Violence In Mandingo

shows the complete wickedness of the Antebellum South, but it has not actually been proven that these fights actually occurred. Slaves during this time were expensive and too valuable to waste for this type of entertainment. After all, plantation owners were businessmen, and they would not thoughtlessly put any of their investments in harms way (Moore. N 2015). Tarantino's reference to Mandingo fighting in this film is a reference to the 1975 film Mandingo, as it is one of his favourite films. Being about a slave who is trained by his owner to fight to the death with other slaves, Tarantino thought it was suitable to show in his film in an attempt to show some of the violence that was going on around this time – not necessarily Mandingo fighting.
The costumes in the film are also quite iconographic, with the cowboy hats, vests, helping them to do their work and to protect them from their work environment (Home Pages, 2016). Particular iconic settings include the open landscapes, the saloon, the jail, the small-town main street and small frontier towns. Other iconic elements in westerns include the hanging tree, horses and spurs. However as previously discussed, Tarantino likes to mix things up a bit. The majority of westerns are set approximately between 1860 – 1910, whereas Django is set just before that in 1858 (Young. C 2012). The traditional western hero is commonly motivated by revenge or a sense of justice, which is presented in Django Unchained, but with a little bit of a twist – he’s a slave looking for his wife. The mise-en-scene in this film also breaks the rules with the landscape throughout the film, even though they still use open landscapes with it’s snowy mountains, and greenery. Traditional western’s landscape contains deserts, which are obtained in this film, mountains, rivers, or a monument valley (Nichols. B and Bazin. A
It has many iconographic traits, and is somewhat historically accurate, however, it is definitely set apart from the traditional western, like the Spaghetti westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars, or the ‘epic’ western The Big Country (Dirks, T 2017). Even though it is considered a revisionist western, it does feature many spaghetti western features, as it is heavily inspired by spaghetti westerns, specifically Django, a 1966 film by Sergio Corbucci. The violence in the film is necessary to convey a particular message about the evils of slavery, and how there was much more going on than they might necessarily display in other western films. Many demonstrations of violence and slavery are displayed throughout different westerns. Django Unchained has taken bits and pieces from iconic western films to make the violence displayed it’s own. In many years to come, this film will be an iconic western of it’s own, as it’s one that is different, but still has the same attributes as other western