Moving to California at the age of 4, Tarantino developed his love for movies at an early age. One of his earliest memories is of his grandmother taking him to see a John Wayne movie. Tarantino also loved storytelling, but he showed his creativity in unusual ways. "He wrote me sad Mother's Day stories. He'd always kill me and tell me how bad he felt about it," Connie once told Entertainment Weekly. "It was enough to bring a tear to a mother's eye."

Tarantino loathed school, choosing to spend his time watching movies or reading comics rather than studying. The only subject that appealed to him was history. "History was cool and I did well there, because it was kind of like the movies," he told Entertainment Weekly. After dropping out of high school, Tarantino worked as an usher at an adult film theater for a time. He also took acting classes. Tarantino eventually landed a job at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. There he worked with Roger Avary, who shared his passion for film. The two even worked on some script ideas together. (1)

Working with producer Lawrence Bender, Tarantino was able to secure funding for his directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), for which he had also written the screenplay. Actor Harvey Keitel was impressed when he read the script, saying "I haven't seen characters like these in years." He signed on as an actor and a producer for the project. Other cast members included Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi and Tarantino himself.

In 1992, audiences at the Sundance Film Festival were entranced by Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's ultraviolent crime caper gone wrong. He drew inspiration for the project from such classic heist films as Rififi and City on Fire. The independent film helped make Tarantino one of the most talked-about figures in Hollywood. While not a big hit in the United States, it became a popular title on video and did well overseas. (1)

Pulp Fiction was both a commercial and critical success. In the United States, it earned over $108 million at the box office, becoming the first independent film to do so. Pulp Fiction won the prestigious Palme d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994 and received seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. For his work on the film, Tarantino took home the award for Best Original Screenplay, an honor he had to share with former collaborator Roger Avary. The two had a falling out over the writing credits for the film. (1)

In 1995, Tarantino wrote and directed one of the four stories featured in Four Rooms. The other three were handled by other rising independent filmmakers Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell and Robert Rodriguez. After the release of Four Rooms, Tarantino and Rodriguez collaborated on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). Tarantino wrote the screenplay for the film and starred opposite George Clooney, the two playing criminals who end up battle vampires. Rodriguez directed the film, which received negative reviews from critics.

Tarantino soon tackled Jackie Brown (1997), a crime thriller starring Pam Grier as a stewardess who gets caught smuggling money for an arms dealer (played by Jackson). A tribute to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the film was adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel. Grier herself had appeared in many blaxploitation classics, including Foxy Brown (1974). The film was well received, with many calling it a more mature work for Tarantino. Critic Leonard Matlin commented that there were "dynamite performances all around" for a cast that also included Michael Keaton, Robert De Niro, and Robert Forster. Not everyone loved the film, however. Fellow filmmaker Spike Lee objected to Tarantino's overuse of a derogatory term for African-Americans in Jackie Brown, publicly complaining in Army Archerd's column in Variety. (1)

Tarantino worked on a World War II script during this period. The screenplay "became big and sprawling. It was some of the best stuff I've ever written, but at a certain point, I thought, 'Am I writing a script or am I writing a novel?' I basically ended up writing three World War II scripts. None of them had an ending," he later explained to Vanity Fair. (1)

Tarantino originally wanted Warren Beatty for the titular "Bill," but he moved on to David Carradine from the television series Kung Fu. The plot focused on revenge, as a female assassin known as the Bride (Thurman) seeks to kill those involved in the savage attack on her and her wedding party. Running over budget and over schedule, Tarantino persevered with the project, shooting so much that he eventually had to create two films. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was released in late 2003, with Kill Bill: Vol. 2 following a few months later. (1)

Tarantino finally returned to work on his World War II script. In 2009, he released the long-awaited Inglourious Basterds, which focused on a group of Jewish-American soldiers out to destroy as many Nazis as possible. He had wooed Brad Pitt to play the leader of the "Basterds." Some of the reviews were mixed, but Tarantino seemed unfazed by any negative comments. "I respect criticism. But I know more about film than most of the people writing about me. Not only that, I'm a better writer than most of the people writing about me," he explained to GQ magazine. He clearly may have known best in this case, as the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including two for Tarantino (for best director and best original screenplay). (1)

Four years later, Tarantino delivered his follow-up effort, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Co-starring DiCaprio and Pitt, the film focuses on the former's struggles to remain relevant as an actor in 1969, presenting an twist on the real-life events that led to the infamous Charles Manson family murders. The feature reportedly drew a seven-minute standing ovation following its May 2019 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and went on to earn Golden Globe wins for Best Screenplay and Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. (1)

The filmmaker had previously been involved in a long-term relationship with actress Mira Sorvino. (1)

Of course, Quentin Tarantino’s writing style is a huge part of what’s made him so successful, but more than that, it is his shot choices that bring the audience deeper into the narrative. Tarantino, like all directors working at the top of their game, uses the camera as his most powerful storytelling implement.  

Here are some of the most compelling ways Tarantino enhances story and character development with his shot list. What follows stands as required reading for directors who aim to achieve the thrills, tension, and comedy of Tarantino’s films.

1) Tarantino stages wide shots

When a director wants to show a character in relation to his or her surroundings — or, when a director wants the audience to appreciate the full scope of a subject's predicament within those surroundings — nothing fits the bill as efficiently as a well-crafted wide shot. 

Tarantino himself once said, “I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.” His wide shots do just that — not surprising from a man who loves spaghetti westerns so much. 

His wide shots let you take in every detail of the world he’s built for you.

Whether it’s the Bride battling the Crazy 88 gang in Kill Bill or Django surveying a burned-out home, Tarantino understands the power of the wide-shot to not only create tension, but to utilize the environment in revealing the desires of his characters.

Even though Quentin Tarantino style relies on sweeping wide shots, the director isn't afraid to move in closer to ramp up excitement.

2) He shoots extreme close ups

Has there been anything more nerve-wracking and exciting than watching the Bride “wiggle her big toe” in Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003)? This is a movie with insane fight sequences, but the way her toe is framed, you can’t look away.

The same way he goes wide to give you an expansive view, Quentin Tarantino can dive in close to give you detail on what’s important.

3) Tarantino uses crash zooms

A “crash zoom,” also known as a snap zoom, is a sudden, rapid zoom in on a subject, and you start to see it in Quentin Tarantino’s work from Kill Bill onward. It’s an intense effect, and heightens the drama around any moment.

It’s like an extreme close-up on steroids.

Saying that characters in Tarantino films are often in peril is an understatement, and his use of the crash zoom heightens those feelings of dread and disorientation.  

Stephen rushing to Calvin Candie’s aid or the Bride waking up from her coma are moments of maximum drama, and Tarantino appropriately employs the technique to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

4) He gets in the trunk

This trademark Quentin Tarantino shot does an effective job putting the audience in the moment. No one ever said, “Yes, being inside a trunk is the most magical thing you can do,” and yet somehow Tarantino makes it work in almost all his movies.

Yes, they're in almost all Tarantino films. We can forgive Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight for failing to deliver on this trademark of Quentin Tarantino's directing style, since automobile trunks didn’t exist in the Old West. Although it's worth mentioning that the director does provide a similar trunk-style looking-up POV shot of Django.

Tarantino wants his audience to feel as if they are right there with the characters, and the closeness and confinement of this "trunk technique" ensures they will be.  

When we look up at the Bride at the end of the first Kill Bill film, we understand Sofie Fatale’s fear. When the Bride finds herself on the other side, looking up at Budd in Kill Bill Vol. 2, we understand just how much the tables have turned.

Again, even when a car trunk isn't readily available, Tarantino employs his trunk-like POV shot technique. 

These shots convey powerlessness in the viewer, and in the characters who are unfortunate enough to be motivating the particular POV shots in question, while emphasizing the literal upper-hand possessed by the characters looking down at us in the frame.

Viewers, and the ground- or trunk-level characters, find themselves at the mercy of the director and his other more powerful players.

5) Tarantino absorbs movies

Tarantino has a great affinity for the audience, and it’s easy to still see him as the movie-obsessed video store clerk he was in the 90s. In interviews and quotes, QT explains how his movies are filled with the passion of a fan who wants to share something cool with us.

The director is notoriously vocal about sharing lists and titles of his favorite films, and their influence can be found in his own work — such as the spaghetti westerns mentioned above, and Shaw Brothers Hong Kong action films giving visual inspiration to Kill Bill.

Ultimately, films by Quentin Tarantino bring the subconscious to the surface, and the use of these shot devices allows for the emotions of the characters to resonate more deeply with the audience.

It is that care and attention to the viewer that has kept his films exciting and fresh for almost three decades.

As he once said, “I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.” (5)

Quentin Tarantino uses this wide shot to hit the audience, as well as Django's immediate opponent, with the full might of the character. Django's bright attire, mocked earlier in the scene, suddenly appears regal and imposing, like a superhero’s uniform.

And here, Tarantino's direction isn't content to simply present a static wide shot on a tripod. No, for maximum effect, Tarantino makes this a low angle tracking shot. It's heroic, and highlights why this movie is all about Django. (5)

For example, in 1997, his debut film, "Reservoir Dogs," was under heavy scrutiny after a critic accused Tarantino of plagiarizing the 1987 Hong Kong crime film "City on Fire." The final 20 minutes of "City on Fire" are essentially identical to the plot of "Reservoir Dogs," and there are shots and moments scattered throughout that directly resemble each other, including this famous Mexican-standoff sequence.

But it's not just in this film. Almost all of Tarantino's eight films have a main source of inspiration. For "Jackie Brown," it was the 1974 film "Foxy Brown." For "Kill Bill," the 1973 Japanese film "Lady Snowblood." And his "Inglourious Basterds" is, in a lot of ways, similar to the 1967 war film "The Dirty Dozen."

And on top of that, each film has more visual references to at least another dozen movies. Many consider these similarities homages, a practice as long as the history of cinema itself, a way for Tarantino to pay respect to the movies he loves. But Tarantino explicitly denies this. In the same interview, he goes on to say: "Great artists steal. They don't do homages." It's a quote that closely resembles words attributed to another famous artist: Pablo Picasso, who's often quoted as having said: "Good artists copy. Great artists steal."

To understand why and how Tarantino steals, it's important to understand his background. Tarantino's career in film didn't start in a classroom or even on a movie set, but a video store, where he worked as a clerk and gained a reputation for his almost encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. In other words, Tarantino was never taught how to make a film. Instead, he learned how to make films by watching them, which makes it natural that imitation became his main source of inspiration and style.

In fact, if you take a look at most of Tarantino's screenplays, they begin with a list of filmmakers whom the stories were inspired by and dedicated to. I think the reason Tarantino is so proud to admit that he is stealing is that he accomplishes something with it that no other filmmaker is quite capable of: creating something new. And as paradoxical as it may sound, Tarantino's movies have a sense of originality to them, despite their many sources of inspiration. This is why Tarantino is often hailed as one of the quintessential filmmakers of postmodernism.

Postmodernism in film describes an era when filmmakers began questioning the ways mainstream movies are made and told and began making movies that went directly against it. One of the central tenets of postmodernism is the idea that nothing is new in art — everything is recycled and reused over and over again. "Reservoir Dogs" might have stolen the Mexican standoff from "City on Fire," but "City on Fire" also stole it from the 1966 film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." And "Pulp Fiction" is no exception. It's chock-full of references to classical movies, especially movies from the French New Wave movement, one of the most influential movements in the history of cinema, in which young filmmakers also tried to challenge the traditional method of filmmaking. Its famous dancing sequence was inspired by this sequence from the 1964 film "Band of Outsiders." And the choreography closely resembles this scene from the 1963 film "8 1/2."

But that's not the only source it steals from. John Travolta's dance was inspired by this scene from 1966 adaptation of "Batman," while Uma Thurman's dancing resembles that of a cat in the 1970 animated film "The Aristocats." And throughout the rest of the film as well. The mysterious suitcase that carries the plot of the film is a replication from the 1955 American film "Kiss Me Deadly." And, of course, this scene was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." What makes Tarantino so special is that he never steals from one source. He rather steals from multiple sources spanning decades and then stitches them together to create something new. It's a technique known as pastiche, a vital element in postmodernism. Most people are more familiar with this technique through another medium, music, and especially in the hip-hop genre, where artists use sampling to take part of an existing song to create something new. And just like Tarantino, it's been the subject of controversy many times.

Tarantino's pastiche works so well for two reasons. One is his understanding of the subject he's stealing from. More often than not, homages in movies are a shallow and vain attempt at imitating an iconic moment, and they rarely serve a purpose. But Tarantino's references are often seamless and easy to miss because they enhance the scenes and the genre he experiments with. And if you take a look at Tarantino's career, each of his eight films is a tribute to a specific genre and movement in cinema. "Reservoir Dogs" is a pastiche of the gritty Hong Kong crime films, and "Pulp Fiction" is based on the unconventional French New Wave movement. "Jackie Brown" bases itself off the '70s' controversial blaxploitation films, while "Kill Bill" is reminiscent of the classical Japanese samurai and Chinese kung fu movies. "Death Proof" pays tribute to low-budget exploitation movies, while "Inglourious Basterds" references World War II cinema. And his two most recent films, "Django Unchained" and "The Hateful Eight," are modern takes of the Italian spaghetti Westerns. Tarantino seamlessly blends all these genres and inspirations through his unique vision and writing. This is where his razor-sharp dialogue comes in.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Tarantino's films are essentially readaptations of classical films and genres that take place in a world of Tarantino, where violence, injustice, sex, and satirical cynicism flourish. Quentin Tarantino perhaps knows better than anyone that you don't have to look far for inspiration. Most of the time, it might be somewhere close and familiar to us. My guess is that, for Tarantino, it's in the aisles of VHS tapes that he grew up watching as a child. Tarantino proudly plays the role of a masterful thief of cinema. And as long as he continues to make a masterpiece out of them, it's the kind of thievery I'd be more than happy to accept. (8)

I would compare watching a Tarantino film to reading a novel, the plot of each of his films unfold in chapters that each have infinite layers of depth. Each so detailed that they could stand alone as a short-film with interweaving plots and characters until they all meet each other for the finale.

Another seminal feature of Tarantino’s work is his groundbreaking use of soundtracks, particularly the way in which he uses them to open his films.

Reservoir Dogs (1992) opens to the tripping percussion of ‘Little Green Bag’ by the George Baker Selection, the perfect rhythm for the authentically iconic slow-motion stride of the ‘wise guys’.

Not to mention when Dick Dale’s rock ‘n’ roll rendition of ‘Misirlou’ famously cracks open Pulp Fiction’s (1994) groundbreaking soundtrack. This became so influential that when Harvey Keitel was recreated as Winston Wolf for the 'Direct Line' advert, he drives away at the end accompanied by this iconic tune.

His influence also transcends the screen: there hasn’t been a Halloween since 1994 without a Mia Wallace outfit recreation; Samuel L Jackson’s impassioned recital of Ezekiel 25:17 is probably the longest biblical quote - even if it is fake - that I would stand a chance of reciting from memory; and Banksy’s depiction of Jules and Vincent Vega has become a staple piece of modern art.Where each of his films have many layers of artistic creation, his contentious use of violence is certainly a crucial organ in his style of filmmaking. 

