Django Unchained Sparknotes

An auteur is a singular artist who controls all aspects of a collaborative creative work, a person equivalent to the author of a novel or a play. The term is commonly referenced to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation.

The director is responsible for overseeing creative aspects of a film. They develop the vision for a film and carry the vision out, deciding how the film should look. The director may also be heavily involved in the writing and editing of the film, as well as managing the script into a sequence of shots, coordinating the actors in the film and supervising musical aspects. The Auteur Theory suggests that films contain certain characteristics or ‘signatures’ that reflect the director’s individual style and give a film its personal and unique stamp. Hayao Miyazaki is one such auteur whose entertaining plots, compelling characters

Django Unchained, directed by Quentin Tarantino, is an adventure western movie set in Texas 1858 that highlights the attitudes held at that time. Through the use of symbolic codes, audio codes, and technical codes Tarantino highlights the texts central issues and presents them to challenge the viewers own attitudes. As a white male teenager living in a first world country, I find the central issues challenging to my own attitudes as I don’t agree with slavery, racial prejudice, and white supremacy. Django Unchained follows the story of a slave that stops at nothing to rescue his imprisoned wife, Broomhilda, from the grasp of a cotton plantation owner who is using slaves to make his fortune.

The film set in the deep South in 1858, about a slave who gains his freedom with the help of Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German bounty hunter, and sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner is an intriguing story with very graphic action scenes. The plot of the story begins as Dr. Shultz buys Django (Jamie Foxx), a black slave, from some traveling slave owners. He buys Django because he is chasing a pair of outlaws known as the Brittle Brothers and Django is the only person who knows what they look like. As the plot develops, Dr. Schultz and Django become allies and work together to achieve each other’s personal goals; Dr. Schultz wants to track down and

An auteur is a director who personal creative vision and style is expressed through films. The term auteur is originated in France and is French for author. There are different ways in which a director can express their vision in films and show who they are. There are many directors that are considered to be a auteur such as: Quentin Tarintino, Tim Burton, Kathryn Bigelow, Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. The director I have chosen as an auteur is Spike Lee.

Perhaps, the powerful storyline of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was what encouraged one of the greatest cinematic martial arts directors Ang Lee, to make a film out of the Chinese novel. In this film, Lee’s primary function is not only to portray skillfully choreographed fighting scenes, but also to connect powerful sequences of events that touches upon the emotional complex human condition that is associated with both the Taoist and Buddhist belief systems. By not allowing action to be the sole guiding force of the narrative of Crouching

The film Django Unchained (2012) by Quentin Tarantino defines the historical issue of institutional racism that existed in the antebellum era of Southern slavery. This unique perspective on history defines the struggle of Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz) to save Django’s wife, Broomhilda Von Shaft (Kerry Washington) from the evil southern plantation owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio). Candie’s presence as the primary patriarchal figure in the story not only defines the dominance of white racism in the south, but the class-based elitism of the “southern plantation owner” as the apex of the institution of slavery in the antebellum era: “The transition from two 18th and early 19th-century models—the genteel

In the film industry, there are directors who merely take someone else’s vision and express it in their own way on film, then there are those who take their own visions and use any means necessary to express their visions on film. The latter of these two types of directors are called auteurs. Not only do auteurs write the scripts from elements that they know and love in life, but they direct, produce, and sometimes act in their films as well. Three prime examples of these auteurs are: Kevin Smith, Spike Lee and Alfred Hitchcock.

During the 1940’s, the idea of the auteur theory arose. It was crafted by Andre Bazin, who was a French film critic, and Roger Leenhardt, a filmmaker. They stated that a film should represent the directors vision. Another French film critic, Alexandre Astruc, enhanced the auteur theory by expressing that directors with their camera should be like writers with their pen. This would make a director’s films all have the same type of aspects. Once a director makes a number of films, a certain “finger print” can be seen throughout his creations.

Many people may have a specific style in which they like to dress. A woman might have a signature lipstick she enjoys wearing, a man might have a distinct cologne that stands out from the rest. Movies are not too far apart in comparison. Sometimes people find films more enjoyable than others, and often do not realize they come from the same director. The Auteur theory is a that defines the director as the sole author of the entire film, adding his or her own personal style. When it comes to the world of animation, director Hayao Miyazaki is a pioneer in auteur. His specific directorial style is seen in many of his films in which he manages to make films enjoyable to adults of all ages. Kiki's Delivery Service was one of director Miyazaki's

This means that the fundamental visual elements convey the message of the film, rather than the plot line, and it “will bear the unmistakable personal stamp of the director” (Britannica, 2015). Tarantino has often been called an auteur (McAuley, 2014) (Keith, 2013) (Bartle, 2013) (Hylan, n.d.), and I would have to agree. Firstly, he meets two of Sarris’s criteria for what an auteur should do, which are that he technically proficient, and that he recognises the “ultimate glory of cinema as an art” (Sarris, 1962).

Jade Nein According to Huffington Post, “No single Hollywood film in the last decade has sparked the kind of controversy and wide-ranging response as Quentin Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained. ”(Spradley) The controversy of racism swarmed Quentin Tarintino’s Django Unchained for excessive use of the N-word, a scene with a rendition of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), and the portrayal of slave fighting in Pre-Civil War era. Racism and stereotypes in Django Unchained do not mean the film possesses racist intention however.

Django Unchained is a film that takes place in the pre-civil war era. Giving it an American Western feel, the film touches on different aspects such as self-assurance, love, and revenge. Even though the film touches on the aspect of love, this is not your average love story. Django Freeman, played by Jamie Foxx is a freed slave who is traveling to find his wife, Broomhilda, played by Kerry Washington, and rescue her from her unpleasant slave owner. Along his journey, he is put into different situations where he is forced to show his dominance as a freed slave. Django’s new status as a free man exhibitions confidence, renewed love, and a taste of vengeance.

Another important characteristic of the film is the frequent use of the word ‘nigger’. Tarantino has been previously accused of using this loaded and destructive word too carelessly, especially in Pulp Fiction(1994), allegedly without fully appreciating the historical context of the word to undermine and oppress an entire racial group. Regardless of whether anybody believes that about Tarantino’s previous films or not, it is difficult to accuse him of misusing the word in Django Unchainedwhere it is directly tied to the calculated way that black people were viewed as sub-human, even to the extent that some of them believed it themselves. And then the film even goes one step further when the character Stephen (Samuel L Jackson) is introduced. Fiercely loyal to his white master Calvin J Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Stephen embodies many of the stereotypical traits that have been used throughout cinematic history to ridicule black characters. He is a despised character within the film designed to show the audience how loathsome many representations of black identity have been, from The Birth of a Nation onwards. Jackson also gives an extremely funny performance,

Quentin Tarantino’s love of 1970s and 1980s Asian cinema is well known and easy to see in Kill Bill. His love of intertextuality is on display as he references many films from that era. However, characteristics and aesthetics in those films are carried over from more classic films such as Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, who also used intertextuality. A story with a lone wolf archetype, violence, and swordplay we can recognize in Tarantino’s work as well as that 70s and 80s Asian cinema he loves. This paper will look at what elements in Sanjuro may have influenced Tarantino in the creation of his work and particularly in Kill Bill.