Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Kill Bill: Vol. 1
2003 · Quentin Tarantino · Kill Bill: Vol. 1 on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the hot light coming straight down onto hair. (light)
Robert Richardson keys nearly every scene from above, so heads and shoulders carry a hard white halo. Even a suburban kitchen or a dingy corridor gets that graphic crispness.
Payoff: The light cuts people away from their backgrounds, which is what keeps the compositions readable as comic panels.
Look at the yellow tracksuit with the black stripe. (setting)
Tarantino puts The Bride in the suit Bruce Lee wore in his unfinished Game of Death. The aliases, the weapons and the title cards all point at other films the same way.
Payoff: The costume is a quotation. Recognizing it changes nothing in the plot and everything about the pleasure. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the suit a mark: an object that means through the chain of films it belongs to.
Watch the chapter titles and the order they come in. (structure)
Sally Menke cuts the film into named chapters and runs them out of sequence, so you jump between times and places.
Payoff: You always know more or less than The Bride does, and that gap is where the suspense lives.
Listen for a record starting exactly on a cut. (sound)
There is no composed score. Nancy Sinatra, Tomoyasu Hotei, Santa Esmeralda and spaghetti-Western cues are dropped in as punctuation, along with a rising siren sting whenever someone spots a target.
Payoff: Tarantino built this soundtrack by selection, and the selections carry the rhythm a score would usually carry.
Count how many lines The Bride actually speaks. (performance)
Thurman works almost entirely through her body: the breathing, the grip, the stillness before a move. Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox and Daryl Hannah each play a type flat out.
Payoff: The film is carried by stances rather than talk, which is a break from Tarantino's first three pictures.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Everything here quotes another film. Watch the poses, the colors and the costumes doing the citing.