Subscribe to Print Edition | Sun., November 22, 2009 Kislev 5, 5770 | | Israel Time: 18:05 (EST+7)
Haaretz israel news English
web haaretz.com
Jewish World Haaretz Toolbar
Diplomacy
Defense Opinion National
Print Edition
Car Rental
Focus U.S.A. Strenger than Fiction Business Travel Magazine Week's End Anglo File Books
Share |
Inglourious Basterds offends some Israelis, but others get the joke
By Koby Ben-Simhon
Tags: Inglourious Basterds 

In his new film "Inglourious Basterds," American director Quentin Tarantino has given us a fictional plot that centers on Jewish-American soldiers during World War II, who are let loose on a brutal quest for vengeance against the Germans. Their acts include the scalping of the enemy, and even an act of arson that consumes Hitler and the rest of the Nazi top brass at a movie theater run by a beautiful Jewish woman.

"From a Jewish and Israeli standpoint, this film touches a very sensitive point," observes Prof. Dina Porat, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University.

"The Jewish people - as individuals - wanted to avenge what had been done to them, and that is why, for example, Jewish Brigade soldiers were not posted in Germany at the end of the war, but rather in Belgium and the Netherlands, because the Allies did not want there to be wild retribution. The point is that the Germans were waiting for a payback for their actions, and the Jews waited for their great moment to exact it. But in the end, plans such as that of poisoning the water sources of four German cities, or various operations contemplated by Abba Kovner's group of Avengers, were never carried out. [David] Ben-Gurion said after the war: 'If six million Germans are killed, will it bring my six million Jews back to life? If not, I am not interested in revenge.' The revenge that Tarantino offers can be enjoyed because it is fantasy, because it never happened in real life."
Advertisement
As in the filmmaker's earlier works, which include "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), "Pulp Fiction" (1994), and two installments of "Kill Bill," "Inglourious Basterds" offers a viewing experience that is extremely violent, but for the most part entertaining. The movie opened in Israel on September 15 and has already attracted more than 200,000 viewers - a big hit by local standards.

The controversial film stars Brad Pitt as the non-Jewish U.S. officer Lt. Aldo Raine. "We're gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we're in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin' guerrilla army, we're gonna be doin' one thing and one thing only ... killin' Nazis," Raine announces early in the film (whose screenplay is also by Tarantino), to his team of Jewish-American warriors known as The Basterds.

"Nazis ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That's why any and every every son-of-a-bitch we find wearin' a Nazi uniform - they're gonna die ... We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are ... Each and every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps. And I want my scalps. And all y'all will git me 100 Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of 100 dead Nazis. Or you will die tryin'," the lieutenant proclaims, wrapping up his speech in a heavy Southern drawl.

"It was utterly deranged," Naphtali Oberhand-Balaban, a 68-year-old Holocaust survivor from Haifa, says in disgust. "A good story is a story with an interesting conflict. The biggest conflict in this film is the violence for its own sake. I saw nothing more than violence. We are shown a group of sadistic Jews. I have a family connection to the Bielski brothers, who led a group of Jewish partisans in Poland. They were absolutely not like that. The partisans were hungry people, weak, who did everything they could to save Jews. They were not bloodthirsty animals. Tarantino depicted them as a more murderous gang than the Nazis.

"Since I am a Jew and a Zionist, I could not watch the film without thinking about its impact on us as Jews," he adds. "This movie says very bad things about us, albeit from the mouth of a Nazi character, but therein lies a problem."

Oberhand-Balaban says the film reminded him of the 1970s comic TV series "All in the Family," whose main character, arch-conservative Archie Bunker, constantly curses Jews and blacks: "A poll found that viewers liked the series, not thanks to its critique of racism, but precisely because they identified with the anti-Semitic messages. A large part of the audience did not think Archie Bunker was an idiot who talks nonsense ... There is something similar in 'Inglourious Basterds' - this time it's a Nazi-devil, who explains with charm and super-intelligence why Jews are rats. How can that be ignored?"