An interview for The Guardian went viral in 2013 when British journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy went too far in pushing Tarantino for a comment on the connection between on-screen violence and real-life violence, resulting in a heated outburst from the Oscar-winning director: ‘I refuse your question. I’m not your slave, and you’re not my master. You can’t make me dance to your tune. I’m not a monkey.’

For Tarantino there is a huge chasm between movie violence and actual violence, the main difference being that in the movies, nobody is actually harmed. In every single one of his films an entire sequence is dedicated to either shoot outs, torture or just general scenes of bloody chaos.

When asked to comment on his arguably excessive use of gore, Tarantino said: ‘Violence is just one of those many things you can do in movies. People ask me, “Where does all this violence come from in your movies?” I said, “Where does all this dancing come from in Stanley Donen movies?”’ For Tarantino, violence is just as crucial as the car chase, the passionate love scene and even Donen’s classic musical number in the rain.I consider myself quite thick skinned when it comes to stomaching movie gore, but Tarantino managed to break me with the grotesque torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. One of cinema’s most gruesome moments, the tension created throughout the notorious sequence reaches that of a horror film, due to the threat of the impending torture.

But, where the thought of being left alone in an abandoned warehouse with the psychopathic Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) dancing around maniacally would normally leave me in a cold sweat, the music created a contradictory impulse. While I had one hand covering my eyes, my toes were nevertheless tapping to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ by the Stealers Wheel. Yet a new wave of fear raises as soon as we see the gasoline, as we have no doubt what Mr. Blonde intends to use it for. Yet Tarantino is of course all too aware of this: he almost resurrects Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) from the dead to break the intensity with an eruption of gunfire. 

This technique is masterfully used as a kinetic release.By using the psychology of suspense, Tarantino toys with the audience for the maximum amount of time before creating an explosion in the moment of climax; he employs the notion of taking pleasure in violence.

This can also be seen in Inglourious Basterds (2009), Tarantino is more than aware that his audience is naturally predisposed to hate Nazis. Therefore, we can’t help but feel a twisted sense of satisfaction when the savage Nazi colonel Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz, is branded with a swastika as justice for his war crimes at the films denouement.

Similarly, the epic mansion shootout at the end of Django Unchained (2012), where 17 people are slain, feels cathartic after watching so many horrendous atrocities unfold. The action set piece becomes almost pleasurable, aided by the almost cartoonish use of blood and the way that the bodies are strewn around like rag dolls.

Rather than to make a social or political statement, Tarantino uses violence to optimise his audience’s cinematic experience. He said: ‘I feel like a conductor and the audience’s feelings are my instruments. I will be like: “laugh, laugh, now be horrified.”' When someone does that to me I’ve had a good time at the movies,’ and I certainly have the same reaction. (11)

The video refers to this common Tarantino method as The Pledge. It’s something that he often utilizes in his screenplays.

In Pulp Fiction, the opening scene’s dialogue begins with, “Forget it, it’s too risky.”

That immediately pledges to the audience that something interesting is going to happen and that there are big stakes ahead.

What’s the plan and why is it so risky?

Audiences are quickly engaged and stay tuned in to each and every word of dialogue within the scene because they know that sooner or later, something intriguing is going to happen.

Tarantino writes dialogue in a way that often serves the whole cinematic story. Each line of dialogue isn’t just there to present itself. It’s there to set up the overarching character development, plot, and story.

That is why it is so difficult to turn your attention away from every line of dialogue in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Every line truly matters.

With a few exceptions for each of his films, every scene, every moment, and every line of dialogue has conflict attached.

Whether it’s an argument, disagreement, confrontation, some form of danger, or a type of inner conflict that a character within the scene is dealing with, almost every scene and line of dialogue has something to do with some kind of conflict.

There is often something at stake in every scene of his movies. And that is what engages audiences and heightens the level of suspense.

Tarantino is a master of subtext, which centers around everything not said within the dialogue but implied in due part to what the audience and the characters know. As the video says, subtext is the difference between the words that come out of a character’s mouth and the thoughts that stay inside their head.

If characters always said what they truly feel, truly know, or truly think, movies would be boring. Tension, hilarity, suspense, and characterization are created through subtext in dialogue.

Watch the full video for examples of Tarantino’s subtext.

The video points out how well Tarantino uses dialogue to prolong suspense. His films often have dialogue scenes that utilize the aforementioned subtext that he’s mastered to build as much suspense as possible until the anticipation is at a boiling point.

The video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnb_3ibUp38&feature=emb_logo

The suspense in this scene is constantly building, but not a word of the dialogue centers on why they are there and what is about to happen. The characters know why they are there and the audience clearly sees that Jules and Vincent’s presence is clearly making the apartment’s occupants nervous, but the dialogue is used to prolong the tension, leading to this moment where the anticipation reaches the boiling point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=155&v=pRE23YfSvc8&feature=emb_logo

Dialogue — and the subtext within — can and should be used to prolong the audience’s anticipation. This can be used in dramas, action thrillers, suspense thrillers, horror flicks, and even comedies.

Watch this next linked video for amazing elaboration and examples of these five methods that Quentin Tarantino uses in his dialogue scenes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XATONsyKml0&feature=emb_logo (12)

 

The plot, if we can call it that, is very simple, covering just three days in 1969, two in February and the October day of the Manson family massacre.  We follow the activities of two fictional aging Hollywood figures, a former big time TV star, Rick Dalton, (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).  Dalton is passed his prime as an actor and is struggling to remain relevant, though his roles are now limited to playing the “bad guy,” which talent agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) tells him is the kiss of death.  The movie also follows Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as she shops for presents for her husband Roman Polanski, sees herself in a movie, and parties at the Playboy Mansion with numerous celebrities.  As Rick works on the set of the TV show The Lancer, Cliff spends his days fighting Bruce Lee, fixing Rick’s TV antenna, and picking up a hitchhiker who happens to be a member of the Manson “family.”  After a six-month stay in Italy where Rick tries to revive his career by taking roles in spaghetti westerns, Rick and Cliff return to LA several hours before the time of the massacre. 

 

Los Angeles was (and still is) a city filled with cars. Many scenes in the movie are set in cars travelling through the remarkably recreated streets of 1960s L.A. The director emphasizes the personal nature of the film by using shots in moving cars that are pointed upwards, as if from the perspective of a six-year-old Tarantino sitting  inside his stepfather’s Karmann-Ghia, which happens to be the type of car that Cliff drives when he’s not using Rick’s. Through the eyes of a child, we see the billboards for old products like RC and Diet Rite Cola, movie theater marquees announcing names of films being shown, and, of course, classic cars like Mustangs, Cadillac Coupe de Villes, and VW Beetles.  The producer acquired nearly 2,000 cars to use in the background to help set the tone. Avid car enthusiasts may be bothered by the inclusion of some cars that had not been produced before 1969, but the overall impact of the old cars in the film is terrific.  

 

Car radios supply much of the soundtrack throughout the film, which includes a number of hit songs by well-known artists who remain popular to this day, such as Neil Diamond, Deep Purple, and Simon and Garfunkel. Yet the soundtrack goes beyond a predictable 60s-greatest-hits collection and includes numerous songs by lesser known acts like the Buchanan Brothers, the Box Tops, Buffy Saint-Marie, and Willie Mitchell, which puts the viewer in the back seat of a car listening to whatever happens to come on the radio, just as it would have been in 1969 before the days of personal playlists and specialized satellite radio channels.  We even have to hear the commercials. Tarantino also includes some news bulletins, including one on Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy’s assassin.  (More of these kinds of bulletins would have added to the richness of the historical context.)  The soundtrack also raises some interesting references in the film. For example, Cliff is listening to “Mrs. Robinson” as he eyes a flirtatious hippie teenager named Pussycat, who ends up being a member of Manson’s cult.  In an interesting twist on the song and the film with which it is inextricably linked, The Graduate, the older Cliff rebuffs Pussycat’s precocious sexual advances because she can’t provide proof of her age.  The scene also brings to mind a comparison with one of the historical figures in the film, Polanski, who in 1977 sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old girl.  

 

More than anything else, Once Upon a Time is about the entertainment industry, and it is filled with dozens of references to movies and TV programs.  In one of the more memorable scenes, in the middle of the day Sharon Tate walks into an LA theater showing Wrecking Ball, starring herself and Dean Martin, and asks the manager if she can go in for free because she is in the movie, just as Tarantino had once done while trying to impress a date by taking her to see True Romance, which he had written.  Instead of reshooting scenes from Wrecking Ball with Margot Robbie playing Tate’s role, we see the actual fight scene between Tate and Nancy Kwan that was choreographed by Bruce Lee, as the fictional Tate (Robbie) soaks up the audience’s reaction.  In this writer’s favorite scene, as Rick reflects on how his career would have been so different had he been given the role of Virgil Hilts in The Great Escape instead of Steve McQueen, Tarantino splices Rick into the actual movie.  We see Rick’s Hilts defiantly delivering the same lines (“I intend to see Berlin…before the war is over”) to Commandant von Luger as he is sent to “the cooler” after his first escape attempt was thwarted. We also see many classic TV programs like Mannix in the background of several scenes, a show Brad Pitt told Entertainment Weekly was his father’s favorite. The film includes many actors playing the stars of the era.  At a party at the Playboy Mansion, we see Michelle Phillips, Momma Cass, and Roman Polanski.  Damian Lewis, who bears a striking resemblance to Steve McQueen, makes the iconic star seem rather creepy and strange as he talks about Tate and Polanski’s relationship.  Mike Moh’s portrayal of Bruce Lee is also unflattering, so much so that the martial arts star’s family publicly objected to it.  

 

An overarching theme of the film is the clash of old Hollywood and the counterculture.  Early in the film, a group of teenage hippies—who end up being part of the Manson cult—is shown digging through a dumpster as they sing the lyrics to an actual Charles Manson song, “I’ll Never Say Never to Always”:  “Always is always forever/As long as one is one/Inside yourself for your father/All is more all is one.”  Rick and Cliff, the Hollywood heroes, are repulsed as they catch a glimpse of the hippies in the dumpster and they frequently show contempt for them throughout.  Though Manson (Damon Herriman) appears only once in the film driving his Twinkie truck outside the Tate/Polanski home months before the murders, his presence is felt throughout by the way his “family” members talk about him.  There is a very convincing portrayal of the cult at its home base at Spahn Ranch, an old site used in westerns like the ones Rick used to star in.  

 

Cliff, a decorated war veteran from either World War II or Korea, is the hero in this movie.  It’s not hard to imagine Cliff doing stunts for actors like Gary Cooper and John Wayne. Though Cliff was rumored to have killed his wife (in a flashback, we see Cliff on a boat pointing a spearfishing gun at his wife as she berates him for being a “loser,” but we don’t see him pull the trigger), he acts with a cool, detached dignity for most of the film. For example, after refusing Pussycat’s sexual advances in his car, he drops her at Spahn Ranch where she lives with dozens of members of the Manson “family.” He asks the teen and other members of the cult about George Spahn (Bruce Dern), whom he remembers from his work on Rick’s TV show at the ranch. In his attempt to get to Spahn, Cliff encounters Squeaky Fromme (the future would-be assassin of Gerald Ford played by Dakota Fanning), who refuses to allow the stuntman to see Spahn. (Tarantino accurately portrays the fact that Fromme had a transactional sexual relationship with Spahn that enabled the cult to live at his ranch.  Spahn also gave her the infamous nickname by which she is known.)  Cliff calmly yet firmly informs Squeaky that he’s coming in and that she can’t stop him. Once convinced that Spahn is not threatened by the hippies, Cliff leaves the ranch, but not before pummeling one of the male cultists for slashing his tire.  

 

As the time of the massacre approaches, the washed-up Hollywood duo are hardly in any condition to heroically prevent the horrific violence at Tate’s home next door to Rick’s.  As the Manson murderers walk up Ciello Drive, Rick is drunk, floating in the pool with headphones on, and Cliff is at the beginning of an LSD trip from an acid-laced cigarette. At this point, Tarantino abandons the original events and creates a fictional ending.  Instead of breaking  into Tate’s home, the three cult members (four were actually present) go to Rick’s, only to be brutally beaten (in Tarantino-style violence) by Cliff and mauled by his pit bull.  Rick is oblivious to all of this until one of the screaming assailants jumps into his pool to escape.  As if to punctuate the point that these old- time heroes are still relevant, Rick retrieves a flame thrower used in one of his movies to incinerate a group of Nazi officers, and turns it on the girl flailing in the pool to eliminate the threat of the cult.  (We see the scene from Rick’s movie earlier, and it’s a clear reference to the climax of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.)  The film concludes with a pregnant Sharon Tate and one of the other guests greeting Rick and finding out about all the commotion. Old Hollywood has saved the day.  

 

Make no mistake, this movie is a folktale, just as the title suggests.  Tarantino does not really attempt to explore in any great depth the many critical political, economic, and social developments at this critical juncture in history.   Viewers looking for signs of the environmental distress in the city brought on by the ubiquitous cars, racial tensions in the aftermath of the Watts riots, or other issues confronting the city will be sorely disappointed.  But like most folktales, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is filled with interesting characters, events, and messages from a bygone era. (18)

The introduction serves to situate Tarantino’s work and its reception, and define the theoretical framework of the study. It reminds the reader that Tarantino is a self-taught director whose creative framework stems from an ongoing engagement with culture, high and low, and film as a medium. Such engagement results in films that are highly intertextual, but whose intertextuality serves to produce meaning and invite viewer participation. 

Discussing the distinction between reflexivity (Robert Stam), metafilm (Marc Cerisuelo), metacinema (Fatima Chinita) and metafiction (Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh), Roche chooses the term “cinematic metafiction” to describe Tarantino’s films, which he defines as cinematic fiction that “engages with its status as a work of fiction by producing a meta-discourse that can be explicit, implicit or, more often, an alliance of both” (9). 
Metafiction, regardless of the medium, engages with the relationship between fiction and reality, and Tarantino’s films reference film and cultural history to invite connections with the real world.

Borrowing its title from Colonel Landa’s line in Inglorious Basterds, “What Shall the History Books Read?”, the first chapter deals with history and film history in the films of Tarantino, focusing on the director’s use of historical material in Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. Roche argues that these three films are firmly anchored in history, with references to actual settings, events and people, as well as film history, with overt or covert connections to film genres, styles and characters. 

The interplay of fictional and historical referents along with a creative relationship to history, resorting to inventions, anachronisms and inaccuracies, serve to highlight the constructed nature of historical discourse as well as the films’ own nature as allohistorical fantasies (presenting an alternate version of history). As fantasies that address political and ethical issues, these films take on an allegorical dimension that broadens the historical and geographical scope of their critical potential, inviting connections with both past and present. To viewers who choose to investigate these connections, they provide new perspectives on a history of violence (race exploitation, anti-Semitism and racism) but also suggest the persistence of that violence in the present. Their conscious inscription in film history allows the films to explore the political implications of culture in representing the past and its power to shape attitudes in the present. As such, they provide “a defense of metafictional cinema as ethically and politically engaged with real-world concerns” (31).

