Essay: Cinephiliac moments – Inglorious Basterds

Identify one of your own private ‘cinephiliac moments’ and try to account for your intense emotional response through a close analysis of the fragment in question, then briefly consider how this moment may be related to wider issues in film culture and history.
My cinephiliac moment is the opening scene in ‘Inglorious Basterds’ – a 2009 World War 2 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is a very intelligently written scene which elicits an emotional response from the audience. There is one particular character in this film that I will be choosing to focus on – Colonel Hans Landa of the SS. He is a high-ranking Nazi officer tasked with tracking down Jewish families in occupied France. I personally, believe this is the best character Tarantino has ever written, and I will be exploring this in my essay. The opening scene in ‘Inglorious Basterds’ is gripping, tension-filled and suspenseful and serves as an introduction to Hans Landa, as well as giving the audience an idea of what is to come for the rest of the film. The scene starts with a wide shot, depicting the peaceful and serene dairy farm in which the LaPadite family inhabit. Perrier and his daughter are outside the house carrying out chores. One key component of tension and suspense, suggested by Lehne and Koelsch in ‘Toward a general psychological model of tension and suspense’, is Conflict, Dissonance and Instability. The first step that Tarantino has taken in making this scene suspenseful is by creating instability. The stability of the peaceful homestead is broken as soon as the daughter sees the Nazis driving up the road towards them. Tension and suspense have now been created and the only solution to this is if the instability is resolved, no matter how. Due to the soldiers now having arrived, the second key component of tension and suspense according to Lehne and Koelsch – Lack of Control – now comes into play. Because the control of the situation has shifted from the LaPadite family (the father – Perrier) to the Nazi soldiers (Colonel Hans Landa), tension is created “due to the inability to influence the course of events.” The power is now all in Hans Landa’s hands, which is not good. The audience also has no control over what unfolds, and the fact that the power rests on the shoulders of a Nazi officer does not help or ease the tension. The power that Landa has is only reinforced in a very subtle way as both him and Perrier move into the house. Perrier answers Landa’s question to go into the house by saying “Yes, after you.”, to which Landa replies by smiling politely and then placing his hand on Perrier’s shoulder to signal for him to go first – and Perrier does. It is an extremely subtle hint that Landa now has the power even in Perrier’s own home, and it may well have gone unnoticed by Perrier. Another clever technique that Tarantino utilises to build suspense, is to develop the audience’s emotional investment into the characters or scene. He does this by using dialogue. Tarantino explains this in an interview with Elvis Mitchell by saying that “Part of my plan is to bury it in so much minutiae that you don’t realise you’re being told an important plot point until it becomes important.” Tarantino makes Landa exert his power through politeness, which helps the audience to develop a strong emotional investment into the characters and thus, creates tension. A key example of this is when Hans Landa grabs one of the daughter’s arms as she goes to fetch some wine for him. He politely refuses and asks for milk instead. Hans Landa had also previously said how attractive Perrier’s daughters are. These two moments combined lead to an uncomfortable and unsettling experience for the viewer. Another very subtle moment in this exchange is how and why Landa grabs the girl’s wrist. Tarantino has made it fervently clear that Hans Landa is first and foremost a detective. It is of my belief, that Landa grabs the girl’s wrist in order to check her pulse. Obviously, knowing her pulse will tell Landa if she is nervous or not, which then means Landa has even more power. He will know if they are hiding something from him. This moment could also be interpreted as Hans Landa grabbing the arm of the audience and checking their pulse, which then increases emotional investment into the scene. A fourth key moment, and arguably the most important, in this opening scene is the revelation of the Jewish family hiding beneath the floorboards in Perrier’s home. This knowledge is deliberately given to the audience in order to create stronger emotional investment in the story. The scene becomes ten times more suspenseful now because they know that Perrier is lying to Landa about his knowledge on the whereabouts of the Dreyfuse family (the family he is hiding). It is now only a matter of time that the suspense and the tension is resolved, whether that is Landa finding the family or Perrier getting away with it, and the audience knows it. It can be directly compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘ticking bomb’ theory of suspense. Hitchcock explains that if two people are talking around a table and suddenly a bomb explodes from underneath the table, there is minimal tension. There is only surprise for the audience and even that won’t last long. Instead, if the audience is told that there is a bomb underneath the table (the family) and it is going to go off, the scene becomes much more suspenseful. Tarantino’s ‘elastic band’ comparison adds to Hitchcock’s suspense theory. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he explains that the longer the scene can hold (the longer the elastic band is stretched), the more tension is built. The outcome or resolution is also much more impactful the longer the scene holds. Eventually, Hans Landa does get Perrier to tell him where the family is hiding, and he brings the soldiers in to shoot into the floorboards. There is so much dust, splinters, screams and blood that it is as if a bomb had indeed exploded from underneath the table.
To conclude, this opening scene is a textbook example on how to build suspense. It is so creatively written and every time I come back to watch this film, I am hooked by this scene and that is why it is my ‘cinephiliac moment’. This scene can be related to wider obdurate issues in film culture and history as an example on how to build proper tension in film and television. There are many films now, mainly horror films, that will opt for cheap jump-scares in order to scare the audience. However, scenes such as the one I have analysed and characters such as Hans Landa are much more terrifying, tense and suspenseful than any ‘demon nun’ screaming at something.
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