Django Unchained Textual Analysis

2. DJANGO UNCHANGED

Mise en Scene

It sets the scene of the Old West with big skies, dusty trails, a gunfight on Main St, an anti-hero in a black hat, blended with the lush greenery of the Deep South, white plantation mansions, enslaved men and women.  In terms of narrative, the plot is linear and shown from only one point of view.

Django Unchained is an ironic mix of humour and violence that steadies you between the horrific and the comical, so that your senses are neither overwhelmed by the film’s violence nor lulled into denial of the seriousness of the subject matter, by its humor.  The costuming and the set design and on-location shooting are a wonderful salute to spaghetti westerns.

The movie revolves around a black slave, Django, who gets bought and freed by a German bounty hunter in order to assist him in identifying some wanted men. Django becomes a bounty hunter himself with the support of the “civilized” and open- minded Dr. Schultz, while at the same time he makes plans to rescue his wife, who is a slave too working in Candyland, Candie’s plantation.

Django’s evolution throughout the film is a core theme of the plot. At the beginning he is a slave wearing just a rag, which he takes off, in a rather symbolic way, as soon as Dr. Schultz buys him. Scared he enters a saloon and tastes his first beer not able to realise what freedom means. After Dr. Schultz’s encouragement his first decision as a free man is to choose his own clothes. He dresses up like a character from a comedy, something he will change only after his first killings as an assistant bounty hunter.

In a great many ways the movie is a clear homage to the to the Sam Peckinpah style of western, with all the over-the-top blood and revisionism that comes with it. Tarantino nods to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles as much as he does serious westerns by the likes of Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) and Sergio Corbucci (Django).

Editing

Panoramic long shots combined with extreme close ups on the characters’ faces, memorable prose, the beautiful landscapes, playing with candlelight, and silhouettes. The shots of Django and Dr. Shultz trekking through big sky country in the winter are stunningly beautiful.

Camera Angles and Movement

Tarantino use a widescreen aspect ratio to shoot the film in the style of Italian Spaghetti Western directors, like Argento, to display the vastness of the American West and the theme of being able to make anything of yourself from small beginnings.  He uses many zoom shot sequences and many important night sequences, which often unfold in rural area settings of the South.  While the use of the zoom may have been aesthetic, it was also used as a practical element, a way of providing a number of setups from one camera angle. This became part of the visual feel for us on Django Unchained.

Sound

Tarantino is a master of diegetic music, the anachronistic soundtrack uses samples from James Brown, 2Pac, Rick Ross, Ennio Morricone and John Legend, songs that the characters can hear because they exist in the world of the film. Many of the songs have a dusty, vintage feel, utilizing the jangling guitars and rousing orchestral swells.  Both past and future intermingle no matter the century in which the story's is set in, with the music doing well to set an overall tense mood throughout the movie.  The film is propelled forward through Morricone’s score.  With whistle and slow-motion tumbleweed swagger, and featuring a few famous pieces of western classical music such as Beethoven's “Für Elise” and “Dies irae” from Verdi's Requiem.