The second and third chapters, “Black Man, White Hell” and “That’s the Excuse You Guys Use Whenever You Want to Exclude Me from Something”, deal with identity politics in the films of Tarantino, respectively race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality. Although Roche separates race and gender in different chapters for the sake of clarity, he constructs both chapters along the same outline (genre conventions, power relations, language, bodies) and multiplies cross-references so as to emphasize how those related aspects of identity intersect in the films of Tarantino. The director represents the various aspects of identity politics as “social constructs caught up in normative discourses and practices that have a history and a context” (34) and hybridizes film genres to destabilize these constructs and suggest transformative perspectives. Impurity, intertextuality and trans-genericity thus serve to establish the films and their main protagonists as sites of transformative potential. Roche’s discussions on race and ethnicity build upon Adilifu Nama’s Race on the QT (University of Texas Press, 2015) and confirm the latter’s assertion that race is an organizing principle in Tarantino’s films, which are constructed as “problematized engagements with racial politics” (74). 

The developments on gender and sexuality reveal the impact of Tarantino’s interest in feminist film theory on his films’ deconstruction of gendered conventions and categories, but they also identify male homosexuality as a blind spot in the films’ exploration of identity politics. 

All in all, Roche demonstrates how the films “are highly self-conscious of the gendered and racialized terms of the genres they rework, of the history and historiography of representations in film and cultural history” (124). They develop a criticism of the cultural stereotypes constructed by Hollywood, explore the past and present centrality of race and gender in power relations, interrogate the role of racist and sexist language to construct the identity of the subject in opposition to an other, and approach whiteness and masculinity as racialized and gendered constructions. 

Although the films belie the existence of a post-racial or post-feminist world, they maintain hope by celebrating interracial relationships and a “female form of empowerment” mixing qualities across gender boundaries (125).

Entitled “Revenge Is Never a Straight Line” and “Everything’s the Same Except for One Change”, the fourth and fifth chapters apply a neoformalist approach to Tarantino’s work, focusing on narrative structures and paradigms, then on narration and style. The two chapters provide an in-depth study of the films’ peculiar structures, modes of narration, aesthetics, and signature style. Alternating analyses of individual films with discussions of the whole body of Tarantino’s work, proceeding thematically and formally through the films, contrasting the use of various profilmic or cinematic devices across the films, and constantly revealing how aesthetic features impact the narrative, these chapters demonstrate that Tarantino’s stylistic and narrative choices, as well as the numerous reflexive devices and intertextual references present in his films, are never gratuitous or merely playful, but always serve the production of meaning, both narrative and political.

Roche demonstrates that Tarantino’s narration and style are mainly indebted to classical Hollywood, with an art-cinema influence that allows the director to deconstruct and resignify Hollywood storytelling conventions. In that sense, Tarantino’s filmmaking is heir to the New Hollywood and 1980s and 1990s US indie cinema that drew on European new waves, exploitation cinema, Italian Westerns, or martial arts movies to question and reinvigorate classical Hollywood.

The various borrowings from all cinemas allow the director to celebrate the wealth and diversity of cinematic creation, while the resignification of the referents critically points out the limitations of the source material, with political implications. Such approach to filmmaking conceives creation “as a reprisal with variation, and thus as re-creation” (222), with the one change bringing old formulas, conventions, and practices into new light.

Chapter 6, “Lookin’ Back On the Track, Gonna Do It My Way”, focuses on the use of preexisting music, Tarantino’s main approach to soundtrack which contributed to “constructing the director’s persona as a historian of pop culture” (224). The films’ use of preexisting music is quite consistent with the common functions of music in film – to support and comment upon characterization and narrative, to establish and complexify atmosphere and rhythm – but preexisting music also contributes to the development of a metafictional discourse on creation and its cultural and political implications. Often selected during the screenwriting process (with such selection process being foregrounded in the films themselves), these preexisting pieces are part and parcel of Tarantino’s process of creation (and of its mise en abîme in his films).

Often recent covers of old songs, and often cropped and tailored to fit a scene, they serve to blur the notion of original material and celebrate Tarantino’s conception of creation as re-creation. Mainly taken from film or TV soundtracks, they establish an intertextual network of meanings – exploring generic identity or an actor’s star image – that can be used to complexify a film’s subtext and comment upon both the present films and their past referents. Preexisting music has specific signifying power because it taps into cultural memory – “it is music with baggage” – so that its use implies “that the acts of both creation and interpretation are inevitably back-and-forth processes” (240) between track and film, original and cover, musical and film genre. The chapter concludes with a note on the use of ’original’ music, written specifically for a film (RZA and Robert Rodriguez in Kill Bill; John Legend, Anthony Hamilton, Rick Ross and others in Django Unchained; Ennio Morricone in The Hateful Eight), arguing that its use is either subordinate to preexisting music (Kill Bill), ends up fashioning the film in similar ways (Django Unchained), or is given similar structural, rhythmic, and narrative functions (The Hateful Eight).

Entitled “Come On, Let’s Get Into Character”, chapter seven focuses on acting and theatricality. Present in various degrees in all of Tarantino’s films, theatricality is a central element “that serves to frame the films’ metafictional discourses on acting, transposing the theatrum mundi metaphor to film” (245).

A modality of reflexivity, theatricality is first achieved through the handling of space and its exploitation in connection with the narrative. Staging, the division of space, the structuration of the narrative around the entrance and exits of characters, the use of props and various aesthetic and stylistic choices (frontality, deep focus, frame within the frame) serve to lay bare the artifice and create spaces for the actors’ movements.

Tarantino’s practices in casting and the direction of actors also contribute to theatricality. The director uses lead and supporting actors often associated with one genre or iconic roles, exploits their star image to engage with film and cultural history, and integrates a reflection on typecasting and direction in his films – most noticeably through his cameos and through the use of recurring actors, the latter also contributing to intertextuality within his oeuvre.

Choices in the direction of actors serve to contrast naturalistic and theatrical acting styles within films and scenes and often invert Hollywood conventions by placing the latter center-stage. Acting is itself overtly thematized, approached through questions of duplicity, professionalism, and role-playing. The films often highlight the dangers of breaking, or sticking to, character and favor instead “an ethical subject asserting her/his values by adapting her/his roles” (268).

The final chapter, “He’s Just Not Used to Seein’ a Man Ripped Apart by Dogs Is All”, discusses violence, spectacle, and their relationship in Tarantino’s films, aspects that have attracted more attention – and criticism – from reviewers and researchers. Roche argues that violence is never gratuitous and merely cathartic, but rather consistently provides a metafictional commentary on the treatment of violence as spectacle in fiction films.

Although scenes of violence are relatively sparse and short (excepting Kill Bill), violence is a central characteristic of Tarantino’s films because it “stands at the nexus of aesthetics, ethics and politics” (287). The director’s treatment of violence alternates between the aesthetics of suggestion and monstration (275), which are usually distributed in relation to the ethics and politics of the violent acts – a restrained approach in more problematic scenes, in which the victim is recognized as an imagined human being; an excessive approach in less problematic scenes, in which bodies are treated as cinematic material). 

The fact that such distribution is not systematic, with each scene begging to be viewed on its own terms, points to the notion that violence is a complex that must be analyzed in context. This complexity is reflected in the films providing catharses that are always “limited and nuanced” (279), mixing blockbuster spectacle and art-cinema commentary to taint even the more pleasurable scenes with moral compromise. The thematization of violence as spectacle further develops a metafictional discourse on the ethics of violence, the position of the viewer, and spectatorial responses to violent spectacle, eventually revealing ethical and political questions in all their complexity.

The conclusion returns to the book’s premise, asserting the inscription of Tarantino’s films in a long tradition of anti-illusionist fiction, recalling that their engagement with film history presupposes a dialogical relationship between culture and history, and concluding that “the poetics and politics of Tarantino’s cinematic metafictions intersect because the politics of representation are intertwined with the aesthetics of re-creation” (289). 

The director’s privileged relationship to the Italian Western makes sense precisely because the Italian Western is itself a derivative and a re-appropriation, glorifying the conventions of the Hollywood genre while undermining its ethics and resignifying its politics. Tarantino’s films do exactly that: “recycle[e] to resignify” (291) and “celebrate the beauty of the icon while undercutting it” (292). They are characterized by their active engagement with contemporary issues of historical and transnational circulations, originality and copy in art, the performativeness and performance of identities. They are also characterized by their layeredness, their remixing and fusing of high art and pop culture across borders and industries, and their striving for an ideal blend of efficacy, spectacle and sophistication that can regenerate cinema. (19)

Much of this film seems well below par. Smart dialogue, ultra-violence and well-manicured set-pieces all turn up present and correct. Nonetheless, the mighty star who's been lured into Tarantino's embrace for the first time plays a cardboard cut-out. The plot's ludicrous. Longueurs abound. A lot looks cynically derivative not just of other people's movies but even of the director's own.

It's not immediately clear what the film is supposed to be. As a war actioner or even as kosher revenge porn, it doesn't seem to mean business. It lacks the cold seriousness that's given Tarantino's brutality so much of its impact in the past. If anything, it seems to be a comedy, but not one that provokes many laughs.

How can such an exercise begin to compete for our plaudits not only with Pulp Fiction, but even with the elegant Reservoir Dogs or the unexpectedly humane Jackie Brown? Understandably enough, its premiere at Cannes prompted puzzlement and disappointment. All the same, since Cannes, it's found admirers, even if some of them find it difficult to explain just wherein its excellence lies.

The film's concentration on cinema suggests that the medium itself may have something to do with its underlying point. This time, Tarantino isn't just genuflecting yet again to the triumphs of his peers. The references to movies past, though voluminous, are this time just too casual to demand much attention. It's as if we're meant to take even the most abstruse of them for granted.

In any case, the centrality of cinema to the film goes far beyond the usual allusions to movie styles and tropes. Not many war films feature a plot-essential film critic or a spy whose cover happens to be big-screen stardom. A bricks-and-mortar cinema becomes the crucible not just for the film's climax but for the making of history itself. A film-within-a-film counterpoints the main drama, the plot turns on the importance of film in war propaganda, and silver-nitrate film-stock fuels the epochal conflagration that crowns the proceedings.

Tarantino himself has remarked: "In this story, cinema changes the world, and I fucking love that idea!" Yet his film does even more than this. Operation Kino's flames consume not just the Third Reich, but reality itself.

Critics frequently berate Hollywood for falsifying history to meet the requirements of story-telling. Rarely, however, can history have been so extravagantly revised as in Tarantino's version of the second world war's conclusion. So extreme is this revision that it feels like a plaintive protest against the inadequacy of what actually happened.

How can history have allowed Hitler to dispatch himself so miserably and furtively in a dreary bunker? Only a spectacular Armageddon of Jewish revenge of the kind Inglourious Basterds delivers could possibly have provided a fitting end for the Führer. Reality got this one wrong.

It gets most things wrong. It doesn't do narrative arcs. Most of the time, it doesn't even do conclusions. Instead, it presents us with a soggy meaningless mess that just isn't good enough to meet the needs of humankind. Stories have provided us with its corrective. In turning fiction's alternative universe into spectacle on a scale sufficient to rival reality, it's the movies that have managed to provide us with the outcomes that we crave.

Thank God for that, Inglourious Basterds seems to be saying. This may not be a particularly insightful message, but it's one that's never been more resoundingly communicated. (22)

After this innovation, in the 1880s celluloid photographic film and motion picture cameras became available so more motion pictures could be created in the form of Kinetoscope or through projectors. These early films also maintained a wide angle layout as it was the best way to keep everything visible for the viewer.

Once motion pictures became more available in the 1890s there were public screenings of many different films only being around a minute long, or even less. These films again adhered to the wide shot style. One of the first competitive filming techniques came in the form of the close-up as George Albert Smith incorporated them into his film Hove. Though unconfirmed as the first usage of this method it is one of the earliest recorded examples. Once the introduction of new framing techniques were introduced then more and more were made and used for their benefits that they could provide that wide shots couldn't.

This was the point at which motion pictures evolved from short, minute long, screening to becoming full-length motion pictures. More and more cinematic techniques appeared, resulting in the wide shot being less commonly used. However, it still remained as it is almost irreplaceable in what it can achieve.

When television entered the home, it was seen as a massive hit to the cinema industry and many saw it as the decline in cinema popularity. This in turn resulted in films having to stay ahead of television by incorporating superior quality than that of a television. This was done by adding colour but importantly it implemented the use of widescreen. This would allow a massive increase amount of space usable by the director, thus allowing an even wider shot for the viewer to witness more of whatever the director intends to evoke with any given shot.

Most modern films will frequently use the different types of wide shots as they are a staple in filmmaking and are almost impossible to avoid unless deliberately chosen to. In the current climate of films, the technical quality of any given shot will appear with much better clarity which has given life to some incredible shots from modern cinema. Also, given the quality of modern home entertainment mediums such as Blu Ray, 3D and Ultra HD Blu Rays this has allowed the scope and size of any given frame to encompass more of the scene and environment in greater detail.

There are a variety of ways of framing that are considered as being wide shots; these include:

Possibly the earliest trunk shot can be noted in the 1948 movie by Anthony Mann (though credited to Alfred L. Werker), He Walked by Night, when the police are inspecting the contents of a murder suspect's trunk. Another use of the shot is in 1967 film In Cold Blood (directed by Richard Brooks) after the two outlaws cross the borders to Mexico in a stolen car. A trunk shot appears also in George Miller's 1985 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome when Max, Master and the savage children are following Jedediah's son while escaping from their chasers guided by Entity. It is also used in the John Hughes film Uncle Buck (1989), wherein Buck (John Candy) opens his trunk to reveal a tied up teenager who cheated on Buck's niece. The 1992 film Sneakers contains a trunk shot when Robert Redford's character is kidnapped.

There is also a trunk shot used in A Good Day to Die Hard, when John McClane and his son Jack find a trunk full of guns and ammo in a car they are about to steal. Paul Thomas Anderson used the shot in his short film Cigarettes & Coffee (1993). In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), there is a scene with a similar perspective, where Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth and Norrington find a buried chest and the camera looks up to them from inside the hole in the ground that the chest is in. (25)

After that, filmmakers incorporated close-ups into their work more. Italian director Sergio Leone famously used extreme close-ups in the final duel scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967). Steven Spielberg is known for slowly zooming into close-ups during tense emotional moments in his films.

For centuries, the biggest tool in an actor’s arsenal was how they moved their body and controlled their performance on stage. With the advent of film and television, different shot types gave directors a new way to build a performance and actors a new way to add depth to their performances and convey their characters in new ways. For example, a close-up allows an actor to use their face as a more nuanced instrument when working on camera.There are four main close-up shot types to know:

Directors use close-ups for a number of reasons:

Shooting a close-up requires a specialized acting skill set. You should:

Now that you know how and why to use close-ups, consider these things to use them effectively:

In 1937, Samuel Beckett settled in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed by a pimp after refusing his solicitations. While recovering in the hospital, he met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnuil, a piano student in Paris. The two would become life-long companions and eventually marry. After meeting with his attacker, Beckett dropped the charges, partly to avoid the publicity. (4)

After the war, Samuel Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery during his time in the French resistance. He settled in Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In five years, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. (4)

Samuel Beckett wrote in both French and English, but his most well-known works, written between WWII and the 1960s, were written in French. Early on he realized his writing had to be subjective and come from his own thoughts and experiences. His works are filled with allusions to other writers such as Dante, Rene Descartes, and James Joyce. Beckett’s plays are not written along traditional lines with conventional plot and time and place references. Instead, he focuses on essential elements of the human condition in dark humorous ways. This style of writing has been called “Theater of the Absurd” by Martin Esslin, referring to poet Albert Camus’ concept of “the absurd.” The plays focus on human despair and the will to survive in a hopeless world that offers no help in understanding. (4)

Samuel Beckett continued to write throughout the 1970s and 80s mostly in a small house outside Paris. There he could give total dedication to his art evading publicity. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, though he declined accepting it personally to avoid making a speech at the ceremonies. However, he should not be considered a recluse. He often times met with other artists, scholars and admirers to talk about his work.

