Pulp Fiction

1994, Cannes Film Festival. 31-year-old Quentin Tarantino is awarded the Palme d’Or, although the film critics favoured Krzysztof Kieślowski and his Three Colours: Red. The winner is a self-taught director and former video rental store employee, but above all, a total film nerd. The controversial decision of the Clint Eastwood-led jury was a symbolic rehabilitation of the kind of cinema referred to by the critic Jerzy Płażewski as “trashy.”  Tarantino indulges in this trashiness with unrepentant pleasure – he alternates timelines, stuns with brutal violence and provokes with offensive language. What ties together the different stories from around the City of Angels is Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta, brought back into the spotlight by Tarantino. The roles of the criminals, villains, and their girlfriends, are played by the hottest 1990s actors. The fascination with violence, the Bible, kung-fu, bad cinema, and feet makes Pulp Fiction a thrilling, exhilarating and utterly self-conscious cinematic experience.

Bogna Goślińska

Quentin Tarantino (b. 1963) is an American filmmaker with an instantly recognizable style, combining stylized violence, snappy dialogue and pop culture references. His debut feature Reservoir Dogs (1992) was an instant hit among critics and audiences, and his breakthrough came with Pulp Fiction (1994).  Since then he has made seven films, each of them a cinematic event; his tenth and allegedly last film, The Movie Critic, promises to be one, too.