m. He politely refuses and asks for milk instead. Hans Landa had also previously said how attractive Perrier’s daughters are. These two moments combined lead to an uncomfortable and unsettling experience for the viewer. Another very subtle moment in this exchange is how and why Landa grabs the girl’s wrist. Tarantino has made it fervently clear that Hans Landa is first and foremost a detective. It is of my belief, that Landa grabs the girl’s wrist in order to check her pulse. Obviously, knowing her pulse will tell Landa if she is nervous or not, which then means Landa has even more power. He will know if they are hiding something from him. This moment could also be interpreted as Hans Landa grabbing the arm of the audience and checking their pulse, which then increases emotional investment into the scene. A fourth key moment, and arguably the most important, in this opening scene is the revelation of the Jewish family hiding beneath the floorboards in Perrier’s home. This knowledge is deliberately given to the audience in order to create stronger emotional investment in the story. The scene becomes ten times more suspenseful now because they know that Perrier is lying to Landa about his knowledge on the whereabouts of the Dreyfuse family (the family he is hiding). It is now only a matter of time that the suspense and the tension is resolved, whether that is Landa finding the family or Perrier getting away with it, and the audience knows it. It can be directly compared to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘ticking bomb’ theory of suspense. Hitchcock explains that if two people are talking around a table and suddenly a bomb explodes from underneath the table, there is minimal tension. There is only surprise for the audience and even that won’t last long. Instead, if the audience is told that there is a bomb underneath the table (the family) and it is going to go off, the scene becomes much more suspenseful. Tarantino’s ‘elastic band’ comparison adds to Hitchcock’s suspense theory. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he explains that the longer the scene can hold (the longer the elastic band is stretched), the more tension is built. The outcome or resolution is also much more impactful the longer the scene holds. Eventually, Hans Landa does get Perrier to tell him where the family is hiding, and he brings the soldiers in to shoot into the floorboards. There is so much dust, splinters, screams and blood that it is as if a bomb had indeed exploded from underneath the table.

To conclude, this opening scene is a textbook example on how to build suspense. It is so creatively written and every time I come back to watch this film, I am hooked by this scene and that is why it is my ‘cinephiliac