Modern cinema according to Tarantino

The first, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Reservoir Books), came out in mid-2021 and was not a novelization of the film of the same name, Tarantino’s last film to date, but rather a kind of complement to the aspects. What happens in the movie is outlined and what appears on the tape is eliminated.

The latter is compatible with this. If Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is fiction about late ’60s American cinema, Film Meditations (Reservoir Books) is a very personal reflection on the same cinema. Tarantino devotes chapters to the many films that solidified 60-70s New Hollywood (Bullitt, Dirty Harry, The Escape, Sisters, Deliverance, Taxi Driver, Harcore, a secret world) and provides more general texts on this critical moment. The change that has had a marked effect for him beyond his fondness for the cheap, martial arts, European western, blaxploitation or double billing sessions.

It begins with the justification of the Tiffany Theater, a movie theater located not on Hollywood Boulevard but on the Sunset Strip area, next to hippie bars and rock venues. “Films like Oliver, Airport, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or even Thunderball weren’t shown at Tiffany’s. Tiffany has hosted Woodstock, The Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter), Yellow Submarine, Alice’s Restaurant, Trash, Meat for Frankenstein, both by Andy Warhol,” writes Tarantino in the foreword. He adds that it’s the room that makes the movie show’s midnight showdowns legendary.

double program

Although it was written both actively and passively that Tarantino’s film education was edited in Video Archives, the video store where he worked for a long time, everything started in that cinema.

The Kill Bill director remembers his first feature film at the age of seven. He’s reminiscent of adult movies that look “great” to him (MASH, Sergio Leone’s dollar trilogy, Daddy, Dirty Harry, Bullitt, Against the Drug empire) and others that are “a rock for an eight or nine-year-old”: Sexuality, Isadora, Domingo , goddamn sunday or Klute.

He passionately quotes Robert Altman from the Korean War comedy MASH, which he watched no more than three times as a child, but then goes back to the director and gives him no respite: “Flying is the cinematographic equivalent of flying for birds. like a bird in the head and Quintet is so bad, boring and ridiculous». “Remember La residencecia, the excellent Spanish horror movie. What a wonderful night!”—Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s debut feature—and “How I feared the initiation of A Man Called Horse, where the eagle’s claws pierced the hero’s chest.”

There are no half measures, no vague opinions. Tarantino writes as he returns. While he doesn’t aspire to be an expert critic, his little essays are illuminating. He is a historian of the not-so-distant times when it comes to cinema. His own historian. The Dirty Harry analysis is impeccable and reminds us that before The Hunt, The Silence of the Lambs or Seven, this was the first thriller to focus on the quest for a serial killer.

Cassavetes and Peckinpah

The episode dedicated to New Hollywood is also fierce and straightforward. There the filmmaker vindicates Sam Peckinpah, John Cassavetes, Bob Rafelson, Hal Ashby, and William Friedkin. Without their films, the emergence of the Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, Spielberg and De Palma generation would probably have been very difficult.

He puts himself in the shoes of any North American city audience that doesn’t distinguish between New and Old Hollywood. “They loved how Gritty was tougher than your usual John Wayne western, the street rhythm of Fight Against Drugs, and Dirty Harry, who shoots the Black Panthers while eating a hot dog. But that doesn’t mean they’re ready for the throat cut scene in The Wild Bunch or the singing in the rain scene in A Clockwork Orange.”

Surprisingly, Cinema Meditations isn’t just a series of texts about movies Tarantino either loved or hated. It is also a historical chronicle and a reflection of the sociological contexts in which these films were produced.