Kill Bill, Volume 1 (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2003) Important facts: Tarantino borrows heavily from Chinese and Japanese film and cultural traditions. o In order to achieve the specific look of Chinese "wuxia" (martial arts) film of the 1970s, Quentin Tarantino gave director of photography, Robert Richardson, an extensive list of genre films as a crash-course in the visual style they used. The list included films by genre-pioneers Cheh Chang and the Shaw Brothers. Tarantino also forbade the use of digital effects and "professional" gags and squibs. As such, he insisted that bloody spurts be done in the fashion made popular by Chang Cheh: Chinese condoms full of fake blood that would splatter on impact. o Sonny Chiba makes katanas in real life. In the movie, his character Hattori Hanzo is a renowned katana maker who has taken a blood oath to never create an instrument of death again. o The characters streaming down the left side of the screen in the opening scenes are Japanese kanji and hiragana, and they read "Hana yome ga kuru, hana yome ga kuru." Or: "The Bride is coming, the Bride is coming," over and over again. o To structure the film, Tarantino used the standard elements of Japanese kanzen choaku aesthetics: 1) rich and visual expression, especially in terms of color and movement; 2) dramatic violence; 3) unambiguous moral value of “promoting virtue and punishing vice.” . Plots of the kanzen choaku tradition have two standard elements: samurai house succession disputes and honorable revenge. o Note the color scheme: . Uma Thurman’s blonde/yellow is an homage to Bruce Lee’s Game of Death . The recurring color themes of white/red are drawn from Japanese aesthetic traditions where white represents death and red represents life. Overall, Kill Bill is a rich combination of elements of the American western, the Japanese jidai geki (gangster movie), and the Chinese wuxia (martial arts film). Questions: Does “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) fit any of the stereotypes of female character types discussed in our textbook? Does she defy these stereotypes? Explain. Kill Bill is considered a prime example of “postmodern” filmmaking on a technical level: o Pastiche: “pasted” elements of multiple genres; o Intertextuality: quotation and borrowing from previous films; o Black Humor/Irony: playful or silly elements appear alongside serious themes and sequences. Can you locate these postmodern elements in the film? Describing the thematic content of Kill Bill, and, as it happens, the thematic expressions of postmodernism, critic Charles Shiro Inouye writs that that the film does “not struggle with moral dilemmas because we…have all but lost our affinity for ambiguity and complication. There is only pure evil and pure virtue, as supported by our enthusiasm for another round of Halo, another dose of Kill Bill, another deployment of troops, another blast of a roadside bomb. In other words, this come back of [kanzen choaku] aesthetics has radically simplified complicated human relationships by making us increasingly automatic with regard to moral questions” (Inouye, Charles Shiro. "Promoting virtue and punishing vice: Tarantino's Kill Bill and the return of Bakumatsu aesthetics." Post Script Winter-Spring 2009: 92+. Academic OneFile. Web. 17 Apr. 2012.) o Can you briefly paraphrase what Inouye is saying? Can you explain the concept in terms of the film? How does this unambiguous moralism differ from the moral questions posed by a film like, say, Deliverance? .