"When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening & said, “Everything I have done is now outdated.” I realised that the ironic movement had surpassed the existential movement. It’s a very important film in film history."
- Ingmar Bergman
Ironically, among young film buffs I'm aware of from a recent social media conversation, Tarantino seems to be regarded as mostly a 90s anachronism (in trying to explain his appeal, an older poster admitted that with the exception of Jackie Brown, the universally agreed-upon exception, his movies 'are the most You Had To Be There movies ever made' - I wouldn't say that Bergman had the last laugh (especially since he seems very serene here), but it's a funny quirk of history that his films are probably less dated-feeling 30 years later
ReplyDeleteBecause I'm rather proud of it, I'll add my contribution to the conversation: 'I thought that Tarantino's admission that, if podcasts had been around when he started out, he would never have become a filmmaker was accidentally the most succinct critique of his work that I could imagine.'
DeleteYes that would have been a perfect way of channeling his talents.
DeleteIf this "ironic movement" is disappearing in the rear-view mirror of cinema history, then who else besides Tarantino is in that "You Had To Be There" category?
It feels like cheating, given that 1) it's not film, but TV, and 2) his own toxic personality got him officially cancelled before taste enters into it, but it's really hard to explain why Joss Whedon had the level of unquestionable ardor he attained. Sticking strictly with film...Kevin Smith, maybe?
DeleteI always thought irony was the wrong lens to view Tarantino through, because in fact he strikes me as a painfully straightforward artist - the assumption was that the tidal wave of references carried an accompanying Godard-esque subtext, when in fact his real innovation was that the referential was an end in itself - it was what he thought was cool, nothing more or less.
That carries through in Whedon's and Smith's work, too - the pop cultural fluency were galvanizing in the period just before geek culture swallowed the world, and poisoned itself in the process
Yes it isn't really irony - it's fanboy geeky can't-resist-signposting-my-pantheon. Straightforward wannabeism.
DeleteI tried to watch Clerks for the first time since the time the other day... Had to give up after about 15 minutes
I still have a soft spot for Reservoir Dogs because it absolutely grips me from start to finish. But, yes, I don't really have much time for Tarantino's oeuvre after Jackie Brown.
DeleteAt least Tarantino is a technically competent director. Kevin Smith should never have been let near a camera. He might have had a very successful career punching up dialogue in other people's scripts (just as Whedon did in the 90s).
Speaking of whom, Whedon doesn't cross over to the movies until the 2010s. He's similar to Kevin Smith in that his skills are primarily in dialogue and he's a deeply mediocre visual stylist.
A director who I want to put in the same postmodern bin and castigate for it is Guy Ritchie.
Michael Bay is perhaps the most postmodern of the lot. Except there are no sly winks and references in his work. Just shiny surfaces evacuated of meaning. (I do like Patrick Willems' comparison of Bad Boys 2 with von Trier's Antichrist as twin nihilistic masterpieces).
Some data to support the argument that we are now in a post-ironic moment. In the Letterbox'd list of 250 top-rated movies - probably as good a guide as any to the tastes of young-ish film fans - Bergman has two entries in the top 50, while Tarantino has none. Bergman has four in the top hundred: Persona, Fanny & Alexander, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries. Tarantino has just one: Inglourious Basterds, at #92.
DeleteThe biggest film of 2024 so far has been the uncompromisingly unironic Dune 2. The biggest films for adults last year were Oppenheimer - enough said - and Barbie, which although obviously fun and silly in places is deeply serious at its heart.
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