By the late 1980s, Samuel Beckett was in failing health and had moved to a small nursing home. Suzanne, his wife, had died in July 1989. His life was confined to a small room where he would receive visitors and write. He died on December 22, 1989, in a hospital of respiratory problems just months after his wife. (4)

A non-historicist reading of Krapp’s Last Tape does not circle around the rigid denominator ‘Beckett’ and its performative idiosyncrasies as an individual author but understands the beckett drama as an operational function of the epistemic challenge posed by the manipulations of tempor(e)alities by electro-acoustics around the 1950s / 1960s. What happens when psychic ‘latency’ becomes magnetic signal recording? Not only is the configuration of a human protagonist (Krapp) and a high-technological device (the magnetophone) a microsocial configuration in the sense of Actor-Network Theory or an ensemble in Simondon’s sense, but the close coupling of the human and the machine on the stage requires a more rigorous analysis (in the Lacanian sense) of the cognitive, affective, even traumatic irritations induced in humans by the signal transducing machine.

Zooming in on the media message of Krapp’s Last Tape, and its approach is inductive in two ways: on the one hand, electro-magnetic induction is the technological condition (the arché) of possibility (in Kant’s / Foucault’s / Kittler’s sense) of the phonographic drama at stake in Krapp’s Last Tape, and on the other hand, in the sense of idiographic identifications of the real media theatre.

Our sense of hearing has developed to inform us about things we do not see. But how do we really perceive sounds? Do we perceive them as coming from a definable source or as potentially abstract aural emanations of an unseen reality? Since the beginning of radio art there has been much debate about this question, as early art theorists, composers, and broadcasters such as Kurt Weill and Rudolf Arnheim welcomed the immateriality of the medium and its potential to teach us an appreciation of art that is connected to the human body but at times unrelated to the physical world as we behold it with our eyes. This talk probes Beckett’s thinking and artistic practice.

We are able to contextualise some documentation from the ongoing Intermedial Play practice-as-research project, which is an exploration of Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963) through digital culture. Some video will be presented from the first experiment (14 April 2017), a version that emerged from conversations relating to creative possibilities for a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) robotic teleconferencing camera and control unit.

Conceptually exploring the similarity between such a camera (designed for surveillance applications) and the “interrogator” light of Beckett’s script, this experiment was streamed to an audience sitting in a different room, raising questions of simultaneity and “live risk” that are generally absent from digital adaptations. The second experiment, currently ongoing, relates to a user-centred FVV (Free-Viewpoint-Video) — a variety of VR (Virtual Reality) — version of Play.

This technological reinterpretation of Play is an exploration of the new cultural subjectivities imposed on humans by new technologies of presence in digital culture. Though partly inspired by Anthony Minghella’s version of Play that was produced for the BBC’s compilation Beckett on Film (2001), our versions elicit the specificities of new, real-time, digital telepresence technologies, thereby offering a fresh digital augmentation of both Beckett’s famous script, as well as a Beckettian response to these technologies.In 1936, Beckett read Rudolf Arnheim’s book, Film, which had been translated into English three years earlier from the German original, Film als Kunst (1932).

In the book, Arnheim laments the introduction of sound and colour to film, arguing that the power of the medium resided precisely in the strangeness generated by its limitations, namely in the uniquely visual nature of silent film. Beckett, who like Arnheim was an advocate of silent film, took the limitations not merely of film but of the other media he worked in as the starting point of his aesthetic. His interest was less in what a medium could achieve than in where its boundaries lay. This is one dimension of Beckett’s ‘art of impoverishment’. By pressing each medium to its formal limits – to the point at which it threatens to spill over into another form – Beckett questions, while also seeming to insist on, the formal particularity of the medium in question. Beckett’s interest in technology, and in the possibilities of the different media in which he worked, grows partly out of the analogies he finds between the machinic and the human. Here, too, he is interested not in what a subject can do but in the limitations of perception, of understanding, and most markedly of agency, intentionality, and free will.

We are able to map the syntax of Beckett’s media aesthetic, and look at the wider implications of his Machine Age multimedial work.The electronic interlaced raster scan that composes a televisual ‘image’ was relayed to the cathode ray beam by way of an analogue signal from the broadcast video source.

That signal amounted to a set of instructions, telling the beam how to behave as it was pulled in a line, magnetically, across the back of the phosphor-treated CRT screen from left to right, before snapping back left again to trace the next line down, and so on: specifically, the signal informed the beam how intensely to transmit at each point of its passage, with what colour electron guns, and with what velocity and refresh rate. These instructions worked, irrespective of the imaginary ‘content’ of the image temporarily formed thanks to phosphor persistence, moiré induction, and retinal retention.

They worked on the basis of an electronic arrangement of post-human speed, and the inbuilt conservatism of the psychological apparatus; as McLuhan puts it, “The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver.
From these he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image.”

Beckett’s Quad is still the most extraordinary work of art composed for the televisual medium, though what is most remarkable about it is scarcely ever discussed. In a word, this is still the only major work for the ‘small screen’ written in an act of imaginative sympathy with the raster scan itself: an impersonal set of instructions about how to move across and around a rectangular space, conjuring images out of mathematically controlled movements.

Looking deeper into the implications of Beckett’s intuitions with regard to the analogue electronic arts as arts of time set to the measure of inhuman speeds and rhythms - Samuel Beckett is often seen as representing ‘high culture,’ as being a writer who moved within intellectual circles and whose work eschews mass consumption.

A reader report on the novel Molloy by the publishing house Secker & Warburg in the late 1940s epitomises this opinion, stating as it does that this book would only appeal to people who will read it for ‘snobbish’ reasons. Indeed, Beckett was mainly published by literary magazines and reasonably small and exclusive publishing houses, whose catalogues did not appeal to the general reading public. Yet as this paper reveals, Beckett was also connected with (daily and weekly) newspapers as well as non-literary magazines such as The Spectator, a form of mass media that reached a greater number of people.

In engaging with the topic of Beckett and newspaper culture, this paper will first of all show how Beckett was an avid reader of newspapers, regularly reading papers such as the Irish Times, The Sunday Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the 1930s. After the War, Beckett read the daily left-wing French newspaper Combat, and urged his friends to do the same. Secondly, Beckett, like Joyce before him, sourced material from newspapers, and as such there are several references to newspapers in his texts. And finally, this paper will examine the neglected fact that Beckett’s work was actually published in newspapers, from the poems ‘Dieppe’ and ‘Saint-Lô’ in the Irish Times (1945 and 1946), the story Ill Seen Ill Said in The New Yorker (1981), to the penultimate work ‘Stirrings Still’ in The Guardian (1989).

Drawing on archival and other sources, this paper will on the whole examine the intersections between Beckett’s work, newspaper and mass media.My talk aims to comment on Gilles Deleuze’s substantial argument that the notion of exhaustion is at the core of Beckett’s works.

In a first step, I would like to discuss the psychophysiology of movements in Beckett. There are movements that fade until they stop and movements that go on and on and on. These movements are governed by the laws of physiology; it is inevitable that everyone gets tired after performing an activity, although everyone gets tired in an individual way. Under normal conditions, the subject is capable of governing itself. It is possible to counteract fatigue to a certain degree by resting, eating, drinking, and sleeping on the one hand, and by regular training and the effort of will on the other hand. But in the end, fatigue that eventually leads to sleep is protecting the subject against exhaustion. While the tired person is able to resume activity in a predictable way, it is uncertain whether and how the exhausted one can ever do so. Under the influence of passion, however, a performance can continue until exhaustion.

The exhausted subject will do what is still possible by performing without consideration and regard to personal interest. In a second step, I will ask how Beckett exhausts language and fiction. One example is the enumeration of possible combinations until one gets tired of them. Beckett’s language uses series of antitheses, oxymora, paradoxes, and contradictions where statements are made, inferences derived, and negations of inferences produced, and these negations are, in turn, negated.

Another example is how fiction keeps amputating the stories until they fade and extinguish the potential of narrating a plot. In a third step, I will question the function of media and argue that the concept of media in Beckett has to be defined neither as form or device of representation such as theatre or film nor as a technical apparatus such as print or radio nor or as a symbolic system such as alphabetic writing, but, rather, as the means to make something visible and audible.

While Beckett’s media give us representations of the exhausted subject, they are also exhausting the potential of a situation by exhausting its own possibilities, i.e. by making audible and visible what could be called, according to Deleuze, a percept, that is an acoustic or optical sensation that stands for itself.The historical setting of Beckett’s Film in 1929 is conventionally related to the significance of that year in the history of film. 1929 not only saw the premiere of Luis Buñuel und Salvador Dalí’s groundbreaking Un chien andalou (to whose most famous scene Film’s opening shot of O’s eye pays homage) but also marks the almost complete transition of Hollywood from silent films to talkies (which reverberates in Film in the only sound we hear: a woman’s ‘sssh!’). But Beckett’s use of the device of the ‘angle of immunity’—the 45° camera angle whose three breaches in the movie induce the “agony of perceivedness” that O seeks to avoid—suggests an additional historical context. The ‘angle of immunity’ is not a technical term in filmmaking, so the question is why Beckett opted to use ‘immunity’—a term that belongs to multiple social realms: medicine, anthropology, religion, morality, politics, and the law.

It is, perhaps, a historical coincidence that Film is set in a year significant in the history of immunology. As Arthur M. Silverstein notes in A History of Immunology, “It was in 1929 that Louis Dienes first showed that tuberculin-type hypersensitivity was not restricted to substances of bacterial origin. He injected egg albumin directly into the tubercles of tubercular animals and demonstrates that they would then develop typical ‘delayed’ hypersensitivity skin reactions to the bland protein itself.”

Delayed hypersensitivity is one of those ‘heretical’ immunological phenomena that could not be explained with the help of the humoralist immunological dogma of Dienes’s time, which considered the antibodies circulating in the body’s humors (mainly blood and lymph) the sole agents of the human immune response. It would take thirty years until the immunological revolution took off, which prompted an awareness of the systemic complexity of human immunity, recognized the crucial role played by cells, and, most significantly, defined immunology as the ‘science of self/not-self discrimination.’

Driven by the publication of Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s The Clonal Selection Theory of Acquired Immunity (1959), this revolution was well underway as Beckett was shooting Film in 1964. Both the historical setting of Film in 1929 and its production in the early 1960s prompt me to inquire into the medical meanings of ‘immunity’ in a film whose damaged protagonist, dilapidated setting, and production in the sweltering heat of New York in July prominently raise issues of health and disease.

I supplement this inquiry into the medical meanings of Beckett’s ‘angle of immunity’ with an exploration of the concept’s social significance. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s and Roberto Esposito’s reflections on community, immunity, and autoimmunity, I note that O’s flight in Beckett’s Film is not merely a flight from perception but also a flight from community—most prominently from the community of the film’s initial street scene, wich Ross Lipman restored in the 2010s. This flight from community, I argue, manifests the destructive, autoimmunitary logic of the self/not-self dichotomy that the immunological revolution succeeded in placing at the heart of immunology as Beckett was shooting his film.

Given the fact that Beckett was very open to new media, such as radio and television, it is only fitting that this openness also characterizes the posthumous care we take of his texts. This means that we should seriously consider the need but also the consequences of editing Beckett’s texts in the digital age.

The digital medium enables us to present aspects of Beckett’s works that used to be known to only the lucky few who had been able to travel to the Beckett archives around the world. Beckett donated many of his manuscripts to friends and these documents ended up in more than a dozen different holding libraries.

If one wished to study the writing process of, say, Krapp’s Last Tape, one had to travel to various places in the US and the UK. By scanning these manuscripts, we were able to digitally reunite the dispersed manuscripts in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, which is available online since 2011 (BDMP, www.beckettarchive.org). Editing this material, however, presents us with many challenges, such as the choice between a ‘teleological’ and a ‘dysteleological’ editorial approach: should we present Beckett’s manuscripts as documents leading to particular publications, or should we (also) present them as traces of moments in the creative process when Beckett did not yet know where his writing was heading? And how should this digital genetic edition relate to the planned critical edition of Beckett’s complete works (on paper, i.e. another medium)? The proposed paper starts from the BDMP as a case study to critically discuss these challenges of editing Beckett’s works, both in printed form and in digital media.

When Billie Whitelaw was rehearsing Footfalls in 1976, she asked Beckett: ‘Am I dead?’, to which he replied: ‘Let’s just say you’re not quite there’. This ambiguous presence of the body in the play goes back to a precedent twenty years earlier, namely the character of Miss Fitt in the radio play All That Fall, who tells Maddy Rooney: ‘I suppose the truth is I am not there, Mrs Rooney, just not really there at all’.

Though written two decades apart, both instances refer to the Jung lecture that Beckett heard in 1935 about a girl not being ‘properly born’. Yet there is also an underlying, medium-specific connection between Footfalls and All That Fall. When Beckett started writing for radio, he made a clear distinction with theatre: the one was intended for voices, the other for bodies.

In the mid-1950s, however, a convergence began taking place, as the body in Beckett’s theatre was gradually reconceptualized under the ‘disembodying’ influence of radio. His earlier comments notwithstanding, the body is a continuous though sometimes problematic presence in Beckett’s radio drama. Starting with All That Fall and Embers, this paper illustrates how a process of ‘remediation’ accounts for the radical and innovative ‘re-imbodiment’ of Beckett’s late theatre. In the definition of Bolter and Grusin (1998), ‘remediation’ is understood as an assimilation of older media by new ones. In Beckett’s case, the reverse happens, as theatre adopts characteristics of radio, innovating that older medium in the process. 

As Julian Murphet (2009) and David Trotter (2013) have argued, it is precisely this responsiveness to cultural codes of new technologies that determines the robustness and longevity of a medium, in this case the poetry and prose of modernism. What is true on the macro-level of a global literary movement, also holds on the micro-level of an individual literary oeuvre, which explains why Beckett is one of the great inter- and multimedial authors of the twentieth century. (7)

As for Beckett's late miniature works – recently revived by the Royal Court with a tour de force performance by Lisa Dwan – they recall the images of more modern artists: Edvard Munch's The Scream (Footfalls and Not I), Whistler's Mother (Rockaby), even Salvador Dalí's famous artworks featuring lips and a mouth (again Not I). Add to these startling images Beckett's pared-down yet so often poetic text, and some thoroughly modern angst, and the playwright emerges as the true theatrical innovator he undoubtedly was, but one who also belonged, as he himself claimed, to a rich literary and artistic European continuum. But what of the central image of the woman in his 1960 play Happy Days, buried up to her waist in act one and to her neck in act two – where did that come from? And how does Beckett use it?

