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From Glorious Nibelungs to Inglourious Basterds: Quentin Tarantino's Refractive Retelling of Fritz Lang's Epic

2019; German Studies Association; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2019.0080

2164-8646

Alexander Weber,

Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs

This article interprets Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) as an aesthetic response to Fritz Lang's two-part Die Nibelungen (1924), a film partly appropriated by the Nazis. The interpretation illustrates how Tarantino's film recreates characters and plot elements from Nibelungen through an aesthetic method that I call "refractive." The primary goal of this recreation is to wrench antisemitically contaminated elements from the Nazi film archive, first and foremost Nibelungen's dwarf characters. Following Eric Santner, the article argues that Inglourious Basterds uses a homeopathic method to remove these characters' fascist corruption, thus rehabilitating and reinventing the Jewish figures that this archive had disavowed.