Kill Bill

Joseph Ruwe

Philosophy of Film

4/16/2014

Dr. Langguth

                                                            Kill Bill

My favorite director is Quentin Tarantino, so I chose to review Kill Bill for my first post. While many could consider it to be a mindless action film, filled with unrealistic scenes of people getting punched and beaten, but miraculously showing minimal ill effects after the fight. But despite the unrealistic and admittedly crudely done action scenes (Think a fountain of obviously fake blood spouting from a severed neck.), I think that there is a case to be made that this work is an example of art in film.

Kill Bill definitely takes advantage of the aspects of medium specificity that are offered in film. It is safe to say that the plot would be impossible to be performed on a stage, and if some ambitious stage director did succeed in cobbling it together in a theater, it would undoubtedly be a poor example of art compared to the movie. My favorite part about the way that Tarantino directs Kill Bill is his camera work. He uses unique perspectives and lenses to show the audience how the story is unfolding. An example of this is when Beatrix gets out of the hospital and into the stolen truck, but her muscles are so atrophied from being immobile in a coma for so long she can’t move her legs. Tarantino uses scaling to focus on her big toe, and you hear her command herself, “Move your big toe.” But nothing happens. You just see the toe, sitting there and not moving. And then she says it again. And you can feel her trying to move her toe. And you realize that you are involuntarily moving your own big toes as if she is talking to you. The camera stays on her stationary toe and she keeps on repeating the command until finally, you see the toe flinch, and move a little bit. And at that point you feel yourself let out a breath of air and you relax, and you never really realized until then how tensed up you had gotten over that one simple scene until it was over. For me, the tension comes from the focus of the camera on the toe. Another interesting technique that Tarantino uses is colored lenses. The sheriff who drives out to the church where Beatrix and her wedding party where murdered wears aviator sunglasses with colored tinted lenses. As the car drives along, you have a first person point of view of the driver, and you see all this aviators lined up on the dashboard of the cruiser, and the color of the camera lens shows the same color as the sunglasses that he is wearing. And then when he eventually takes them off, the color of the film goes back to normal.

Tarantino doesn't tell the story of Kill Bill in a straight line. It is filled with flashbacks and routinely pauses to tell back stories of characters. For O-Ren Ishii, the member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad of oriental descent, the film switches from traditional film to an animated anime-like movie. This is really cool because of her Japanese connections and the fact that anime is Japanese. It is also a tasteful choice considering it is showing her as a young girl acting as a prostitute and stabbing her client to death. That probably would not go over super well if an actual child actor played that part.

In the scene where Beatrix kills O-Ren Ishii, she kills probably 100 people…a bunch of weak bodyguards, as well as 87 of the Crazy 88, the elite band of guards that Ishii had assembled to protect herself. The fight takes place in a hotel-like venue, and in the foyer/main room there is a fountain. Tarantino focuses on this fountain of water before the fight, and the audience sees the clear water. The camera then uses the fountain throughout the fight and at the end of the fight to illustrate just how many men Beatrix has killed and how bloody it was. By the end of the fight the pool of clear water is almost unrecognized, as it is absolutely filled with blood. Also during this scene the camera goes to black and white, from color for a few minutes. I get a sense of Beatrix’s perspective during this time. It gives a sense of what she is feeling while fighting this inordinately high number of foes. It emphasizes her enemies and by taking color out of everything shows how focused she is on each one of her kills. Nothing matters right now except that she kill all of these people. If she makes one mistake they will overwhelm her. Changing the picture to black and white does a great job of capturing her focus what her frame of mind would have been in that situation.

Another technique that he uses is bracketing. In Beatrix’s fight with the last of Ishii’s bodyguards, her adversary uses a giant iron monkey fist attached to a chain as her weapon. Although in real life this is probably a very impractical weapon, especially to use indoors. Tarantino uses bracketing on the monkey fist when the girl spins it and shoots it out at Beatrix. It starts off spinning around the bodyguard, and then suddenly it shoots out in the direction of the camera, getting bigger and bigger until it is dominating the screen.