It might have surfaced from the depths of Beckett's own creative imagination, of course, since it had been anticipated in his vision of Malone in his novel, The Unnamable: "There are no days here, but I use the expression. I see him from the waist up, he stops at the waist." Or it may have occurred to him after seeing someone buried in sand on a holiday beach; or, more macabrely, as a form of punishment used in medieval torture; or in more modern times (reputedly at least) by the French Foreign Legion.

And yet a half-buried Winnie would probably never have existed had Beckett not been familiar with some striking images in art. From his student days, Dante's Divine Comedy had always been one of his favourite books; and in his magnificent illustrations to the Inferno, Gustave Doré had memorably depicted Dante's damned with their heads or lower limbs protruding from the frozen lake, or the "livid stone".

Material has also recently come to light that reveals Beckett was intimately acquainted with many of the distorted, fragmented, sometimes even decapitated images found in surrealist, cubist and expressionist paintings. One of his favourite painters was Germany's Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose stark, violent images made an enduring impact on him. What we can be quite certain of, however, is that Beckett was acquainted with the closing frames of Dalí and Luis Buñuel's 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, in which two women are displayed casually buried up to their waists on the beach. Not only was this film very familiar to the avant garde literati of the time, Buñuel and Dalí's script was printed in the same issue of This Quarter magazine as some of Beckett's own translations.

But there may be more specific sources of inspiration for Happy Days, about to be revived at the Young Vic in London, with Juliet Stevenson as the lead. A whole series of portraits of celebrities bearing an uncanny resemblance to Winnie's situation were taken in the manner of surrealism, mostly in the late 1930s, by the British photographer Angus McBean. The full range of these pictures – which include shots of Dorothy Dickson, Beatrice Lillie, Diana Churchill and Audrey Hepburn – became known only fairly recently. In the shots of Frances Day, Britain's first blonde bombshell and mistress to four princes, the affinities with Happy Days are striking: burial in a mound of earth, albeit in a basket in the photograph; Day holds a lock of her hair, just as Winnie does; a looking-glass is held up like Winnie's, although by another person's hand. In the same year, equally strikingly, McBean photographed actor Flora Robson, with her chest again apparently bursting out of (or being sucked into) the earth. We do not know if Beckett saw these photographs but, even for someone who was living in Paris from 1938 onwards and visiting England or Ireland rarely, it is likely he did, since they appeared either in the weekly magazine the Sketch or in the well-known Picture Post.

A further pictorial candidate came to my attention recently, in the shape of Max Ernst's Projet Pour Un Monument à WC Fields, a remarkable, kaleidoscopic painting of Mae West and WC Fields. In the centre of the 1957 work is a female figure, West, painted as a rotund, buxom torso in red, wearing an ornate hat and holding aloft an unfurled, multicoloured parasol. The right foreground features the head of a male figure, wearing a top hat and reaching out his hand. This is the comic actor WC Fields and the painting had apparently been inspired by the collaboration of Fields and West on a 1940 film called My Little Chickadee.

Given the unusual light-filled setting of Happy Days and its preoccupation with the element of fire, it was the brightness of the colours of the Ernst painting, especially its fiery reds, that struck me. Happy Days is, after all, the only play by Beckett that has any bright colours. Looking at this painting, in the Bechtler Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, I assumed that I had started seeing Beckett everywhere.

But was there any connection between the play and the painting? And which came first? The latter question was quickly answered: the date 1957 is on the painting itself, inscribed with the artist's signature. We know, of course, that Beckett's play was written in 1960-61. But when did Hans Bechtler purchase the picture for his collection? Might Beckett have seen it in Paris before, or even after, it was purchased? In a general way, there were a sufficient number of personal links between Beckett and Ernst. The German painter had briefly been married to Peggy Guggenheim, with whom Beckett had had a passionate affair in the late 1930s; and Ernst would later illustrate a trilingual edition of Beckett's From an Abandoned Work.

More decisively, the painting had been reproduced in Patrick Waldberg's beautiful 1958 biography of Ernst – and Waldberg's letters from Beckett revealed that the two men were dining together and playing bar billiards at the time he was writing it. Crucially, the letters also show that Waldberg sent Beckett copies of his many books on art. In addition, there is the strong likelihood that the painting figured in a special exhibition in 1958 to celebrate the publication of Waldberg's book. This took place at La Hune, the bookshop visited regularly by Beckett.

Whatever the inspiration for this startling, even shocking image, Beckett certainly uses it in his own way. One of the most disquieting features of Winnie's predicament is that she behaves as if "entombment" were the most natural thing in the world − which, of course, for Beckett, with his vision of the encroachment of the sands of time, it was. She also touches, however lightly, on many of the central problems that have preoccupied western philosophy: the relationship of mind and body; the power and limits of the will; the relation of past experience to the present; and many more. To have taken an image associated with surrealism and to make Winnie into a credible, buoyant human being with a wide emotional range is a mark of genius.

To counter the static nature of her situation, Beckett also has her perform an elaborate ballet with her hand gestures, complementing or interrupting her vocal runs, her little trills and her more extended arias. Maurice Béjart, the celebrated French dancer and choreographer, said he learned to dance simply by watching the French actor Madeleine Renaud play Winnie – despite the fact she moved only her head, her arms and, above all, her hands. Personally, I can't wait to see what Juliet Stevenson, subtle actor that she is, makes of this demanding role. (10)

The set from "Waiting for Godot" is a prime example of Beckett's use of empty settings in plays.

Beckett is perhaps best known for his plays, which are written quite differently from many other plays from around his time in how simply they are written.  One feature that sets Beckett apart is his overly simplified settings.  This trait is perhaps most apparent in Waiting for Godot, in which the entire setting for the first act is explained in a few simple lines: “A country road.  A tree.  Evening,” (6).  This description could not be more basic, which is unlike many other authors who include great detail in their first stage directions.  Not only does Beckett create an nondescript setting in appearance, but also in regards to the time and place of the play. 

Throughout of the entirety of the play Endgame, Beckett gives a few vague to the setting when Hamm wonders what would happen “if a rational being came back to Earth,” and when he mentions that from a crablouse “humanity might start from there all over again!” (33). 

From Hamm’s comments, it is determinable that there are no people on Earth, however, the audience members can not be positive why, or when, or how society ended nor where the characters are now.  

In these plays, Beckett has stripped his scenes down to the bare basics; whether he does so in order to insure no superfluous details to detract from his message or in order to create a barren and empty atmosphere (or both) is up for debate.

Not only are his plays unique for their vague settings, but Beckett’s short and choppy sentences differ greatly from the great monologues written by other playwrights.  Very seldom does one see any of Beckett’s characters speaking more than a single line of text, and even if they do, sentences are normally spread out with stage directions in between. 

One of Beckett’s most common tools for breaking up dialogue and slowing down pace is the stage direction “(Pause).”  Take, for instance, in Endgame, when Nell and Nagg are having a conversation, neither one speaks more than a sentence without the stage direction “(Pause)” between each of their sentences (20).  

It is also interesting to note that the longest sentence in that same conversation is merely nine words long.  Indeed, it is quite astonishing that Beckett is able to portray so many of his complex ideas through such short sentences.

Beckett’s prosaic style is a style all on its own, and contains many aspects that not only set his style apart from other authors’, but from his own dramatic style as well.  What is most noticeable about his style is his stream of consciousness writing – what is meant by stream of consciousness is that the narrators in Molloy, Jacques and Molloy, spew forth their ideas continuously, often without transitions between ideas. This stream of consciousness is often extremely apparent in his prose because it the reason that Beckett chooses to disregard many of grammar’s most basic rules. For instance, when writing prose, Beckett disregards the normal rules for tense.  Although Molloy is told from the point of view of Molloy looking back at past events, which would normally warrant past tense, Molloy bounces back to present tense even while describing the past.  

Beckett has Molloy acknowledge to the reader that he does indeed disregard tense, simply narrating how it is easiest for him: “I speak in the present tense, it is so easy to speak in the present tense, when speaking of the past,” (26).  

In addition to breaking common rules that apply to the tense of writing, Beckett also has a tendency break grammatical rules as well, such as the use of paragraphs. Throughout the first 91 pages of text, there is only one paragraph break; this makes for very little distinguishable transitions between his flowing thoughts. 

Another result of Beckett’s stream of consciousness is that since most all of the ideas in the book are the thoughts of the narrator, Beckett makes dialogue a minimal aspect in his novels. 

Just how little Beckett cares for dialogue is apparent in a few different ways: he use very little dialogue, when characters do speak there are no quotation marks or paragraph breaks to indicate a speaker, and finally, every time there is a speaker Beckett always uses the plainest indication word – “said.” Finally, Beckett’s stream of consciousness often results in long run-on sentences that express multiple ideas without transitions between those ideas. 

Take, for instance, one of Molloy’s thoughts, during which he contemplates what day it is, how bad his day is, where sheep are going, how the sheep will die, and how one properly slaughters a sheep all in once sentence: “That then is how that second day began, unless it was the third, or the fourth, and it was a bad beginning, because it left me with persisting doubts, as to the destination of those sheep, among which were lambs, and often wondering if they had safely reached some commonage or fallen, their skulls shattered, their thin legs crumpling, first to their knees, then over on their fleecy sides, under the pole-axe, though that is not the way they slaughter sheep, but with a knife, so that they bleed to death,” (29). Not only are grammatical errors such as run-on sentences, paragraph breaks, and tense agreement all very uncommon in great literature, but Beckett’s long, dialogue-lacking sentences are quite the opposite of the short and choppy dialogue found in his plays.

Despite their differences, Beckett’s prosaic and dramatic styles do share some aspects that are unique to Beckett. One such aspect is the use of repetition. Often times in Molloy, Beckett repeats words or phrases two or even three times in close proximity in order to make an idea apparent.

Take Molloy’s rant on believing you are correct in a situation, even if you are wrong: “And if you are wrong, and you are wrong, I mean when you record circumstances better left unspoken, and leave unspoken others, rightly, if you like, but how shall I say, for no good reason, yes, rightly, but for no good reason, as for example that new moon, it is often in good faith, excellent faith,” (41). Although the exact meaning behind the passage may be utterly confusing, the words and phrases that are repeated (you are wrong, unspoken, no good reason, rightly, and faith) help to emphasize a main point, which in this case would seem to be that when you are wrong for saying things you shouldn’t for no good reason it is probably because you have faith that you are right. Beckett doesn’t only exhibit repetition in his word choice, but in character’s actions as well. An excellent example of this can be found in Waiting for Godot, when Vladimir and Estragon attempt to determine which of three hats are theirs: “Estragon takes Vladimir’s hat. Vladimir adjusts Lucky’s hat on his head. Estragon puts on Vladimir’s hat in place of his own which he hands to Vladimir. Vladimir takes Estragon’s hat,” (46). This cycle repeats two and a half more times. Obviously Beckett intended an audience to recognize the repetition in the characters’ actions. Whether it is physical repetition or rhetorical repetition, Beckett purposefully uses it throughout his works.

Yet another one of Beckett’s stylistic aspects can be found in both his plays and his novels; this is the idea of having characters talk to or allude to the presence of an audience. This is perhaps most prominent in Molloy, in which the character Molloy often narrates in a manner that is conversational with the reader. Just a few things that Molloy says directly to the reader are “I apologize for these details,” (63) and “follow me carefully,” (77).

By apologizing and telling the reader to follow him, Beckett is obviously communicating directly to the reader through Molloy, a trick not many authors use. Beckett also references his own audience in Endgame, although he doesn’t have characters talk directly to the said audience. The best example of this is when Hamm makes a comment to himself that is overheard by Clov, and Hamm explains that it was meant to be an aside: “An aside, ape! Did you never hear of an aside before?  I’m warming up for my last soliloquy,” (78). By having one of his own characters make a reference to his own soliloquy and aside Beckett is clearly acknowledging the presence of an audience and is thus breaking the third wall – something seldom done in dramatic works. By referring to his own readers or audience members in his works, Beckett is distancing himself even further from typical authors.

Obviously, many of the stylistic liberties Beckett takes in his works are unconventional to say the least. Very few of the world’s “great” authors would ever choose to use nearly empty settings, disregard basic grammatical rules, and refer directly to their own audiences. However, Beckett’s choice to do what many authors wouldn’t dare to do is exactly what set him apart from other writers. (14)

This movement known as the Theater of the Absurd was not a consciously conceived movement, and it has never had any clear-cut philosophical doctrines, no organized attempt to win converts, and no meetings. Each of the main playwrights of the movement seems to have developed independently of' each other. The playwrights most often associated with the movement are Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. The early plays of Edward Albee and Harold Pinter fit into this classification, but these dramatists have also written plays that move far away from the Theater of the Absurd's basic elements.

In viewing the plays that comprise this movement, we must forsake the theater of coherently developed situations, we must forsake characterizations that are rooted in the logic of motivation and reaction, we must sometimes forget settings that bear an intrinsic, realistic, or obvious relationship to the drama as a whole, we must forget the use of language as a tool of logical communication, and we must forget cause-and-effect relationships found in traditional dramas. By their use of a number of puzzling devices, these playwrights have gradually accustomed audiences to a new kind of relationship between theme and presentation. In these seemingly queer and fantastic plays, the external world is often depicted as menacing, devouring, and unknown; the settings and situations often make us vaguely uncomfortable; the world itself seems incoherent and frightening and strange, but at the same time, it seems hauntingly poetic and familiar.

These are some of the reasons which prompt the critic to classify them under the heading "Theater of the Absurd" — a title which comes not from a dictionary definition of the word "absurd," but rather from Martin Esslin's book The Theatre of the Absurd, in which he maintains that these dramatists write from a "sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition." But other writers such as Kafka, Camus, and Sartre have also argued from the same philosophical position. The essential difference is that critics like Camus have presented their arguments in a highly formal discourse with logical and precise views which prove their theses within the framework of traditional forms. On the contrary, the Theater of the Absurd seeks to wed form and content into an indissoluble whole in order to gain a further unity of meaning and impact. This theater, as Esslin has pointed out, "has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images of the absurdity of existence."

Too often, however, the viewer notes only these basic similarities and fails to note the distinctive differences in each dramatist. Since these writers do not belong to any deliberate or conscious movement, they should be evaluated for their individual concerns, as well as for their contributions to the total concept of the Theater of the Absurd. In fact, most of these playwrights consider themselves to be lonely rebels and outsiders, isolated in their own private worlds. As noted above, there have been no manifestoes, no theses, no conferences, and no collaborations. Each has developed along his own unique lines; each in his own way is individually and distinctly different. Therefore, it is important to see how Beckett both belongs to the Theater of the Absurd and, equally important, how he differs from the other writers associated with this movement. First, let us note a few of the basic differences.

One of Samuel Beckett's main concerns is the polarity of existence. In Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp's Last Tape, we have such characteristic polarities as sight versus blindness, life–death, time present–time past, body–intellect, waiting–not waiting, going–not going, and dozens more. One of Beckett's main concerns, then, seems to be characterizing man's existence in terms of these polarities. To do this, Beckett groups his characters in pairs; for example, we have Vladimir and Estragon, or Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov, Pozzo and Lucky, Nagg and Nell, and Krapp's present voice and past voice. Essentially, however, Beckett's characters remain a puzzle which each individual viewer must solve.

