Quentin Tarantino Supercuts Explore the Director’s Stylized Use of Sound, Close Ups & Cars in His Films

It’s not sur­pris­ing per­haps that we are in a film nerd super­cut gold­en age. After all, all film stu­dents have access to video edit­ing soft­ware, almost all movies are avail­able dig­i­tal­ly, and web­sites, like this one, are per­pet­u­al­ly hun­gry for new con­tent. Great super­cuts reveal some­thing new or unno­ticed about a great direc­tor, like how Yasu­jiro Ozu uses hall­ways or Kubrick favors one-point per­spec­tive. Edi­tor Jacob T. Swin­ney, who won the inter­net last month with his video “First and Final Frames,” just released the third out of a promised four-part super­cut on Quentin Taran­ti­no.

The direc­tor of Pulp Fic­tion and Death Proof is, of course, known for his dia­logue – razor-sharp, obscen­i­ty-laden repar­tee crammed with ref­er­ences to pop cul­ture or obscure movies. What is a Taran­ti­no movie with­out a rant about the true mean­ing of “Like a Vir­gin,” say, or a lengthy dis­course on the dif­fer­ence between McDonald’s menus in Amer­i­can and in Europe? Swin­ney strips away all that dia­logue to explore some of the recur­ring visu­al and audi­al motifs that lard Tarantino’s films. What you real­ize after watch­ing these is just how styl­ized his movies are. Taran­ti­no loves expres­sion­is­tic sound effects, flashy insert shots, gen­er­al­ly aping the look and feel of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like Ser­gio Leone or King Hu. You can watch the first film above and the next two below.

The first film called “Hear­ing Taran­ti­no” is about all the pun­gent, styl­ized sounds the QT has used. As you can imag­ine, there are lots of gur­gling of blood and clank­ing of swords. What you might not have noticed is how many car­toony whoosh­es and zings he has fold­ed into the sound mix.

The sec­ond vid, “Tarantino’s Extreme Close Ups,” shows lots of eyes bear­ing expres­sions some­where along the ter­ri­fied-pissed off spec­trum.

And the third piece, “Taran­ti­no: Dri­ving Shots,” shows just how much of his movies take place in cars.

The fourth film has yet to come out, but I hope it’s on Tarantino’s not-at-all creepy obses­sion with women’s feet. You can prob­a­bly fill a cou­ple min­utes just on Uma Thur­man’s alone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Tells You About The Actors & Direc­tors Who Pro­vid­ed the Inspi­ra­tion for “Reser­voir Dogs”

Watch Free Online My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.