With Inglourious Basterds, cult director Quentin Tarantino made one of his best films. The war film combines tough tension with light humor, distinctive characters, quick dialogue and that unforgettable coup to rewrite world history.
But I associate Inglourious Basterds, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2009, with an even more formative experience. After Tarantino’s masterpiece, I wanted to watch films differently than before.
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds uses language as a weapon of war in its original version
When the film opened in our cinemas in 2009, I was used to watching films almost exclusively dubbed. Before Inglourious Basterds, I read with anticipation various reviews that said multilingual character of the new Tarantino film. That’s why I went to an Inglourious Basterds performance with my friends, which was shown in the original language with German subtitles.
The first chapter, in which Christoph Waltz as SS Colonel Hans Landa interrogates a French farmer because he is supposed to be hiding a Jewish family, had an incredible effect on me.
While Landa initially speaks French to his counterpart, at some point he switches to English. This means that the family hidden under the floorboards cannot understand what is being said. It is the first proof of power and a sign of Landa’s superiority in a film that turns language into one of the most powerful weapons in war.
Also check out Yves’ video review of Inglourious Basterds:
This film changed me: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS | Quentin Tarantino Rewatch
The German dubbed version of Inglourious Basterds tries to recreate this scenario as best as possible, switching from French to German instead of French to English. Nevertheless, later in Tarantino’s film it becomes even clearer how crucial the original sound is for further such details.
Inglourious Basterds proves better than any other Tarantino film how important original sound is in films
Later in the film, American Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and two of his fellow Nazi hunters disguise themselves as Italians and want to infiltrate the cinema, which is about to be blown up together with Adolf Hitler and his followers. Here it’s Hans Landa again, the camouflaged people with his perfect Italian demonstrates.
He has Raine and the other two repeat their fake names again and again until their strongly American pronunciation sounds at least a little like authentic Italian. Once again it is Landa who, as a multilingual devil, acts as the most powerful person in the room.
A third passage in Inglourious Basterds that underlines the importance of the original tone is the exciting tavern scene in Chapter 4. In it, the British Lieutenant Hicox poses as a German in order to also win the trust of some SS soldiers. For the sequence, Hicox actor Michael Fassbender speaks almost accent-free German, which still has a very slight coloring to it.
His downfall comes when he incorrectly shows three fingers, but even before that, Tarantino generates one incredible tension through fine dialogue duelsin which linguistic subtleties are used like loaded weapons.
Universal
Diane Kruger and Michael Fassbender in Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino uses language like music and everyone should appreciate that
Inglourious Basterds made me see films with different eyes (or rather, hear them with different ears). After I saw the Tarantino film for the first time in 2009, I increasingly watched films in the original language and, if necessary, with subtitles. Nowadays, I almost always avoid dubbed versions, because with predominantly High German voices practically all linguistic subtleties and details are lost.
Tarantino himself has spoken about how his dialogues generally follow a kind of musicality. The language has a very specific rhythm for him, which he can only transfer into the final film with the right cast. Anyone who only knows Inglourious Basterds in dubbed form has missed large parts of the masterpiece. And that will have been the case for many people when they watched Tarantino’s film in the cinema, on television or as a stream.
If you watch Inglourious Basterds, other Tarantino films or all films in general only dubbed, you should switch to the original sound more often. It can change your life as much as it changed mine.