In contrast to Beckett, Eugene Ionesco's characters are seen in terms of singularity. Whereas Beckett's characters stand in pairs outside of society, but converse with each other, Ionesco's characters are placed in the midst of society — but they stand alone in an alien world with no personal identity and no one with whom they can communicate. For example, the characters in The Bald Soprano are in society, but they scream meaningless phrases at each other, and there is no communication. And whereas Beckett's plays take place on strange and alien landscapes (some of the settings of his plays remind one of a world transformed by some holocaust or created by some surrealist), Ionesco's plays are set against the most traditional elements in our society — the standard English drawing room in The Bald Soprano, a typical street scene in Rhinoceros, and an average academic study in The Lesson, etc.

The language of the two playwrights also differs greatly. Beckett's dialogue recalls the disjointed phantasmagoria of a dream world; Ionesco's language is rooted in the banalities, clichés, and platitudes of everyday speech; Beckett uses language to show man isolated in the world and unable to communicate because language is a barrier to communication. Ionesco, on the other hand, uses language to show the failure of communication because there is nothing to say; in The Bald Soprano, and other plays, the dialogue is filled with clichés and platitudes.

In contrast to the basic sympathy we feel for both Beckett's and Ionesco's characters, Jean Genet's characters almost revile the audience from the moment that they appear on the stage. His theme is stated more openly. He is concerned with the hatred which exists in the world. In The Maids, for example, each maid hates not just her employer and not just her own sister, but also her own self. Therefore, she plays the other roles so as to exhaust her own hatred of herself against herself. Basically, then, there is a great sense of repugnance in Genet's characters. This revulsion derives partially from the fact that Genet's dramatic interest, so different from Beckett's and Ionesco's, is in the psychological exploration of man's predilection to being trapped in his own egocentric world, rather than facing the realities of existence. Man, for Genet, is trapped by his own fantastic illusions; man's absurdity results partially from the fact that he prefers his own disjointed images to those of reality. In Genet's directions for the production of The Blacks, he writes that the play should never be played before a totally black audience. If there are no white people present, then one of the blacks in the audience must wear a white mask; if the black refuses, then a white mannequin must be used, and the actors must play the drama for this mannequin. There must at least be a symbol of a white audience, someone for the black actors to revile.

In contrast to Beckett, Arthur Adamov, in his themes, is more closely aligned to the Kafkaesque, existentialistic school, but his technique is that of the Theater of the Absurd. His interest is in establishing some proof that the individual does exist, and he shows how man becomes more alienated from his fellow man as he attempts to establish his own personal identity. For example, in Professor Taranne, the central character, hoping to prove his innocence of a certain accusation, actually convicts himself through his own defense. For Adamov, man attempting to prove his own existence actually proves, ironically, that he does not exist. Therefore language, for Adamov, serves as an inadequate system of communication and, actually, in some cases serves to the detriment of man, since by language and man's use of language, man often finds himself trapped in the very circumstances he previously hoped to avoid. Ultimately, Adarnov's characters fail to communicate because each is interested only in his own egocentric self. Each character propounds his own troubles and his own achievements, but the words reverberate, as against a stone wall. They are heard only by the audience. Adamov's plays are often grounded in a dream-world atmosphere, and while they are presenting a series of outwardly confusing scenes of almost hallucinative quality, they, at the same time, attack or denounce the confusion present in modem man.

Characteristic of all these writers is a notable absence of any excess concern with sex. Edward Albee, an American, differs significantly in his emphasis and concern with the sexual substructure of society. The overtones of homosexuality in The Zoo Story are carried further until the young man in The American Dream becomes the physical incarnation of a muscular and ideally handsome, young sexual specimen who, since he has no inner feelings, passively allows anyone "to take pleasure from my groin." In The Sandbox, the angel of death is again seen as the muscle-bound young sexual specimen who spends his time scantily dressed and performing calisthenics on a beach while preparing for a career in Hollywood.

Since all of the writers have varying concerns, they also have much in common because their works reflect a moral and philosophical climate in which most of our civilization finds itself today. Again, as noted above, even though there are no manifestoes, nor any organized movements, there are still certain concerns that are basic to all of the writers, and Beckett's works are concerned with these basic ideas.

Beyond the technical and strange illusionary techniques which prompt the critic to group these plays into a category, there are larger and, ultimately, more significant concerns by which each dramatist, in spite of his artistic differences, is akin to the others. Aside from such similarities as violation of traditional beginning, middle, and end structure (exposition, complication, and denouement) or the refusal to tell a straightforward, connected story with a proper plot, or the disappearance of traditional dramatic forms and techniques, these dramatists are all concerned with the failure of communication in modern society which leaves man alienated; moreover, they are all concerned with the lack of individuality and the overemphasis on conformity in our society, and they use the dramatic elements of time and place to imply important ideas; finally, they reject traditional logic for a type of non-logic which ultimately implies something about the nature of the universe. Implicit in many of these concerns is an attack on a society or a world which possesses no set standards of values or behavior.

Foremost, all of these dramatists of the absurd are concerned with the lack of communication. In Edward Albee's plays, each character is existing within the bounds of his own private ego. Each makes a futile attempt to get another character to understand him, but as the attempt is heightened, there is more alienation. Thus, finally, because of a lack of communication, Peter, the conformist in The Zoo Story, is provoked into killing Jerry, the individualist; and in The Sandbox, a continuation of The American Dream, Mommy and Daddy bury Grandma because she talks incessantly but says nothing significant. The irony is that Grandma is the only character who does say anything significant, but Mommy and Daddy, the people who discard her, are incapable of understanding her.

In Ionesco's plays, this failure of communication often leads to even more drastic results. Akin to the violence in Albee's Zoo Story, the professor in The Lesson must kill his student partly because she doesn't understand his communication. Berenger, in The Killers, has uttered so many clichés that by the end of the play, he has convinced even himself that the killers should kill him. In The Chairs, the old people, needing to express their thoughts, address themselves to a mass of empty chairs which, as the play progresses, crowd all else off the stage. In Maid to Marry, communication is so bad that the maid, when she appears on the stage, turns out to be a rather homely man. And ultimately in Rhinoceros, the inability to communicate causes an entire race of so-called rational human beings to be metamorphosed into a herd of rhinoceroses, thereby abandoning all hopes of language as a means of communication.

In Adamov's Professor Taranne, the professor, in spite of all his desperate attempts, is unable to get people to acknowledge his identity because there is no communication. Likewise, Pinter's plays show individuals grouped on the stage, but each person fails to achieve any degree of effective communication. This concern with communication is finally carried to its illogical extreme in two works: in Genet's The Blacks, one character says, "We shall even have the decency — a decency learned from you — to make communication impossible." And in another, Beckett's Act Without Words I, we have our first play in this movement that uses absolutely no dialogue. And even without dialogue, all the action on the stage suggests the inability of man to communicate.

Beckett's characters are tied together by a fear of being left entirely alone, and they therefore cling to one last hope of establishing some kind of communication. His plays give the impression that man is totally lost in a disintegrating society, or, as in Endgame, that man is left alone after society has disintegrated. In Waiting for Godot, two derelicts are seen conversing in a repetitive, strangely fragmented dialogue that possesses an illusory, haunting effect, while they are waiting for Godot, a vague, never-defined being who will bring them some communication about — what? Salvation? Death? An impetus for living? A reason for dying? No one knows, and the safest thing to say is that the two are probably waiting for someone or something which will give them an impetus to continue living or, at least, something which will give meaning and direction to their lives. As Beckett clearly demonstrates, those who rush hither and yon in search of meaning find it no quicker than those who sit and wait. The "meaning" about life that these tramps hope for is never stated precisely. But Beckett never meant his play to be a "message play," in which one character would deliver a "message." The message here is conveyed through the interaction of the characters and primarily through the interaction of the two tramps. Everyone leaves the theater with the knowledge that these tramps are strangely tied to one another; even though they bicker and fight, and even though they have exhausted all conversation notice that the second act is repetitive and almost identical — the loneliness and weakness in each calls out to the other, and they are held by a mystical bond of interdependence. In spite of this strange dependency, however, neither is able to communicate with the other. The other two characters, Pozzo and Lucky, are on a journey without any apparent goal and are symbolically tied together. One talks, the other says nothing. The waiting of Vladimir and Estragon and the journeying of Pozzo and Lucky offer themselves as contrasts of various activities in the modem world — all of which lead to no fruitful end; therefore, each pair is hopelessly alienated from the other pair. For example, when Pozzo falls and yells for help, Vladimir and Estragon continue talking, although nothing is communicated in their dialogue; all is hopeless, or as Vladimir aphoristically replies to one of Estragon's long discourses, "We are all born mad. Some remain so." In their attempts at conversation and communication, these two tramps have a fastidious correctness and a grave propriety that suggest that they could be socially accepted; but their fastidiousness and propriety are inordinately comic when contrasted with their ragged appearance.

Their fumbling ineffectuality in their attempts at conversation seems to represent the ineptness of all mankind in its attempt at communication. And it rapidly becomes apparent that Vladimir and Estragon, as representatives of modern man, cannot formulate any cogent or useful resolution or action; and what is more pathetic, they cannot communicate their helpless longings to one another. While failing to possess enough individualism to go their separate ways, they nevertheless are different enough to embrace most of our society. In the final analysis, their one positive gesture is their strength to wait. But man is, ultimately, terribly alone in his waiting. Ionesco shows the same idea at the end of Rhinoceros when we see Berenger totally alone as a result, partly, of a failure in communication.

Each dramatist, therefore, presents a critique of modern society by showing the total collapse of communication. The technique used is that of evolving a theme about communication by presenting a series of seemingly disjointed speeches. The accumulative effect of these speeches is a devastating commentary on the failure of communication in modem society.

In conjunction with the general attack on communication, the second aspect common to these dramatists is the lack of individuality encountered in modern civilization. Generally, the point seems to be that man does not know himself He has lost all sense of individualism and either functions isolated and alienated, or else finds himself lost amid repetition and conformity.

Jean Genet's play The Maids opens with the maid Claire playing the role of her employer while her sister Solange plays the role of Claire. Therefore, we have Claire referring to Solange as Claire. By the time the audience realizes that the two sisters are imitating someone else, each character has lost her individualism; therefore, when Claire later portrays Solange, who portrays the employer, and vice versa, we gradually realize that part of Genet's intent is to illustrate the total lack of individuality and, furthermore, to show that each character becomes vibrantly alive only when functioning in the image of another personality.

Other dramatists present their attack on society's destruction of individualism by different means, but the attack still has the same thematic intent. In Albee's The American Dream, Mommy and Daddy are obviously generic names for any mommy and daddy. Albee is not concerned with individualizing his characters. They remain types and, as types, are seen at times in terms of extreme burlesque. So, unlike Beckett's tramps, and more like Ionesco's characters, Albee's people are seen as Babbitt-like caricatures and satires on the "American Dream" type; the characters remain mannequins with no delineations. Likewise in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, the Martins assume the roles of the Smiths and begin the play over because there is no distinction between the two sets of characters.

Perhaps more than any of the other dramatists of the absurd, Ionesco has concerned himself almost exclusively with the failure of individualism, especially in his most famous play, Rhinoceros. To repeat, in this play, our society today has emphasized conformity to such an extent and has rejected individualism so completely that Ionesco demonstrates with inverse logic how stupid it is not to conform with all society and be metamorphosed into a rhinoceros. This play aptly illustrates how two concerns of the absurdists — lack of communication and the lack of individualism — are combined, each to support the other. Much of Ionesco's dialogue in this play seems to be the distilled essence of the commonplace. One cliché follows another, and yet, in contrast, this dialogue is spoken within the framework of a wildly improbable situation. In a typically common street scene, with typically common clichés about weather and work being uttered, the morning calm is shattered by a rhinoceros charging through the streets. Then two rhinoceroses, then more. Ridiculous arguments then develop as to whether they are African or Asiatic rhinoceroses. We soon learn that there is an epidemic of metamorphoses; everyone is changing into rhinoceroses. Soon only three individuals are left. Then in the face of this absurd situation, we have the equally appalling justifications and reasons in favor of being metamorphosed advocated in such clichés as "We must join the crowd," "We must move with the times," and "We've got to build our life on new foundations," etc. Suddenly it seems almost foolish not to become a rhinoceros. In the end, Berenger's sweetheart, Daisy, succumbs to the pressures of society, relinquishes her individualism, and joins the society of rhinoceroses — not because she wants to, but rather because she is afraid not to. She cannot revolt against society and remain a human being. Berenger is left alone, totally isolated with his individualism. And what good is his humanity in a world of rhinoceroses?

At first glance, it would seem obvious that Ionesco wishes to indicate the triumph of the individual, who, although caught in a society that has gone mad, refuses to surrender his sense of identity. But if we look more closely, we see that Ionesco has no intention of leaving us on this hopeful and comforting note.

In his last speech, Berenger makes it clear that his stand is rendered absurd. What does his humanity avail him in a world of beasts? Finally, he wishes that he also had changed; now it is too late. All he can do is feebly reassert his joy in being human. His statement carries little conviction. This is how Ionesco deals with the haunting theme of the basic meaning and value of personal identity in relationship to society. If one depends entirely upon the society in which one lives for a sense of reality and identity, it is impossible to take a stand against that society without reducing oneself to nothingness in the process. Berenger instinctively felt repelled by the tyranny that had sprung up around him, but he had no sense of identity that would have enabled him to combat this evil with anything resembling a positive force. Probably any action he could have taken would have led to eventual defeat, but defeat would have been infinitely preferable to the limbo in which he is finally consigned. Ionesco has masterfully joined two themes: the lack of individualism and the failure of communication. But unlike Beckett, who handles the same themes by presenting his characters as derelicts and outcasts from society, Ionesco's treatment seems even more devastating because he places them in the very middle of the society from which they are estranged.

Ultimately, the absurdity of man's condition is partially a result of his being compelled to exist without his individualism in a society which does not possess any degree of effective communication. Essentially, therefore, the Theater of the Absurd is not a positive drama. It does not try to prove that man can exist in a meaningless world, as did Camus and Sartre, nor does it offer any solution; instead, it demonstrates the absurdity and illogicality of the world we live in. Nothing is ever settled; there are no positive statements; no conclusions are ever reached, and what few actions there are have no meaning, particularly in relation to the action. That is, one action carries no more significance than does its opposite action. For example, the man's tying his shoe in The Bald Soprano — a common occurrence — is magnified into a momentous act, while the appearance of rhinoceroses in the middle of a calm afternoon seems to be not at all consequential and evokes only the most trite and insignificant remarks. Also, Pozzo and Lucky's frantic running and searching are no more important than Vladimir and Estragon's sitting and waiting. And Genet presents his blacks as outcasts and misfits from society, but refrains from making any positive statement regarding the black person's role in our society. The question of whether society is to be integrated or segregated is, to Genet, a matter of absolute indifference. It would still be society, and the individual would still be outside it.

