Inglourious Basterds - Language Expert Breaks Down Pub Scene

hello so this video is sponsored by babble which is an app that allows you to learn a foreign language quickly and easily you can use the website you can use the app and if you sign up for 3 months you can get extra 3 months for free you can find out more about that at the end of the video but they approached me and asked me to make a video about language and because I'm me I've made it about film obviously so today I'm gonna be talking about the pub scene from inglourious basterds I want to look at how it uses language to build suspense and I've even got one of babbles language experts to help me say hello to Ted my name is ted mentally I'm from Wisconsin in the United States but and you're an language expert I am if you haven't seen it go watch it but all you really need to know is that Michael Fassbender is portraying an englishman posing as a german soldier he goes to a pub to meet an informant only to discover that the pub is full of nazis hate when that happens Tarantino is a master of film language and he uses it the way that you would with any language to communicate he's using everything in the frame everything you're seeing everything you're hearing to convey emotion and information this scene is from a technical perspective near perfect the shots are efficient and economic sometimes instead of using separate shots he'll convey multiple things in one shot this stuff sounds simple but directors don't really do it often enough he makes sure that you understand the geography and that's important because if you don't have to figure out where people are and what's going on you can immediately invest emotionally into the scene and what emotion does he want you to feel and one who said that I thought I was alone see now I feel tense obviously the premise of this scene is inherently tense but film language is used in a variety of ways to build and sustain that tension for a solid 20 minutes I could go on all day about film language but here's a few examples this shot begins with Fassbender and his informant bridget von hammersmark having a secret conversation but develops onto this german soldier when he interrupts them but look at this framing her shoulder is taking up most of the frame it looks like it was never intended to be a shot of this man and it makes us feel like he's intruding on the conversation sound design - plays a huge part the first half of the scene is quite jovial this laughter and chatter and music playing in the background but that all stops when the antagonist is introduced look at the lighting when we're introduced to the antagonist he's sitting alone in the corner in the shadows it just makes me nervous he's also shot in profiles we can't see his whole face he's mysterious he makes us feel uneasy even the blocking of a scene can build suspense and inform character when he stands and enters the scene he circles the room almost like an animal stalking its prey while the camera mirrors his movement until it's and he discover Fassbender the object of his attention this shot establishes the power dynamic between the two characters and this shot reinforces it like I say it seems like really simple stuff especially when you break it down but it's really effective the scene develops when this Nazi soldier begins to interrogate Michael Fassbender's character for his strange German accent and that brings in the main source of detention in the scene language spoken human language this film was targeted predominantly at an english-speaking audience which means that most people that have watched it like me don't speak German so even though that we know the fast Mendes character is giving himself away we don't know exactly how he's doing it we don't understand the nuances of the German accent but somebody who speaks German would they would know what he's doing wrong which brings me back to Ted I'm definitely not like a native level German speaker by any means but yeah you can definitely hear some artifacts of English pronunciation when he's speaking for example one sound that's often pretty hard for English speakers to make in German is the soft CH sound it kind of sounds like a like if you imagine like a cat kissing you know like like in the word each or niched but when Michael Fassbender says it he does pretty well most of the time but sometimes it comes out sounding a little bit like it seemed Nick um next vite a ballistic at nicosia that's one thing that could give him away but in certain regional dialects for example here in Berlin they say ich they don't say ich really but he doesn't claim that he's from Berlin so a couple other things is our sounds now they don't sound like like an English R but they also don't sound so much like a German are what it sounds like is an English person giving their best go at doing the German are up a few huh in German there's really only one L sound call that in English a light L and that's for example when you say the word light you have that L that's at the front of your mouth but in English we also have what's called a dark L it's performed more eight towards the back of the mouth and in German they don't have this dark L sound so when michael fassbender says something for example like Ober Weber oppa faire Weber you can hear the dark L and how is it supposed to sound oberfeld V better and he says uber uber third paper but ultimately it's not his ability to speak German that gives himself away it's a very small cultural difference which I was happy to find out is a very real thing this is a real thing because they they start counting with their thumb but every German person I've ever talked to is like why would you start coming with your index finger and what's so brilliant about that moment is that it plays out like a twist we know that something went wrong but we don't find out exactly what went wrong until the next scene that's the German see and that might be the thing I find most interesting about all this is how the scene changes if you do speak German I thought about it in in two different ways I thought that in one sense it can make that scene more tense because you can maybe hear these small mistakes he's making but on the other hand they could take some of the attention out of the scene it could kind of take that climax and makes it less surprising yeah that he does figure it out because if I didn't hear those mistakes I'm not even a native German speaker and I can hear them then this accent fiend can hear them as well so I could see it going either way but I tend to lean towards the fact that it would take a bit of the tension or surprise out of the scene although you would get a little bit of that like snarky what do you think I'm especially interested to hear your thoughts if you do speak German is there anything we didn't pick up on please let me know in the comments below and are there any other films you can think of where the experience really changes when you know multiple languages thank you for watching I hope you've enjoyed and now a message from our sponsor Babel can help you learn a new language for self-development travel family or just for summit to do you know we all need hobbies the lessons provide relevant vocabulary so you can have proper conversations and speak a language the way that you've always wanted to there's a team of language experts to help you and over a hundred linguists creating the courses and lessons only take about 15 minutes so in spending more time on social media I could be learning a new language you know instead of having fights with middle-aged men on Twitter about DC movies my personal favorite lessons are the ones would they test my pronunciation because they do not let you move on until you get it right and it makes you feel like you're really getting to know the language bubble is available on desktop Android and iOS devices and like I said at the beginning of the video if you buy a subscription for three months you can get three months for free if you follow the link in the description you can sign up to babble now and start learning a new language straight away Ted thank you very much for being part of my video yeah no problem Jack trying to say goodbye in German yeah I'll be the Z a wiedersehen house my German a [ __ ] rubbish could use titties we could use some work oh yeah that's what babbles for

Channel: JackHoward

Views: 843,790

Keywords: Jack Howard, Jack and Dean, video essay, Inglorious bastards, Michael fassbender, bar scene, German, bar shootout, review, break down, analysis, german three, german 3, basement, quentin tarantino, explained, suspense, tension, film language

Id: tdjYpw_dZv0

Length: 7min 9sec (429 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019