The surviving images of Quentin Tarantino

Abstract

Quentin Tarantino’s films have been characterized for their formulation of multiple techniques of recycling, parodying and paying tribute to formulas of the past. According to some critics, this idea has turned him into the paradigm of the postmodern filmmaker, who only conceives reality from the amalgam of images that composes it. This paper analyses the intertextuality present in Tarantino’s films, based on Didi-Huberman’s notion of the surviving image, and on the idea that his films rescue the anachronistic in order to bring it back to life in the present. Tarantino’s work is a huge repository of diverse images that coexist and establish new forms of dialogue, the aim of which is to recover a certain ethical dimension present in the actions of the characters. In recent years, this ethical perspective has evolved into a desire to reinvent and rewrite history itself within the parameters of fiction, as if the existence of a world made up of surviving images might make it possible to glimpse the darkest world of barbarism, to detect the presence of evil and to bring the silenced atrocity into the light.