No conclusions or resolutions can ever be offered, therefore, because these plays are essentially circular and repetitive in nature. The Bald Soprano begins over again with a new set of characters, and other plays end at the same point at which they began, thus obviating any possible conclusions or positive statements. The American Dream ends with the coming of a second child, this time one who is fully grown and the twin to the other child who had years before entered the family as a baby and upset the static condition; thematically, the play ends as it began. In all of these playwrights' dramas, the sense of repetition, the circular structure, the static quality, the lack of cause and effect, and the lack of apparent progression all suggest the sterility and lack of values in the modem world.

Early critics referred to the Theater of the Absurd as a theater in transition, meaning that it was to lead to something different. So far this has not happened, but the Theater of the Absurd is rapidly becoming accepted as a distinct genre in its own right. The themes utilized by the dramatists of this movement are not new; thus, the success of the plays must often depend upon the effectiveness of the techniques and the new ways by which the dramatists illustrate their themes. The techniques are still so new, however, that many people are confused by a production of one of these plays. Yet if the technique serves to emphasize the absurdity of man's position in the universe, then to present this concept by a series of ridiculous situations is only to render man's position even more absurd; and in actuality, the techniques then reinforce that very condition which the dramatists bewail. In other words, to present the failure of communication by a series of disjointed and seemingly incoherent utterances lends itself to the accusation that functionalism is carried to a ridiculous extreme. But this is exactly what the absurdist wants to do. He is tired of logical discourses pointing out step-by-step the absurdity of the universe: he begins with the philosophical premise that the universe is absurd, and then creates plays which illustrate conclusively that the universe is indeed absurd and that perhaps this play is another additional absurdity.

In conclusion, if the public can accept these unusual uses of technique to support thematic concerns, then we have plays which dramatically present powerful and vivid views on the absurdity of the human condition — an absurdity which is the result of the destruction of individualism and the failure of communication, of man's being forced to conform to a world of mediocrity where no action is meaningful. As the tragic outcasts of these plays are presented in terms of burlesque, man is reminded that his position and that of human existence in general is essentially absurd. Every play in the Theater of the Absurd movement mirrors the chaos and basic disorientation of modern man. Each play laughs in anguish at the confusion that exists in contemporary society; hence, all share a basic point of view, while varying widely in scope and structure. (17)

Deep into literary form, syntax, and language, Beckett reflects ominous political and historical changes, and satirizes aesthetic and philosophical interpretations that overlook them. He burdens aesthetic production with guilt for how imagination and language, theatre, and narrative parallel political techniques, the aspiration to both effect atrocity and cover it up. This book develops new readings of Beckett’s early and middle work up to Three Novels and Endgame. (21)

Shane Meadows' semi-autobiographical series has become known for its gritty realism, its grasp on the dank, cold colours of crumbling council estates, but also for the warmth of its brilliant cast.

Interestingly, capturing the feel of these places and these lives has been as much about technology as it has about Meadows mining his own childhood and teen years for inspiration. Behind the scenes, This Is England charts how Meadows has struggled with budgetary limitations throughout his career, and how the digital revolution has allowed him to revel in his own style of filmmaking.

I met Meadows back in April, when the current series was still being filmed. We sat in the brilliantly chintzy front room of a large semi-detached house, set to be the venue of a student party. It's also where Shaun is offered his first and probably last ever olive by the over-ingratiating dad of his new middle class college mate.

"It spins back to some autobiographical stuff, from when I first went to college," Meadows explains. "I started to break away from that gang and went to further myself, if you like. But Shaun only went to study drama because there was a ratio of 13 boys to 16 girls, and two of those boys were gay.

"So, one alpha male and loads of girls. Which is based on my own story. I got access to this whole other world. I was going to houses like this, I had all these mates in Uttoxeter – it was the first time I'd ever seen a fucking chicken kiev."

This is England 88 has been made entirely with digital cameras – and for Meadows, that hasn't just been about money, it's been about creative emancipation. When he started making shorts in the early nineties, he was using cheap home video cameras rather than film, and came up against a barrage of snobbery.

"I went to a film club and said I want to submit my tape for a competition," he says. "They asked for a 16mm print, and I asked, 'what's that?' and handed them a video cassette. They said, 'no, we only screen film'."

Unperturbed, he arranged his own festival, hiring out a local porn cinema as a venue. "It was only on a very small scale," he says, "no fucker was flying over from the States to see it. But we were quickly over-subscribed. It turned out there were loads of people making videos and there was nowhere to get them exhibited. There were only 15 seats in this old porn cinema and 80 people turned up, so we had to run the same tapes about six times."

While home camcorders were cheap and light, what they produced always looked like video – it was unavoidable. But as digital cameras first started arriving at reasonable prices, Meadows quickly found that the footage they produced was more malleable, and closer in look to film.

"The dream was a 35mm chip in a camera I understood," he says. "I wanted to be able to have that quality without bastards telling me that it's not achievable or affordable. And that's only just happened with digital really.

"So for the first time ever, I am able to bring my own personal camera on to set. I've been shooting alongside the Red cameras, which, once you start adding all the bits to them, are very expensive and very cumbersome. It's like what happened with music 10 years ago – you didn't have to go to a studio any more because you could get 32 tracks in your bedroom for a couple of hundred quid. That's coming in to the film world."

Another benefit, of course, is that there's no film to develop. Meadows shoots a lot of footage; he allows long languorous takes to extract every ounce of emotion from intimate scenes, and he films all his rehearsals with the actors, just in case there's a spontaneous, irreproducible moment of brilliance that would otherwise be lost forever.

The day before I visited the set, he shot four hours of footage, experimenting and messing about with the cast, developing scenes on the fly. "With my movies in the past, I couldn't really go beyond two or three takes, because it was so expensive to develop the materials," he says. "I improvise everything, but the 20-30 minute takes I wanted were impossible on film. Ten minutes was the maximum."

"And we were always under financial pressure," says Mark Herbert, Meadows' longtime producer. "There were always people on my back, and then I'm on Shane's going, 'you'll have to cut down on the film stock, it's costing too much'. Those conversations just don't happen any more.

"Right now, Shane is in the house, rehearsing with his actors. We're not watching it, but he gets the scene working – just about. Then we go in, the director of photography does his thing, and we can just keep shooting. There is no mag changing and all that – we're shooting considerably more material than we did on the first This is England."

There's also that quality, of time and subtlety, that have made, say, the quiet, harrowing scenes between Woody and Lol more moving.

"We can be much more intimate," says Herbert. "We can be really, really close; there's no one shouting, come on, we've got to move on. Also, we have a guy in a van checking the footage: you can just go, 'did that work alright?', and he'll come back five minutes later and say, 'yeah, it's all fine, the focus was fine, we didn't see that satellite dish'. So you know you can move on; you're able to get more footage."

Keen to mess around with the possibilities of digital movie-making, Meadows gave every cast member a Sony Bloggie, a tiny camcorder that looks like a mobile phone but shoots in decent HD. The idea was that they'd produce lots of behind the scenes material, which could then be used as teasers, or as extras on the DVD release.

The cast embraced the concept wholeheartedly. Andrew Ellis, who plays Gadget, is a tech-fan who has been recording non-stop. George Newton, who plays Banjo, took the camera and filmed himself having a gold tooth fitted. There was just one rule. "I've introduced a £1,000 fine for penis shots," says Meadows. "And if they put their willy on someone else's phone, we'll have to do a line up – that'll be a double fine. Actors are very cunning, they're very deceitful people."

But there are also serious creative possibilities here. "It comes down to this lovely freedom that musicians have always had," says Meadows. "They can write and experiment with their songs on an acoustic guitar, and there's a purity to it that's better sometimes. But as a filmmaker, it used to be that you'd shoot on ropey 8mm or Hi-8 and it never really showed your talent. Now, I shoot a lot on phones and Bloggies, because they're always to hand, they're always in your pocket.

"I've been going through ideas with Mark. I don't think we're far away from a film being made on one of these £100 buy-at-Currys jobs. What happened with the Blair Witch Project is only a step away from shooting a movie on a phone, and getting it released. Obviously, you have to be realistic about your subject matter – you couldn't make Star Trek on one."

At the close of our interview, we wandered outside into the front garden, temporarily a mass of trailing wires and camera equipment. It was here a few weeks before filming, that This is England 88 took another of Meadows' apparently typical last-minute narrative detours.

"As we were walking down the drive, there was this contraption that the house owners had dumped in the garden – it looked like a robot out of Star Wars," he explains. "It was actually this old one-man sauna. And it made me completely change the basis of what the family were and how the party scene would work.

"I wanted the whole thing to open with this queue of lads, tops off, shouting 'hurry up, you dirty bastard!' You think they're all waiting to have sex with the same person, but when the door opens, Gadget's in the sauna, his head above the parapet.

"So yes, I wrote the script, but then I turned up on location and just went, 'fuck me! Right, the mum's going to be a beautician!' The whole casting and everything changed based around someone leaving this bloody dirty device in the garden!"

Meadows shot This is England 88 mostly on a Red, a high-end digital camera used extensively throughout the movie industry. But he also has a much cheaper Sony PMW-F3 handheld.

"I'm not really one for bells and whistles," he says. "I want a camera that's great in low light so if I've not got a crew I can still make something with my mates. If I want to make something like a Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee, I can take that camera and shoot it. Here, we're adding £15-20,000 lenses with matt boxes and a little screen. But I can take all that off, get an adaptor put a Canon zoom on it and shoot at no cost."

The whole post-production experience has also been demystified in the digital era. Meadows complains about going to colour-grading labs in the nineties and being told the look he wanted for his early movies wasn't achievable.

"With film, you used to get your look through lighting," he says. "Now, you do that a bit, but you try to get everything quite flat – your black levels are low, your whites aren't peaking – so when you get to the grade, you master the look afterwards. That was an alien concept 15 years ago.

"The DoP was having to burn the look into the film really because the twats in the lab were no help. They'd just go, do you want it to look warmer or colder? And I'd say, it's not a fucking central heating advert!'. That was their basic range. I asked if they could add more contrast and they'd say, 'It's impossible, what are you talking about" Three or four years later everyone's doing it and those people lost their jobs."' (6)

But my memories have more meaning than that. As a kid growing up in Uttoxeter, Staffs, it was a time of great music, brilliant fashion and a vibrant youth culture that makes today's kids look dull and unimaginative by comparison. It was also a time of massive unrest when British people were still prepared to fight for the stuff they believed in. My new film, This Is England, is about all of these things.

Set in 1983, this is the first period film I have made. A great deal of it is based on my own childhood and I tried to recreate my memoirs of being an 11-year-old kid trying to fit in. It was a time when Uttoxeter, like the rest of the country, was awash with endless different youth tribes. There were new romantics, heavy rockers, smoothies, punks, goths, skins and mod revivalists who were into the Specials and 2 Tone. Then there were those pop culture kids who came into school wearing one green sock, one pink sock and some deely boppers on their head. People often looked daft, but were genuinely committed to their chosen denomination and would wear their identities on their sleeves with immense pride. In a town as small as Uttoxeter, though, there weren't enough people for each sub culture to fill their own parties or clubs, so most weekends everyone would turn up at the same village hall disco and end up fighting.

Like most 11-year-old kids who wore jumpers with animals on, I got bullied by the older kids at school. So I looked for my own tribe to join. It was the skinhead movement that enamoured me the most. I remember seeing 10 or 15 of them at the bus shelter on my way home from school one summer night and thinking they were the most fearsome thing I had ever seen. Even though I was terrified of them, I was instantly attracted to them. To be a part of most of the other factions you had to be a little rich kid. But to be a skinhead, all you needed was a pair of jeans, some work boots, a white shirt and a shaved head. You could be transformed from a twerp into a fearsome warrior in 15 minutes. Skins appealed to me because they were like soldiers: they wore their outfits like suits of armour and demanded respect. There were playground myths that surrounded them and especially their Dr Martens boots. It was feared that a single kick from a DM boot would kill you or at the very least give you brain damage. I can remember kids refusing to fight unless the skinhead agreed to remove his fearsome boots first.

My older sister was going out with a skinhead who took me under his wing and taught me about the roots of the whole culture. He was a nice bloke who bore no relation to the stereotypical racist yob that people now associate with that time. It was him that I based the character of Woody on in the film. I learned from him that skinheads had grown out of working class English lads working side by side with west Indians in factories and shipyards in the late-60s. The black lads would take the whites to blues parties where they were exposed to ska music for the first time. Soon, Jamaican artists like Desmond Dekker, the Upsetters and Toots And The Maytals were making a living out of songs aimed directly at English white kids. This was where the whole skinhead thing came from - it was inherently multicultural. But nowadays when I tell people that I used to be a skinhead, they think I'm saying I used to be racist. My film shows how rightwing politics started to creep into skinhead culture in the 1980s and change people's perception of it. This was a time when there were three and a half million people unemployed and we were involved in a pointless war in the Falklands. When people are frustrated and disillusioned that's when you get extremist groups moving in and trying to exploit the situation. That's what the National Front did in the early-80s. Skinheads had always taken pride in being working class and English so they were easy targets for the NF who said that their identities were under threat. They cultivated a real hatred of the Asian community. In the film, Combo represents the sort of charismatic leader the NF used to turn skinheads into violent street enforcers. Suddenly, all skinheads were branded the same way. But most of the real old skins who were into the music and the clothes went on to be scooter boys to separate themselves from the racism. I always wanted This Is England to tell the truth about skinheads.

As I started to make the film, other themes started to interest me. We had a relatively small budget so we couldn't afford to recreate every last detail of the Uttoxeter of 1983. Instead, I set the scene by using archive news footage at the start and end of the film. Going though footage of the Falklands war really made me think again about the whole thing. As kids, we thought it was like going into a World Cup campaign. It was exciting and we were cheering on our lads to go and do the Argies. But the scenes of soldiers' coffins shocked and appalled me.

In many ways the country was a mess. The miners' strike was massive - they were killing scabs by throwing paving slabs from bridges onto cars. You had all the protesters and unrest at Greenham Common. But remembering all of these things made me nostalgic for a time when people were ready to stand up and say something. People cared about where the country was going. As the 1980s ended we had the poll tax riots which turned out to be the end of an era. Afterwards, it was like the nation lost its backbone. People were bought off. They were given a little bit of land, the right to buy their council house and put a little satellite dish on the front of it. They became content and lost their will to rock the boat.

The big difference between now and the period in which my film is set is our level of isolation. In 1983, people still cared about society as a whole but now they'll keep their mouth shut as long as they've got the house, the job and the car they want. If you were a kid in 1983, you wouldn't have a PlayStation to sit indoors alone with. You got your entertainment from mixing with a variety of different people. While making the film, I realised that all of my fondest childhood memories surrounded human contact: mucking about with mates or going camping. In 2007, people put less emphasis on that sort of thing and more on planning their careers and their TV viewing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're working from nine to five then coming home to watch shows that your Sky box has recorded for you while you were out, you might as well be on a fucking drip.

This Is England is a snapshot of an era and a life that seems very dated now. It's about sticking up for mates and beliefs.' (9)

In this text, I will discuss Shane Meadows’ work as a director of British films, looking directly at how the past reflects the aesthetics and conventions within his films, how his cinema embodies the spirit of working classed identity and the social issues that are touched upon within his work and also why Meadows has become a popular film maker in contemporary Britain. The text will look at three of Meadows’ films in particular; TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass and This is England, and will analyse the relationship that each film has with one another and why he has constructed an autobiographical take upon each of these films.

