Cinema told by Quentin Tarantino, in his first book

Instructions for raising a well-behaved child who will do great things. Take him to the cinema as a child, choosing films that are not suitable for his age. At eight or nine, there were on the bill: “Carnal knowledge”, “Sunday cursed Sunday”, “A call for Inspector Klute”, “MASH”, “The godfather”. He doesn’t understand everything, but to be with the big boys he has to respect two rules. First, don’t bother. Second, do not ask stupid questions during the screening (all questions are, the darkness of the room unlike the sofa at home requires a certain respect).

The dark spots became clearer at the release, for example the still frame in the ending of “Butch Cassidy”, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman. “What happened?” Asks the boy. “They are dead,” replies the mother. “How do you know?”, Insists the young spectator, not yet familiar with shortcuts: “I know because I know”. “They should have shown it,” concludes the boy, who only changed his mind after years. But he still remembers the joy of observing adults, in the evening, in their natural habitat.

“Little Q Watching Big Movies” opens “Cinema Speculation”, first book on cinema signed by Quentin Tarantino. After the impromptu interventions that fans know. At the Venice Film Festival in 2004 he was an enthusiastic spectator and commentator of the retrospective on Italian B-movies. All of his films are reinterpretations of the history of cinema: the Blaxploitation in “Jackie Brown”, the western in “Django Unchained” or in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, which functions as a double show. The film with Leonardo DiCaprio and his stunt-man Brad Pitt, the novel that tells the opinions of a spectator bold enough to see films with subtitles, overturning judgments – “the sad suckers Jules and Jim, it would have been better if the girl were died immediately drowned “.

“Cinema Speculation” was released on November 1st by Harper Collinslaunched with a promotional tour that started yesterday from Los Angeles (La Nave di Teseo will publish the Italian edition next year). He has everything we can expect from a Quentin Tarantino book on cinema, and more. Just don’t be fooled by the index, which goes from “Bullit” (1968) to “A quiet weekend of fear”, to “Taxi Driver”. With a curious thought experiment, the “speculation” of the title: “What would ‘Taxi Driver’ have been like if Brian De Palma had directed it instead of Martin Scorsese?” (it was De Palma who first read Paul Schrader’s script; he found it not very commercial and diverted it to “Marty”).

They are not monographs, they are pieces of cinema history told with a passion that makes Quentin Tarantino one of the most overwhelming directors around. He also forgives the damage done to the new – but not so much – generations convinced that he was the one who invented cinema. If they read “Cinema Speculation” (having so far carefully avoided any history of cinema) they would understand that not even the brilliant Tarantino is born out of nothing, let alone those who are talented are scarce.

The chapter dedicated to “Daisy Miller” – the film by Peter Bogdanovich based on a short story by Henry James – tells the moment when many directors adapted literary works, “Away from the Madding Crowd” by Thomas Hardy or “Enemies: a story of love ”by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In the expert hands of Bogdanovich, the story of the heiress Daisy Miller visiting the beauties and ruins of Rome has the rhythm of the comedies of Howard Hawks: jokes in bursts, as in “Men prefer blondes” or “Susanna!”. This is the book’s only flaw: each page invites you to stop and see at least a couple of films.