#Kill bill 1 and 2 series#
The film’s generic hybridity, of which David Carradine’s star persona appears to be an embodiment-Carradine was the lead actor in the TV series Kung-Fu (Warner Bros.
Yet, paying attention first to the staging, then to the camerawork, 1 this article seeks to go beyond the film’s show-offy veneer in order to study the way the fight scenes play an integral part in terms of narrative, dramatic and metafictional intent, and ultimately to assess to what extent the treatment of profilmic and filmographic movement, and the lack thereof, reflect the generic and cultural hybridity of two films that mix “American” and “East Asian” genres, like the Western, the gangster, blaxploitation, pirate, samurai and kung-fu movies, possibly revealing that some movements are, in effect, generic. Clearly, the fight scenes in Kill Bill represent feats both for the Bride-in terms of the valor and number of her opponent(s) and the length of the fights-and for the cast and crew who have choreographed fights that are challenging in terms of space-fights occur in closed spaces like Vernita’s house, Budd’s trailer and the Bride’s hotel room time-the twenty-minute-long showdown at the House of Leaves restaurant -and action-the final swordfight with the duelists sitting around a patio table. 1 More space would have been necessary to study the relationship between the rhythm of the fights, th (.)ĢIt is this connection between fight choreography and film genre, in other words between the representation of the circulation of bodies in the film and, on the metafictional level, the circulation of references to national genres and specific movies, analyzed at length by Philippe Ortoli in his ground-breaking book (230), that will be the main focus in what follows.Another fight choreographer, Aaron Anderson (2005), has provided a general overview of fight choreography in order to demonstrate that “violent imagery functions as one of the primary cinematic languages for character description and plot progression in modern action films.” He describes Tarantino’s approach in Kill Bill as one of “playful borrowing,” Tarantino having designed the fight scenes, largely by himself if one is to believe David Carradine, as “multi-layered homages to other films.” Much of the information concerning fight choreography has been provided by a how-to-do book on the topic, written by a Chinese American stuntman and fight choreographer, John Kreng, who defines fight choreography as “the art of creating a staged and rehearsed physical conflict that is convincing to the audience for entertainment purposes” (xx).
1While most articles on and reviews of Kill Bill have focused on genre (Le Cain 2004), gender (Coulthard 2007 Lavin 2010) and ethnicity, notably raising the question of cultural appropriation (Pang 2005 Tierney 2006 Inouye 2009 Chan 2009), that is whether or not Tarantino’s attitude towards East Asian genres is colonial or on the contrary in keeping with these traditions, this article offers an analysis of the live action fight scenes in Kill Bill Vol.
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