Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema

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Django Unchained is certainly Quentin Tarantino's most commercially-successful film and is arguably also his most controversial. Fellow director Spike Lee has denounced the representation of race and slavery in the film, while many African American writers have defended the white auteur. The use of extremely graphic violence in the film, even by Tarantino's standards, at a time when gun control is being hotly debated, has sparked further controversy and has led to angry outbursts by the director himself. Moreover, Django Unchained has become a popular culture phenomenon, with t-shirts, highly contentious action figures, posters, and strong DVD/BluRay sales. The topic (slavery and revenge), the setting (a few years before the Civil War), the intentionally provocative generic roots (Spaghetti Western and Blaxploitation) and the many intertexts and references (to German and French culture) demand a thorough examination. Befitting such a complex film, the essays collected here represent a diverse group of scholars who examine Django Unchained from many perspectives.

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This collection, the first to focus exclusively on the successful and controversial movie Django Unchained from the equally successful and controversial Quentin Tarantino, covers an impressively wide array of subjects and represents a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives of the filmfrom questions about race to the representation of violence. Quentin Tarantinos Django Unchained is an obvious choice for film scholars and students interested in Tarantino. * Timothy Corrigan, Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, USA, and author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker *
With a wide array of perspectives and an international roster of scholars, Oliver Specks Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema presents an impressive collection of essays on what is perhaps Tarantinos most controversial film. The contributions range across historical, theoretical, and critical analyses, each offering worthwhile contributions to debates and discussions about the films relation to violence, race, cinema, and history. * Lisa Coulthard, Associate Professor of Film Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada *

Author Bio

Oliver C. Speck is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. His scholarly writing focuses on the representation of memory and history in French, German and other European cinema.