Django Unchained Poster UK — Buy Tarantino's Western Wall Art

Jamie Foxx · Christoph Waltz · Leonardo DiCaprio · Oscar Best Original Screenplay — 260gsm museum-grade from £3 at 98types Camden

"Django — the D is Silent" — Tarantino's Revisionist Western

Django Unchained (2012), written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, won two Academy Awards — Best Original Screenplay (Tarantino's second, after Pulp Fiction) and Best Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz, his second, after Inglourious Basterds) — and grossed $425M worldwide. The film is Tarantino's most politically direct: a Spaghetti Western set in the antebellum American South, in which Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx), a freed slave, partners with German bounty hunter Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to rescue his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the Candyland plantation of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The film's genre framework — the Italian Western, specifically Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966), whose protagonist's name Tarantino directly borrows — is used to tell a story about American slavery that mainstream Hollywood had systematically avoided. Tarantino's decision to use the genre's conventions (the outsider hero, the violent showdown, the redemptive violence) to address historical atrocity was both commercially effective ($425M worldwide) and culturally contentious: Spike Lee publicly objected to Tarantino's use of the word "nigger" in the screenplay; Tarantino defended it as historically accurate. The debate about the film's relationship to the history it depicts has continued for over a decade.

Christoph Waltz — The Greatest Supporting Performance of the 2010s

Christoph Waltz's Dr King Schultz is the finest supporting performance in any Tarantino film: a character of such verbal elegance, moral complexity and specific comic register that the film around him becomes his showcase. Schultz is simultaneously the most civilised and the most casually violent character in the film: he kills bounty targets with the same equanimity with which he discusses linguistic etymology. Waltz won the BAFTA, SAG Award and Academy Award for the role — his second Academy Award for Tarantino after his debut in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie — Playing Against Type

Leonardo DiCaprio's Calvin Candie is the finest villainous performance of his career: a character whose charm and apparent refinement are the surface of something genuinely monstrous. The Mandingo fighting sequence, the dinner table speech about phrenology and the skull, the moment when Candie realises he has been deceived by Schultz — DiCaprio plays each beat with specific commitment to a character who represents the deliberate cultivation of false sophistication over moral vacancy. The improvised blood moment (DiCaprio accidentally cut his hand on real glass during filming; Tarantino kept the take) is the film's most viscerally authentic moment.

Why the Django Unchained Poster Works as Wall Art

The Django Unchained visual identity is immediately communicative: the wide-brimmed hat, the fur-trimmed coat, the wide-open spaces of the Southern landscape. The poster captures the film's specific register of Western iconography applied to a story the Western genre historically refused to tell. At 98types, the Django Unchained poster is printed on 260gsm museum-grade archival matte paper with pigment inks, from £3. Buy it with Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas = the definitive crime cinema wall = 3 prints + 1 free from £9.