Shane Meadows born in 1972 in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, grew up within a working classed community. Meadows teenaged years were in a time which saw great political change for many people in the 1980s, with the working classes seeing only negative outcome to a new British government. Industrial areas, most notably within the North of England, saw the threat of unemployment around every corner and the very essence of working classed life was destroyed by Thatcher’s government, in her quest for a post industrial, classless society. Meadows experiences as a youth and the political and social changes that took place within the 1980s have been established throughout Meadows’ works. I think my 1980s is a richer time to draw on than any other.” Meadows has said when questioned on the reasons why his own childhood experiences are prominently featured in many of his films.

As a British Realist film maker, Shane Meadows has distinctly borrowed from recognisable techniques and traditions from movements of the past. His notable influences are in the ‘New wave’ cinema of film makers such as Karl Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson from the 1960s and Mike Leigh and Ken Loach who have contributed to socio-realist cinema throughout the 1980s up until present day.

What this has meant for Meadows is that his films are able to create a recognisable identity for a nation that people can be able to associate with. By creating a bond to the cinema of New wave and Realist cinema, Meadows is able to critique our nation through the use of a popular and recognisable aesthetic which is associated with many British dramas.

The British New Wave cinema was the first step into creating a realist aesthetic in British narrative films. Through the inspiration of Documentary and the Italian neo-realist films that had come before, its film makers such as Karl Reisz and Lindsay Anderson were able to create a cinema which focused upon the intent of bringing social issues to the screen through realistic interpretations. Before they contributed to narrative cinema, Anderson and Reisz focused their talents upon Documentary, in which they created a movement, known at the time as the ‘Free Cinema’ movement. Their approach was opposed to the traditional expository mode which British documentary film maker John Grierson produced within his production company; GPO pictures. Grierson’s documentaries sought to tackle the social problems of the working class misrepresented in British cinema, by siding with them. The ‘voice of god’ narration and selective viewpoint was avoided within the ‘Free Cinema’ movement, providing a poetic approach that stripped their documentaries of voice-overs and the right wing political stand point of the Grierson styled documentary, became left wing, criticising the British political system by focusing on the ‘real’ working class, although, from a distance. I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and their importance.” Lindsay Anderson said of his commitment to presenting the working class within his works.

Although Grierson’s approach was highly criticised by the filmmakers of the free cinema movement, it was from Grierson himself who said that documentary was The Creative treatment of actuality.” This broadly used term could simply be interpreted as the way the film maker is able to create a display of artistic elements, from the construction of real people with real problems in real settings.

Implicit in the Free cinema formulation were two related conceptions of freedom: on the one hand, a freedom from commercial constraint and, on the other, a freedom to give vent to a personal or unusual, point of view of vision.”

The importance of the realist aesthetic within the Free cinema documentaries and the ‘New wave’ narrative film was to make it clear that the artist was at the centre of the work. This did not necessarily mean that he was involved within the film itself, but the style of the film, ideologies and messages were that the film maker was trying to get across.

The other importance was the ability to create the feeling of something new, to transform the real from Meer observation but to create a poetry which was able to work upon more than one level, and it was through the representation of a group of outsiders (the working class) that the film makers were able to do this.

Films such as The Loneliness of the Long distance runner, A taste of Honey, A Sporting Life and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, shifted the emphasis from middle class idealistic families, to a focus upon the youth living and working within industrial cities, situated in the Northern areas of England.
The late 1950s/early 1960s became the first time since the Second World War that workers started to benefit from decent salaries and some, an almost disposable income. The youth in particular were able to separate themselves from their work lives and the authority figures that held a grasp over them, enabling them to spend their wages on the consummation of the latest in fashionable products. This is also true of ‘New Wave’ films, which focused less on the importance of work within the lives of the characters but on their leisurely activities. The decline in the working class traditions and the rise of the working classed youth became notable. They were becoming defined not by what they produce but of what they consume and this was an indicator of the times.

When looking at Saturday night Sunday morning by Karl Reisz, the main protagonist, Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) may work within the confines of a factory, but when his working is shown, it is briefly and only to underline the important images or to support the leisurely aspect of his life. E.G. when he is finishing work. By wasting his money upon a sex, drugs and almost rock and roll lifestyle he is separating himself from the authority figures that keep him in his place during his working hours. It’s not a unity of a working class that can be seen within this film or many of the New wave films of the 1960s, it is very much about issues of one person in particular, in the case of Saturday night, Sunday Morning, it is Arthur.

Writer John Hill stated that Despite the ostensive commitment to represent the working class, the British ‘New Wave’, through their adoption of conventional narrativity and realism, tend to have the opposing effect, that is, the creation of an accentuated individualism.” The emphasis on the individual in this working class aesthetic of the New wave films may come down to the absence of work as a dominant presence. Instead it seems that the importance of working class life, as a youth, is separating themselves from the authority figures and dominant forces of work and instead making leisure and the way in which the characters separate themselves from work in their free time.

In Meadows work, there is a felt presence of the ‘New wave’ films throughout his work

The focus upon just one main protagonist and their personal struggle rather than the united struggle of the working class is that it is extremely difficult to represent political problems within narrative film, without a need to create a bond to the personal effects that the political has upon the working class within realist cinema.

But what exactly did the filmmakers do to try and create a believable and purposeful reality, and at once avoid the idealistic and theatrical approach that the Traditional Hollywood films employed?

The main focus of reality in these ‘New Wave’ films is by

Meadows first feature film TwentyFourSeven was released in 1997. A resurgence in British Realism lead to a shift in focus for many of the films released within the 1990s. Whereas the films of the ‘New Wave’ in the ’60s, focused upon the employed youth’s personal struggle with working classed life and the hedonistic, anti-establishment attitude they portrayed in their leisurely pursuits and the 80s saw reactions against the Thatcher’s government’s destruction of traditional working classed values and perceptions, the 90s took upon a different perspective, with Britain very much a post industrial nation, class now determined not what they made and who they were as a unified work force, but instead was now determined by what they consumed. This perspective now shifted upon the youth of today, from pre pubescent Children to teenagers growing up on rough, poverty stricken council estates. Unemployment has left the youth in the same position and status.

Samantha Lay stated that Dramas focus more tightly on family relationships and partnerships. Poverty, unemployment and social exclusion are not the driving forces of their narratives, but are merely signalled as contributory factors to family strife, so that it is the working class family that has failed, not the state or capitalist society.”

British Realist films focus upon the effect that politics have had upon the class system, specifically the working class who’s inevitable decline since the 1950s has lead to an alienation of masculine identity and the emphasis as class as a unification.

Meadows films are about the alienation of family life and the journey of finding a place to really belong. The perspective of a child or in the case of Twenty Four Seven; Young Adults, gives Meadow a chance to see the Working Class from a different perspective.

What Meadows’ films do which many mainstream British films do not do is to question the stereotypical view of the average British person, by keeping to a low budget, Meadows’ keeps the focus upon the identities within his own regional upbringing.

Unemployment plays a big role within the films of the British realist aesthetic that were made within the 1980s up until our contemporary time. Children and the youth are not affected in the same in which the adults are but their perspective is of the upmost importance. The period aspect to this is England, Twenty Four Seven and A Room for Romeo Brass gives you an aspect of political change.

Within the 90s and the 2000s working class focused films created a way of escaping from the reality of the situation. Characters were able to find success from the economic situations that have dragged them down, most notably through entertainment. This can be seen within films such as Billy Elliot, Brassed off, The Full Monty and to an extent Trainspotting. Each of these films proved popular to the British movie going audience and tried showing how the working class could develop and escape from the working class life that had been dragging them down.
Meadows approach, although not entirely pessimistic is about the positive which comes out of the negative situations, or the defeat of people.

Unstable protagonists at the start of each three films, struggle with the uneven situations that their parents are entangled within, often dragging the children down with them. It is this alienation from family life which causes distress and change from these characters. Their questionable actions often ending in violence leads to the chance meetings in which potential father figures, genuinely interested in the emotional and physical state of the these characters help the characters from emotional unrest.

In This is England, Shaun’s violent playground fight is caused from the mention of his Dad’s death. His walk home from school leads to the meeting of a Skinhead gang, most notably Woody who notes Shaun’s unhappy presence. His happy go lucky attitude and genuine care for Shaun makes him feel wanted in a place where he’s alienated not only from family life but from being part of a sub culture which will accept him for who he is, which is evident from the mocking attitude of some of Woody’s friends who are not as caring as Woody’s father attitude to the situation is.

In A Room for Romeo Brass, the fight between Romeo and the two boys leads to the rescue from Morell who is alerted from nearby. Again, the importance of chance turns a violent hateful act, into one with positive outcomes, in which children/teenagers are brought into the world of the adult. The Subculture is what draws the children into an adult’s world. Leisure drives them from the woes of family life and from the authority figures which are bringing them down.
The masculine father figures within Meadows’ films help to refocus the output of the violence of the youth that they have taken under their wing. The troubled teenagers caught in violent episodes, find new ways in which to focus their negative energies. This frustration for life in post industrial estates, in which domestic problems of parents causes great angst often leads to violence. By refocusing these ill thoughts and actions through healthy attitudes, the Father figure is able to guide the youth away from everything that is holding them back. Woody’s optimistic and peaceful father figure for fatherless tearaway Shaun in This is England, enables his alienation from a social perspective to be reinstated into a group in which he belongs. The anger and frustration of these Skinhead youths does not lead to the targeting of people, but of decrepit, rundown buildings on council estates. (13)

The Virtues features Meadows’ trademark mix of humanity, revenge, tragedy and bittersweet humour familiar from 2004 crime thriller Dead Man’s Shoes and four series of This is England, the Bafta-winning study of British subculture. But it also represents something of a departure for Meadows.

“This is clearly authored by Shane which means it has a huge heart, incredibly powerful performances and that mix of humour he finds in characters and situations, but this is very much a focus on one man rather than an ensemble piece,” Herbert explains.

Stephen Graham (who played Combo in This is England and also features in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman) is Joseph, a moral yet troubled man with repressed memories who travels to Ireland to confront demons from a childhood spent in the care system. Helen Behan (also from This Is England), plays Anna, the sister Joseph hasn’t seen since they were separated as children. Frank Laverty (Michael Collins) is her husband.

“It’s a story that Shane has wanted to tell for a while even before This is England began. It’s all about timing. Is there the right actor and right time to tell this story.”

With regular writing partner Jack Thorne, Meadows wrote a ‘scriptment’ for all four episodes but then treated it as a jumping off point open to exploration with the actors.

“The script was a blueprint which was workshopped and changed in rehearsals with the actors,” Herbert explains.

What was unusual is that this process continued right through filming, with the production often stopping for hours, a few days and even three weeks at one point, in order for Meadows to work through a scene with the actors.

“Shane has to have a truth to everything he films and we both felt that this time around we’d break the conventions of the shoot and reach for that truth a different way.

“Normally for an hour-long drama you’d allot two weeks to shoot it and you block all the scenes together for each location since that’s the intensive and expensive bit of the whole production. What tends to happen is that even if a scene is not quite working you fall under pressure to keep to schedule because you might only have the actors for a certain amount of time. With the way Shane wanted to work we needed to break that structure.”

They set up camp in a disused former school in Sheffield, not far from Warp Films’ offices. It was a space to which the actors could return and rehearse at any time.

Editor Matthew Gray (The Stone Roses: Made of Stone) set up his Avid in the same building so that Meadows could quickly see how things were progressing in the edit.

“It’s not like it was the expense of being in the middle of Soho,” Herbert says. “The rent was peanuts. It was perfect to give Shane the creative space to take a break from filming if he needed.”

Commissioning broadcaster Channel 4 was on side with this based on its previous relationship with Meadows including This Is England. “They trusted Shane and knew that we’d deliver on budget and schedule.”

It helped that The Virtues is a contemporary drama. Trying to do this with period sets which may require street dressing or props hired for only limited windows would have been impractical.

Instead of the classic ten weeks preparation, the show had the luxury of five months. Only when they were ready to shoot were technical crew brought onboard.

“Sometimes we stopped for a few hours and cracked it before going to shoot it, other times we had weeks of break. That was stressful for myself and the production team but everyone signed up to the process. I talked with the crew, many of whom we’ve worked with before, and explained how we were going to work from day one and gave them a deal that encapsulated the whole process.”

Scenes were lengthened, shortened, new dialogue was written, character storylines extended and until the start of episode four they had no conclusion to the drama.

Director of photography Nick Gillespie (camera assist or b-camera op on Kill List, Sightseers and Stan and Ollie) describes the process as “very organic – a really freeing way to work to tell the story” adding that the director’s approach is like “documenting drama.”

He explains, “From my point of view I was trying to be a little bit invisible, to let the actor’s performance dictate where the camera should be. Rather than locking down focus or blocking a series of shots I wanted to remain flexible to find the moments Shane was looking for.”

To do this Gillespie used multiple cameras, sometimes up to seven shooting simultaneously “to give everyone an angle”.

A and B cameras were handheld ARRI Alexa Minis fitted with lightweight ARRI Alura zooms to which he added locked-off cameras like Sony AS7s with Zeiss fixed speed glass.

A series of flashbacks to the 1980s which pepper the narrative were filmed on VHS tape as a cost-effective alternative to 16mm.

“I had used a Panasonic video recorder when I was a kid so when Shane came to the set with one I wasn’t scared to use it,” Gillespie says. “It’s just a point and shoot with old vintage zooms but it has a nice look to it. We attached a mobile phone to the recorder so we could monitor what it was shooting from a rough point of view and just in case the VHS didn’t work.”

The taped material was upscaled to HD, the mixed camera formats matched and the grade performed at Dirty Looks, supervised by Meadows.

Most interiors were shot in Sheffield and Chesterfield with location work in Belfast, Birkenhead and the Liverpool to Belfast ferry. Shooting was chronological in order to maintain flexibility with changing storylines.

Although the process is in similar to the actor-led creation of much of director Mike Leigh’s work, the big difference here was the starting point of a complete script.

“We had a really solid basis for a story and rounded characters,” Herbert says. “Even for the secondary characters he has developed full backstories. When the actors came in they’d take this on board but bring their own personality and interpretation of the character with them which is exactly what Shane wanted to develop. Shane and Jack had that worked out but if something better came along they had the freedom to change it.

“You can’t go off-piste in this way unless you’ve nailed the basics,” he adds. “Shane doesn’t jump into a production unless he hundred percent believes in it.”

“I always wanted to make a film where people didn’t talk,” he says. “I’d watch some European films and it would be just people ambling along in a car – 15, 20 minutes where no one would speak and it would be completely compelling. And I could never do it.”

With The Virtues, he has. Especially during the first and second episodes, there is a real sense of things unsaid. This is unusual in Meadows’s work, where characters tend to speak quickly and truthfully, and the violence, when it comes, is unexpected. In The Virtues, you can feel repressed pain, sense it leaking out and driving the action, even though the plot is unclear for quite some time. This is mostly due to an immense performance from Graham, who is transformed, far from the character he’s played before for Meadows. (15)