Oberhand-Balaband is worried about the movie's influence on less knowledgeable viewers. "Most of the people in the world do not watch documentary films about the Holocaust, which are always hidden on some minor channel. Such films get more exposure in Israel and Germany, but the situation is completely different in the rest of the world. When for millions of people the main encounter with the Holocaust and World War II takes place through Tarantino's eyes, in my opinion a distortion is created. I don't know how dangerous Tarantino is to the memory of the Holocaust, but it is clear to me that he is creating a devaluation of our Holocaust. There are scenes in his film that are brilliantly shot and directed, that is certain, but I cannot escape the history I know. Tarantino veers off sharply from the historic path."

Prof. Porat notes that it is not unusual for Holocaust survivors to "dislike or fear anything that does not represent reality exactly the way they experienced it. Their great anxiety is that the reality they lived through will not be depicted correctly, will be distorted and forgotten."

She adds, however, that the Holocaust is a subject that confounds depiction: "Tarantino does not tell the story of the Holocaust, and therefore I do not see his story as problematic. He says outright: 'I am not giving you history, this is what I fantasized to myself, come along and fantasize with me.' If a historic fact gets twisted, I will get angry and speak out, but 'Inglourious Basterds' has no pretensions to be the truth, and that is what's beautiful."

Porat was particularly impressed by the first of the film's five "chapters," which tells the tragic story of a Jewish family in hiding and a French farmer who has no alternative but to turn them in.

Porat: "When the French farmer grasps that it's either him and his daughters or the Jewish family, he decides to reveal the fact that he is hiding Jews under the floorboards of his house. Then, a moment before the Nazis shoot them indiscriminately, he sits right above them and cries, without their realizing that he has betrayed them. That scene in particular spoke to me, because compared to the scalping and cracking of heads in the subsequent chapters, this it is a scene in which the three main elements of the Holocaust coalesce, the three sides of the triangle: the Jews, the local population, and the Germans. This scene portrays the whole dilemma: the Jews who are in hiding and are doing everything they can to save themselves, and the Frenchman who has done everything in his power to save them, but in the end gives them up. Tarantino demonstrates this with great delicacy."

'I actually shed a tear'

At an early-October screening at Tel Aviv's Lev Dizengoff Cinema, Tarantino's film sparked powerful reactions. Elinor Shriki, a media studies student, squirmed in her seat as the audience around her applauded and shouted encouragement each time Germans were eliminated. The ease with which Tarantino elicited belly laughs from the audience surprised her.

"It bothered me that in a lot of unfunny scenes, which did not make me laugh, the audience was in stitches," she said afterward. "In the final scene, where you see a burning movie theater full of Germans, I actually shed a tear. It's hard for me to explain; it was very strange. I wasn't crying out of pity for the Germans. Maybe it was excitement at the drama of the event."

At that moment there was a hushed silence in the theater, Shriki explained, "and then one woman began to giggle, and after her everyone started laughing. The scene was not an easy sight to digest, very powerful, and perhaps the silence prompted the audience to break the tension that had built up throughout the scene, in the form of laughter. What made people laugh was the extremism, not because the Nazis were being hurt and getting scalped. I think the audience was simply astounded at where Tarantino had taken the Holocaust. People laughed because they were actually in shock.

"Tarantino gave us two hours of pleasure, a frothy delight with bits of bitterness," Shriki said, in summing up. "But in my opinion, if you delve into the film more deeply, you can reach more complicated insights as well. For example, someone asked me whether 'Inglourious Basterds' will be shown on Israeli television on Holocaust Remembrance Day 20 years from now - will it become a legitimate Holocaust film for us? My initial response was 'No way,' but on second thought I can't rule it out. Because of the film's flip-flopping, because of the contrasts it contains and the fact that it does not take any stand, it is hard to argue against it. The subject matter is heavy, but the movie is light ... Everything is elusive, devoid of any categorical statement."

Danny Warth, a local film critic, says that he went to see the movie with apprehension. "I wouldn't classify 'Inglourious Basterds' as a Holocaust film. Aside from the murder of the Jewish family at the beginning, it does not really deal with it. It is pretty difficult, in my opinion, to put this film in the same category as Holocaust films like 'The Pianist,' 'Life Is Beautiful,' or 'Schindler's List.'

"The film deals with cinema and derives from cinema," he explains. "Tarantino likes to put his love of film into his work. This motif has been recognized in his other movies, but here it reaches new heights. There is hardly a scene that has not been borrowed from somewhere else, that does not connect to something else. The character of the 'Jew Hunter' is based on dozens of Nazi characters from Hollywood films. It's a kind of compound of all the Warner Brothers characters - for example, the German officer played by Conrad Veidt in 'Casablanca.'"

