ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the case for Tarantino's film to be included within a trajectory of Holocaust representation. Inglourious Basterds is a film that gives scholars of the Holocaust and of visual culture pause for thought. It affirms Tarantino's status as the ultimate postmodern pastiche rip-off artist through a provocative triptych of cinematic affect that destabilizes audience expectation, that troubles with its visceral and hyper-visualized violence and that provokes with its fantasy of rewritten history. The chapter analyzes how Inglourious Basterds revisits certain characteristics of Holocaust films while also offering a representational update for the twenty-first century. The analysis will focus on two key gestures of defiance — the film's depiction of extreme violence and its rewriting of historical fact. With rare exceptions, much of the critical analysis of Tarantino's larger oeuvre centres on the graphic violence that mixes the realistic with self-conscious cinematic homage.
