Western - Django unchained

Django unchained is properly the most modern form of the western genre yet has a lot of the traits of a classic Western taking elements such as the fast zoom in shots which particularly interest me as watching this 2012 film, these elements of the cinematography stand out as its something that we no longer see within films.

Other features of the film that targets it as a western includes the use of sound, with the gun shots and non-diegetic stereotypical western soundtracks. Along with the symbolic sound representing a western, I also noticed that most westerns are set in a distant past period, with Django Unchained picking up on the cowboy hats and guns, along with the history of black slavery with the movie being set in 1858.

Leonardo Dicaprio plays the bad guy, Calvin Candie, in which in preparing for this role, Jamie Foxx quoted on The Ellen DeGeneres show that Dicaprio would ignore Foxx when on set to get into his nasty racist character.




I think that Quentin Tarantino was the perfect director to bring back the Westerns into modern day cinema, as he thinks through every shot with clarity and metaphoric meanings. For example, he makes blood look beautiful in his cinematography such as when the man in the fields is shot and the white roses get splattered in bring red blood, portraying a clean setting turning bad within a few seconds. He has also done this in Kill Bill with the blood spraying from the chopped off head like a water fountain.

This shows that Tarantino has experience from the blood and clever fight scenes needed for a good western. This picture shows the sized room used for the complex shooting scene which is similar to he highly complex fight scene in Kill Bill.