Tarantino's film is a parody of the genre that began with Robert Aldrich's 1967 "The Dirty Dozen," Warth says. "The title of Tarantino's movie is the same as that of Enzo G. Castellari's 1978 war/action film, which was already a variation on Aldrich's film. Many bits of the plot and musical score in the film reference 1960s spaghetti Westerns. Tarantino incorporated into the soundtrack music by Italian composer Ennio Morricone that accompanied some of them. Wiping out the Nazi top brass takes place inside a movie theater, in an explosion created by burning movie reels, which back then were printed on flammable material. The movie opens with the words: 'Chapter 1: Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France' - a direct reference to Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti Western 'Once Upon a Time in the West,' in which the second scene depicts the killing of a farm family. So if we are talking pastiche, then with Tarantino it is a pastiche of a pastiche."

Warth adds: "There truly are scenes that were handled with virtuosity from a directorial standpoint. There's no doubt about it: The man knows how to position a camera and shoot a scene. On the other hand, there is the immature side of Tarantino, who bases the movie on other movies in a sort of enthusiasm, without understanding the suffering of the Jewish people, the human tragedy. But, yes, it is impossible to avoid the fact that Tarantino's provocative nature makes him a pretty interesting director. He injects something new into American cinema, which sometimes seems to me rather tired and repetitive. So in the debate surrounding the film, I find myself in the middle.

"He's not a second Jean-Luc Godard, who used a lot of cinematic quotes in his early films. Godard's approach was ideological, subversive. He used the bits from other films as a vehicle for criticizing politicians, or the United States. Tarantino is the representative of a generation of young people who were raised on video. He himself worked at a video rental store, and began writing his first screenplays there. His entire universe is taken from the movies. From my point of view, this works both to his advantage and disadvantage, because if we go looking for a little human emotion in him, then we will not find it. In the film he employs elements from horror films, trash, scalping and head bashing, but not the fairly basic generic elements of action movies, such as characterization. The characters lack any dramatic depth and are devoid of any human characteristics. We do not know the backgrounds they come from, and I feel there is no elementary human emotion in this film."

Perhaps because such emotion gets in the way of the atmosphere of silliness? Because Tarantino wants the audience to walk out of his movie smiling, because he wants to entertain us?

Warth: "There is something megalomaniacal about his work and the way he sees himself, as reflected in interviews with him. He does not treat this film as pure entertainment or comedy of the absurd, but rather believes that he has created a cinematic masterpiece."

Tarantino and taboos

At a press conference in Tel Aviv in September, when he came for the film's local premiere, Tarantino attempted to contend with the criticism aimed at him; to answer the questions of Israeli journalists who wanted to know how he had permitted himself to have a roaring old time at the expense of the Jewish people's tragedy. Tarantino said it was important to him that Israelis like the film, and that he was eager, on his first trip to Israel, to see their reactions: "I'll be seeing it for the first time with an Israeli audience ... I'm interested to see, 'Okay, are there laughs here? Does the suspense work here as well as it works somewhere else?'"

Asked whether there were any topics he would hesitate to deal with on screen, the director said: "To me, taboos are meant to be broken."

He insisted that "Inglourious Basterds" is not a parody, but agreed that it takes an ironic stance toward the conventional victimization aspect of World War II movies: the concept of good guys versus bad guys. "When I come up with the idea of 'I want to do a bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission-movie,' then I have to sit down and say: Who are these guys and what's their mission? And I came up with the idea of a bunch of Jewish-American soldiers doing an Apache resistance against the Nazis, because I had never seen that before, and I've seen the other story ad nauseam." He added that his Jewish male friends loved the idea: "They go, 'Wow, I want to see that movie.'"

Dressed in jeans and a black-and-white checked shirt, Tarantino appeared discomfited by the suspicious glares he was getting. "As a writer, I don't have the luxury of judging any of my characters," he replied to one question with a crooked half-grin on his face. "If I judge them, then I'm not being them. They are my creation, they are the three-dimensional characters that can go wherever they go and I'm always surprised at where they go. I can't dictate to them. But at the same time I like all my characters because there are no villains or heroes when you create characters ... [The audience] can choose whom to like and whom not to like. I have to understand them and I have to love them."

