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. The second name on the list gets crossed off first, and the wedding chapel is held back.
Payoff: You always know more or less than The Bride does, and that gap is where the suspense actually 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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the pause before two fighters move. (staging)
Tarantino holds each duel at a posed peak: the bow, the drawn blade, the eyes, the stillness stretched past comfort. The blood arrives as a geyser rather than as a wound.
Payoff: The film is built almost entirely out of peaks, with the ordinary movement between them trimmed away. In the reading: privileged-instants. The reading calls these privileged instants: posed peaks borrowed from painting, stacked where a film would normally show continuous motion.
Watch the image drop into black-and-white, then blue silhouette. (light)
At the height of the House of Blue Leaves fight Richardson strips the color out, then flattens the room to a blue field with black figures. The change arrives mid-battle without explanation.
Payoff: The color stops describing the room. It absorbs the scene and changes the key you are watching it in. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this an affective color-image: color stops describing a place and starts soaking up the feeling of it.
Follow the camera up over the Crazy 88 melee. (camera)
Richardson pulls to an overhead view of the whole floor, then comes back down. The same film locks into rigid symmetry for the standoffs and glides in a long descent into the restaurant.
Payoff: The camera keeps switching between a map of the fight and a seat inside it, so the space never goes vague.
Watch the cut into the anime and back out. (cutting)
O-Ren's childhood is animated by Production I.G and dropped whole into the live action. Menke changes medium the way other films change location, and the momentum does not break.
Payoff: The switch lets the film stage something it could not hold in photography, and it costs the story nothing.
Carry this in: Everything here quotes another film. Watch the poses, the colors and the costumes doing the citing.