"Who can attain to anything great if he does not feel in himself the
force and will to inflict great pain? The ability to suffer is a small
matter: in that line, weak women and even slaves often attain
masterliness. But not to perish from internal distress and doubt when
one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of it — that is great,
that belongs to greatness." Nietzsche: The Gay Science
"Moreover, Africans faced punishments designed not to only correct
but also to degrade and humiliate. William Byrd, Virginia planter and a
sophisticated colonial gentleman, noted, without embarrassment, in his
diary how he forced a slave bed-wetter to drink a “pint of piss”The Routledge History Of Slavery
It is nearly impossible to discuss Django Unchained without discussing Richard Wagner's Ring cycle of dramas and Siegfried in particular. How could it not be when both Tarantino and Christoph Waltz
have discussed the influence of Wagner's work on Tarantino's newest
movie - especially so in the German media. Add to this that Django is
searching for his wife Broomhilde (Brunnhilde) and the clear links
between certain characters and those found in Wagner's dramas. However,
like everything that Tarintino "steals" from, he manipulates them for
his own purposes - while often doing little more than nodding at the
original. And I don't just mean the written narrative here but all of
the narrative structures at a film makers disposable: sound, music,
dialogue, mise-en-scene, titles, costumes, framing, etc. Indeed, one
feels sometimes that perhaps this alteration of the original source
allows him to add a further narrative message - even if one needs to be
familiar with the source to see how he does this and perhaps what he he
might be trying to say. This would be no different in the manner that he
adapts Wagner's work then he does that of the other two main pieces of
source material Sergio Corbucci's original Django and Pietro Francisci's
Hercules Unchained. However, I think that Tarantino's distortion of
Wagner's Siegfried (Django) is so important in this movie that it needs
far more attention than has been provided by those perhaps less familiar
with the source. But don't worry, we will keep things simple. Don't I always?
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Reminiscencia
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Reminiscencia is a performance piece created during lockdown by Chilean
playwright Malicho Vaca Valenzuela. Valanzuela is the sole live performer
and from...
14 hours ago