In fact, Tarantino declared that it was not his intention to make a Holocaust film, but rather an adventure story. "And it came out interesting," he said: a spaghetti Western about World War II, with the Jews and the Germans slugging it out.

However, says Zahava Zuckermann-Stromsoe, a Holocaust survivor who lives in the Ramat Aviv neighborhood of Tel Aviv, "I didn't see a Jewish-German Western. It may be what Tarantino set out to do, but as far as I'm concerned it was no Western. In my view it is simply a movie that is done superbly, that really spoke to me. His vivid imagination does not anger me at all. The gang of avengers he created, whose essence in life is to take revenge and give the Nazis the most painful death - not just shoot them, because to be shot to death is an easy death - did me good. It did me good to see the Nazis beg for their lives, tasting a bit of that bitterness. By the same token, it felt good to see the Jewish girl who survived and lived under an assumed identity in France. I was thrilled to see her courage, to see her powerful spirit after her family was murdered and she was left all alone." Substituting her sunglasses for reading glasses, Zuckermann-Stromsoe seeks to put Tarantino in perspective: "It is a mistake in my eyes to judge the film as black or white. Ultimately these experiences that we look at with hindsight, we know what is real and what is direction, we recognize the salt and pepper used to season the plot. It may be that not everyone can understand him, but I could. There were certainly a number of moments that I, as a Holocaust survivor, experienced, particularly the endless persecution to kill, to hound the Jew, wherever he might be. When the Nazi officer in the film says that in order to find the Jews you have to think like a Jew, like a rat, it resonated with me. We were like rats. Nobody who did not go through the Holocaust can understand it, but this is exactly how it was."

Zuckermann-Stromsoe was born in Vilna, in what was then Poland, to a middle-class family. Her father owned a bakery and her mother was active in Zionist movements. She was only 9 when the war began and her world turned upside down - unaware that some months later, she would be weeping bitterly and begging Jewish policemen not to betray her father to the Nazis, but in vain.

"When the roundups began in the ghetto, when they started taking children to Ponar, the extermination site in Vilna, the ghetto leaders contemplated how to save the children," she recalls. "They found hiding places for us inside the ghetto. I hid in all sorts of places. The first, for example, was in a sewage canal under the gate to the ghetto, where I heard - just like you see in all the movies - the Germans' steps overhead. It was terrifying.

"We ran into any hole to hide, fewer and fewer kids each time. One time they put us in a place that was wet and black, a big frozen space. A baby also came down there with us. His mother stuck bread crumbs inside a small rag that was like a pacifier and gave it to us. That's how we fed him. That baby cried and we, who were afraid we would be discovered, covered him with our bodies. At a certain point he grew silent. When they got us out of there, the mothers, including mine, were waiting for us above ground. The baby's mother was also there, but when they gave her the baby she started to scream. It is indescribable. It would have woken God. Only then did I realize that the baby had died."

After two years, when the ghetto had been emptied, Zuckermann-Stromsoe and the other Jews who had survived were put on a train to the Kaiserwald work camp in Riga. From there she was transferred to the Stutthof death camp.

"I was like a zombie, I ate snow off the ground, but I survived," she says. "When my mother disappeared I didn't want to go on living. I decided to run to the electric fence. I saw how people did it every day, cling to the fence and that's the end of the story. It's for the best. But since I knew that after you do such a thing everyone in your barracks gets punished, I decided to forgo that. I did not want so many people to suffer because of me. Afterward came the death march, the wind blew against us, the road was covered in ice, and to either side were forests, deep snow. Anyone who could not keep up was shot and dumped on the side of the road like a dog. At night they put us in pigsties and horse stables. In the morning they would unlock the doors and we would carry on marching. I was released from hell only in March '45."

Tarantino does not relate any of this. His story and yours are two different worlds that are based on the same historic event. Your story is accurate, profound, painful; his is amusing, far from historic truth, and yet you find it acceptable?

