We must resist Quentin Tarantino’s war against reality

It was instantly engulfed in controversy. The exhibits included a concentration camp model made of Lego and a display of 147 portrait photographs of Hollywood idols who played screen Nazis.

Holocaust survivors protested that these images made a mockery of the past and desecrated the memory of the camps. It took courage to defend the show but James Young, a brilliant commentator on Holocaust literature, art and memorials, did just that.

Young explained that the artists had not set out to offend anyone, although they were not so naive as to ignore the chance of creating a sensation. Rather, they were candidly exploring how the horrors of the war had come down to them from parents and grandparents who lived through it. They had "experienced" the war and Nazi terror vicariously through the stories they heard and the images they absorbed from TV and the movies. They wanted to depict how, as children, they played out what they overheard and how they replicated those stories with the toys that lay at hand.

In his latest film Quentin Tarantino does much the same. It is pointless assessing Inglourious Basterds according to any standards of accuracy or authenticity. It is really about how cinema creates myths and how it has manufactured its own mythic versions of the past. In Tarantino's crazed mind there is no history, only film history. He is not interested in what happened between 1933 and 1945, so much as how film makers depicted the period then, and subsequently.

This is why the plot hinges on a film within a film (produced by Joseph Goebbels, no less), involves the actions of two film stars and a film historian, and reaches its preposterous climax in a cinema. Just in case the audience doesn't get the message, it is peppered with more references to celluloid productions than a conversation between two film bores.

But if there is no such thing as reality in films, why not invent everything? Why not start the Holocaust in 1941 and end the war in mid-1944, as Tarantino does? Why not have Jews scalping dead Germans and show Hitler being assassinated, just for the fun of it? Why not hire the costume designer who worked on Schindler's List to make it look right while the actors ham it up to high heaven?

There's the rub. Should the war, or any slab of history, be subjected to total distortion for the sake of entertainment? Where should accuracy begin and end? The answer is not to protest against such historical abominations or try to rein in the Tarantinos.

The rest of us can only try to ensure that history is taught well and responsibly in our schools and universities. If teachers use films or discuss them, they need to explain that movies are merely a reconstruction of the past which tells us as much about the time and place they were made, and the people who made them, as the period they purport to depict. The fact that Tarantino's absurd epic is so transparently a fantasy actually makes this easier.

James Young commented sagely about the 2002 exhibition that "this media-saturated generation makes as its subject the blessed distance between themselves and the camps". In the freedom he enjoys to make films as he pleases, Tarantino's folly is a perverse celebration of the peace won so bitterly nearly 65 years ago.

David Cesarani is research professor in history at Royal Holloway, University of London