"Spiritual liberation never depends on how many things you think, only on what you have done, and the spirit never relies on the spirit to awaken and liberate, only on action. A person's true freedom is not in thought, but in action. Action, broaden the spiritual space, give life the real strength. ”
In quentin Tarantino's 2012 new work "Django Liberated", Quentin is clearly playing with the "new story" of the once-popular Italian-style Westerns on the surface of the story.
He replaced the classic white cowboy Django with a black slave who was trafficked. Django, a black slave, is rescued by the bounty hunter Dr. Schultz, who "indoctrinated" and learns to read and use weapons, and has since embarked on an adventure to take revenge and rescue his trafficked wife.
We can draw a series of interesting antagonisms from this film: black and white, outlaws and defenders of the Constitution, legends and history, rivers and lakes and temples...
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > the image of a black hero</h1>
But Quentin's "original" itself has another clue from the 1970s — black exploitation films. This type of film emerged in the early 1970s, and its story was characterized by following white action movies, cop movies, and Westerns, and replacing white heroes with black people, and in production, the film's cast was mainly black, tending to satisfy the interests of black audiences.
The "stroke of genius" of Django Liberated looks more like a reincarnation of this trend, reminiscent of the Song of Svetbæk and another Mandingo in the genre of "Black Exploitation Films"
If the former "created the Black Superman" as a response to decades of winning weak or nearly invisible black screen images, the latter directly inspired the temporal and spatial architecture of Kun's story in the 1830s in the American South, which was still under slavery, and also provided a prototype for the plot of the second half of the film: Jiang Long, as a master of the Mandingo trading, was able to penetrate into the plantations of the great slave owner Candy.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="10" > the perfect inheritance of black exploitation films</h1>
As far as the film's apparent system is concerned, "Django Liberated" has become a clever collage and reincarnation of the black traditions in the history of cinema. Like an optical trick, Quentin makes the black cowboy story of 1858 come into view through the refraction of the 1970s genre film "Prism".
In particular, it is worth mentioning that while the film activates the formal language of black exploitation of film, it also erases the imprint and ideological load of the era in which this genre was born.
The rise of black exploitation films in the early 1970s as a symptom of the development of the black civil rights movement in the United States and its predicament. In black exploitation films of this period, crime is usually the main plot line, and white policemen and politicians always have a negative image of racial discrimination and violence, which is rare in the stereotypes of The Good Vegetable Wood's previous racial narrative.
"The Song of Svetbæk" even became a must-see film for black civil rights and the radical group "Black Panther Party". Quentin's cunning lies in the fact that he partially inherits the formal elements of black exploitation films, but pushes the social time and space in which the story takes place for nearly a century and a half, forming a certain meaningful perversion.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="16" > struggle and liberation cannot be found</h1>
Thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment, inhumane slavery has been swept into the rubbish, and the dark page of the "free nation" has been turned. This allows the viewer to safely play with Django's killing spree without having to sit on a needle in the haystack for his black identity.
Django, the Black, is not so much an aurrodication of the established racial symbolic order as a re-submission to the dominant discourse, enriching and expanding the American tradition of guaranteeing individual freedom, while at the same time abandoning the social struggle based on the rights and interests of the Black as a whole. The long tradition of Westerns had promised him a periphery of society for him to roam freely, rather than having to struggle to make a living like most of his compatriots.
Therefore, Django's search for a wife is consistent with the German myth of slaying the dragon, but it is difficult to think of the struggle for black racial rights.
"Django liberated" should have been "Django who broke free of his chains" according to his original English name. On the contrary, it is translated as "liberation" after the Chinese, revealing a strong sense of political action - liberation is a necessary part of establishing the identity of the modern subject. Ironically, Django is unable to liberate himself, and his free status is maintained in his don Quixote-Sancho-like master-servant relationship with the white Doctor Schultz.
According to the plot setting, Dr. Schultz constantly directs the drama, while Django always needs to "play" some auxiliary role with the attendant, or a servant or a trader of mandingo. It was the "play" that constituted the structure of asylum, not the political and social revolution, that named this new free man.
In order to announce Django's liberation, the film needs a symbolic ceremony, which is Django's two pleasing "modifications": whether it is a bright and beautiful servant costume, or a smooth denim suit, or even a set of exquisitely decorated saddles, which is close to the fun of middle and upper-class whites, which makes Django look "cool" and charming, but also makes him complete the transformation of the identity class.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" How to define freedom > data-track="29"? </h1>
Django's liberation is correspondingly manifested in the process of obtaining its "black skin, white mask" type of subject position. There is a detail in the film about the conundrum of "what will happen to Django after liberation": Schultz and Django visit the manor of the plantation owner "Big Daddy", and "Big Daddy" asks his black maid Bettina to take the "free body" Django around.
Because Bettina could not imagine the identity of a liberated black man, the "big daddy" took a long time to explain to Bettina that Django could not be treated like other blacks, nor as white as ordinary whites, and this tongue twister description made Bettina even more confused, which also meant that Django's "free" identity must be identified with reference to the realistic symbolic order of "black" and "white".
Django's skin color can be "blackened" and "black exploitation films" can be reincarnated again, premised on the premise that the black civil rights movement of the 1960s has been absorbed into the mainstream narrative of American freedom. The radical attempts of the black civil rights movement in the late 1960s, including the Black Panther Party, remain a deep historical wound.
Under the premise of selectively forgetting the "radical 60s", the skinned Django becomes an awkward hostage, and American audiences mortgage him to empty freedom and liberation in search of self-comfort in times of crisis.
The freedom we seek is not outside of us, but always within us. Man is bound by external rules and regulations because he can break the inner shackles, and he can still feel free for it. Man may be able to attain outward freedom by violent actions, but inner freedom can only be derived from symbols. Symbols come out of the mouth, not words spoken by people, but words that rise from the deep strength and need of the self, and are unexpectedly placed on the tip of the tongue.
Thanks for watching!