Zuckermann-Stromsoe: "He is not telling my story. That needs to be understood. I received it as a gift that nobody had the imagination to make before. Not everyone can understand and enjoy it. That's fine. The pleasure that a woman who went through the Holocaust gets out of a film like this could be considered something wacky, but it is not wacky at all. It is my reality. I can see in the film very painfully some of the things that I experienced, but also get satisfaction from the punishment at the hands of the Jewish avengers.

"Ultimately," adds Zuckerman-Stromsoe, "I have lived my whole life in Israel, I built myself up, raised two delightful children, and I have four grandchildren. If you ask me, that is the real revenge."
PROMOTION: Mamilla Hotel
Bookmark to del.icio.us  
 
Hamas: No rockets
Hamas says all militants in Gaza agree to halt rocket fire
Chavez and the PLO
Hugo Chavez lauds Carlos the Jackal as 'great' pro-Palestinian fighter
  1.   Inglourious Basterds just a speculative movie 09:52  |  Dani 06/11/09
  2.   Koby ben- Simhon- wonderful discussion! 09:53  |  shtarka 06/11/09
  3.   yet another Tarantino gorefest 14:24  |  Ben 06/11/09
  4.   No need for cinema... 15:13  |  Larry 06/11/09
  5.   Stereotypes 15:50  |  franky 06/11/09
  6.   Gaza is now a Ghetto 16:03  |  Pronsias 06/11/09
  7.   Pronsias ,a "Ghetto" with not one but 2 cell phone networks? 16:38  |  Absolute Sweden 06/11/09
  8.   Unrealistic ,Goldstone and UN would have accused them of war crim 17:25  |  Absolute Sweden 06/11/09
  9.   everyone knows Gaza is a ghetto 18:46  |  newageblues 06/11/09
  10.   #5 Pronsias welcome to your nightmare 20:10  |  Big Sur 06/11/09
  11.   Bad Timing after The IDF in Gaza 22:02  |  jeff 06/11/09
  12.   i wish such soldiers existed during the war 23:14  |  crypto jew 06/11/09
  13.   It was good 00:52  |  Eli 07/11/09
  14.   As Absolute Sweden points out 02:08  |  hollingsworth 07/11/09
  15.   Viewers mystified by Inglourious Basterds 03:42  |  allang 07/11/09
  16.   Sucking up to the Jews 08:22  |  L A 07/11/09
  17.   Tarantino`s pandering 08:51  |  chelemer 07/11/09
  18.   # 7 The Jewish Ghetto was not all doom & gloom 09:39  |  L A 07/11/09
  19.   chaelemer 05:13  |  sWeis Melbourne 08/11/09
  20.   Pronsias 05:18  |  sWeis Melbourne 08/11/09
  21.   # 17 Tarantio wrote a `happy ending` 14:51  |  Petra 22/11/09
Special Offers
Advertisement
Eldan Rent a Car
Israel's leading car rental company offers you a 20% discount on online reservations
Protea Hills
A Retirement Village in Nature Nestled in the Foothills of Jerusalem
Date Local Jewish Singles
Ready to meet your match? Join Jdate today!
Junkyard
Junk a car - get free towing nationwide and a tax-deductible receipt
More Headlines
17:01 Peres: Israel to halt settlements once peace talks begin
16:53 IDF vows 'zero tolerance' for soldiers who refuse orders
15:17 IDF chief: Reports of progress on Shalit swap don't help
11:28 Lieberman: After all the insults, Turkey can't mediate Syria talks
16:23 Iran launches 'huge' war games amid threats to strike Tel Aviv
15:10 Obama must deal with important questions of the Mideast conflict
11:41 Ultra-Orthodox pressure stalling church, mosque at Ben-Gurion airport
22:00 TV ROUND-UP: Hamas: No more rocket attacks; Iran to hold war games
09:07 Israeli heir: More Kafka works stashed in Swiss vault
17:59 IDF soldier who tried to sell army rifle jailed for 20 months
09:34 Why is Israel laying claim to an Arab home in Jaffa?
14:46 Number of IDF recruits seeking combat service jumps by 6%
13:52 The financial crisis is over, at least for Israel's top officials
Home | TV | Print Edition | Diplomacy | Opinion | Arts & Leisure | Sports | Jewish World | Site rules |
| Advert: Recommended Restaurants | Makom: Engaging on Israel
| Search engine marketing
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
© Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved