A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR

Like Stauffer, Rentschler follows Rosenstone’s historiographical thinking. But while Stauffer seems entirely on board with Tarantino’s subversion of the past, Rentschler is critical of certain aspects of the director’s handling of his source material. Rentschler’s tome “The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife” is the principal book that Tarantino utilized to create his narrative about propaganda minister Joseph Goebbel’s films and to create a pastiche of a Nazi film, which the party’s leaders are watching when they are killed.

For the most part, Rentschler lauds Tarantino’s usage of the book. “I think he learned some things factually, particularly that Goebbels wasn’t purely an ideologue and was in some ways a huge cinephile who looked to Hollywood,” Rentschler says. When it came to creating his imagined Nazi film, however, Tarantino opted more for an exaggeratory tone. “The point in my book is that the films that don’t seem full of poison are those which are most ideologically insidious––the notion of ‘the spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down,’” says Rentschler.  

The bluntly violent and anti-semitic film-within-a-film that Tarantino created, then, is less subtle and affecting than the films that were actually being released. “[The film-within-a-film] is very obvious, very heavy-handed, and very ideological,” says Rentschler. “It’s actually not the kind of film that Goebbels would have made.”

Still, despite his complaint, Rentschler appreciates Tarantino and says he has even internalized a friend’s conspiracy theory about “Inglorious Basterds: “[My friend] said, ‘It’s curious that the Michael Fassbender character in the film is...a specialist in Nazi cinema who has also written a book on director G.W. Pabst.’ If I really wanted to flatter myself I could assume that it was some sort of inscription of my presence, but I’m not willing to go that far.”

STYLE WATCH

University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. builds on Stauffer and Rentschler’s concept of historiographical truth to condemn any scholars who look to censor artistic voices. “I want artists, black and white, to have full creative license in their interpretation of black history and black reality—that’s the only way we can get at its complex truth,” he says. “‘Django’ is just as true to the black experience as ‘12 Years a Slave.’” Gates, who consulted on the latter film while engaging Tarantino in a widely read interview series about “Django Unchained,” believes that stylizing African-American history is the only way to keep the public engaged with its lessons. “It would be boring if the only way to represent the black experience would be through a one-to-one relationship with history.”

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With “12 Years a Slave,” however, Gates did his best to honor the narrative that Solomon Northup provided in his own written account of his kidnapping by con men and the sufferings he endured at the hand of mercurial cotton planter Edwin Epps. “When you have an autobiography, the criteria are different,” Gates says. After a long phone conversation with Steve McQueen, the film’s director, Gates agreed to look over the script and help make McQueen’s representation of Northup’s life as accurate as possible.

Gates says that he directed particular effort toward trying to uncover the fate of Northup after his emancipation. To this day, Northup’s unsuccessful prosecution of his kidnappers and the circumstances of his death 10 years after his freeing are shrouded in mystery. “I did a lot of research to get the state-of-the-art scholarship about Northup’s last years and wrote the final words on the screen at the end of the film, which they used verbatim. I was very flattered by that,” says Gates. For Gates and McQueen, free communication seems to have led directly into mutual admiration and effective collaboration.  

A TRUE COLLABORATION

While Stauffer and Rentschler had mostly positive interaction with Tarantino, neither has kept up communication with the director or ever actually met him––Stauffer even declined an invitation to go to the set, citing his disillusioned feelings toward celebrity and Hollywood. Gates and McQueen are a different story. “Steve McQueen has always been a hero of mine…. I know many of the black intellectuals on the English scene,” Gates says. “I’d never met him before, so the initial phone call was very exciting.”

In addition to attending the premiere of the film at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, where he discussed the film with the cast and crew at length, Gates has kept up communication with McQueen and plans on honoring him with the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, presented to luminaries who work for African-American rights and visibility, at the second annual Hutchins Center Honors on Sept. 30. The closeness and mutual admiration that have developed between the duo showcase more clearly than anything else I encountered the potential for scholars and filmmakers to work in tandem. Far from engaging in a historiographic tug-of-war, McQueen and Gates seem to be working in parallel.

BIG BUSINESS

The primary concerns of scholars and filmmakers during the consultation process are the placement of appropriate historical details and the necessity of appealing to a broad audience. However, the opinions of a third party also figure into the equation. David Franzoni, writer of “Amistad” and “Gladiator,” thinks that film executives play just as large of a role as scholars in determining the vision of the past that a film presents. Franzoni, who worked with Classics professor Kathleen M. Coleman on “Gladiator” and several other projects, believes that the roles of scholars and executives on films are diametrically opposed.