Tag Archives: quentin tarantino

Everyone's a Critic, Thoughts

W2 exercise: referentiality and Baby Driver

Last week we pitched a 300-word critical review, to be written over the weekend and then workshopped in class. This is mine.

No film exists in a vacuum. All but the most experimental filmmakers weave a fabric of archetypes, narrative patterns and cultural touchstones into something that is — hopefully — new. The internet has opened up entire worlds of art for young practitioners to draw from in their own work, from vintage rock albums and arcane literature to obscure films that previous generations of artists could have enjoyed only rarely at repertory cinemas. As a result, we live in a time where there is no single dominant vector of influence, and never before has mass culture been so vast and varied in its sources of inspiration.

Baby Driver director Edgar Wright has made a career of invoking pop cultural history in his work, from Spaced’s litany of direct visual references to cinema history, to Scott Pilgrim vs The World aping the aesthetic of video games, to the “Three Flavours” trilogy’s collage of zombie/cop/sci-fi tropes. It’s as if Wright is attempting to personify Quentin Tarantino’s famous quip that “when people ask me if I went to film school I tell them no, I went to films.”

With Baby Driver, Wright has distilled referentiality into an art form of its own, where any deeper symbolic meaning is cast aside in favour of allusions, references, cameos and easter eggs. For audiences, the experience is a two-hour long game of spot-the-reference as much as it is anything else, and in this way the film is tailor-made for a generation of viewers raised with the history of human culture mere clicks away.

Wright is careful to ensure that the film is a high-octane thrill ride no matter how familiar the viewer is with the history of cinema, but there is a strange pleasure to be found in recognising the main character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), as a sort of millennial echo of Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver (whose director, Walter Hill, has a voice cameo in Baby Driver), or noting that the construction of scenes in which Doc (Kevin Spacey) briefs his criminal underlings on the plans for their next job, are reminiscent of another heist-gone-wrong film: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

By under-serving deeper meaning and symbolism, Baby Driver opens itself up to the accusations that it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. But when the sound and fury is this enjoyable, does it matter?

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Media 1, Readings

Learning by doing

If you had to teach someone to play guitar, would you just hand them a book on the history of guitar music and say “off you go”, without letting them ever actually touch an instrument?

It seems obvious and self-evident that if you’re attempting to teach someone a practical skill (such as media production) that you would teach them by doing, by actually using that practical skill, rather than by relying solely on theory and history. This is the main idea in this week’s reading, a pair of blog posts and a video by academic David Gauntlett.

Gauntlett argues that the traditional backwards-looking mode of studying media – characterised by study of institutions, productions, audiences, and texts – is, today, essentially useless and not at all reflective of the current media landscape. There are two “peaks” of activity that Gauntlett describes as coming along with the rise of DIY, lo-fi media production, one positive and one negative:

  1. Optimistic – people empowered through technology to make media, for marginalised voices to be heard, democratisation of media production and consumption, etc.
  2. Pessimistic – exploitation and capitalism, Big Data, government and private surveillance, etc.

But the part of Gauntlett’s posts that most resonated with me is that media studies is a field particularly suited to learning by doing. Theory and history are valuable, but what’s really going to get you somewhere is to just start making things. This ties into our readings from a previous week about the passion trap, and how important dedicated practise is, which I discuss more in the blog post Passion.

It also ties into the ideas of the filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, neither of whom ever went to a formal film school to learn their craft but who are now universally regarded as masters of their form. Though they each clearly had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the foundations of cinema to begin with (gained through years of watching thousands and thousands of films), in interviews they both say that what really helped get their careers as filmmakers off the ground was to simply start making films.

As the directors of two of the all-time greatest debut feature films in American cinema history (Reservoir Dogs and Hard Eight, respectively), and possessors of immense natural talent, they are surely exceptional examples of this theory and therefore may not necessarily be representative. I definitely wouldn’t assume that their success is easily replicable. But their success also proves that what makes someone a good maker is not necessarily theoretical knowledge.

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