d'Or-the fest's highest prize-at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, wowed critics, scored seven Oscar nominations (winning for Best Original Screenplay), and made over US$200 million at the worldwide box office against a modest US$8 million budget. But it was Tarantino's second film, Pulp Fiction (1994), that turned him from rising star to veritable supernova.
(1) Born in 1963 in Tennessee, and raised largely in Los Angeles, the director was the breakout star of the American independent filmmaking explosion of the 1990s, earning acclaim with his debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), whose image of a crew of gangsters in monochromatic black-and-white suits remains, still, iconic. Quentin Tarantino may be the most famous American filmmaker of the past quarter-century-someone who was called, by iconic filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, 'the single most influential director of his generation'.