1/23/2024 0 Comments Kill bill costume maleTarantino appropriates both of these types of characters to make a more rounded character that will appeal to both genders. So what you have is Tarantino framing the gender of his protagonist through two different viewpoints of cinema genres the strong, quiet, protagonists of eastern martial arts and samurai films and the victimizing, distinctly female protagonists that undergo emotional transformations in the rape-revenge genre. On her wedding day, her antagonists kill her friends and new family, and leave her comatose while pregnant. While Thurman’s character does not get physically raped by her antagonists, she gets raped in regards to her assassin character striving for a normal life. In the rape-revenge genre, movies like Last House on the Left and even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a woman usually gets raped, rehabilitates, and gets revenge. Tarantino uses the story process and the power relationships in the rape-revenge genre in Kill Bill to enhance this relationship between Thurman’s character and the audience. The aforementioned issue in Kill Bill is that the action hero is female in this film, not really a convention in modern cinema. Tarantino also borrows elements from older American genres, as well. One could argue the original intended meaning of the suit was to make Bruce Lee pop on the movie screen, and the new intended meaning for Tarantino was that you could do the same thing with a female, Caucasian, lead as well. Tarantino uses the imagery made in past films and makes icons out of them by reviving them in his. The original intended meaning of the suit was simple, visual appeal. This suit was probably appropriated by Tarantino to show that Thurman’s character’s temperament was that of Lee’s in Enter the Dragon, even if she is a female protagonist, and to pay homage to the genres he was borrowing from. Beatrix Kiddo, Thurman’s character and protagonist, wears a yellow suit reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s in Enter the Dragon. There is a lot of suspended gravity throughout the action scenes and a lot of imagery referring to old martial arts cinema heroes. Tarantino also uses elements of Chinese martial arts films. These scenes, in Kurosawa’s films, were meant to display how deadly the katana was, and how lethal they were in a samurai’s hands and appropriated a couple times, by Tarantino, through Volume I and II to add weight to his protagonist’s showdowns with the assassins she is getting revenge on. There is a vignette between Uma Thurman’s character and Lucy Liu’s character where the emphasis is on one sword strike, not an elaborate action scene (there are a bunch of these too), reminiscent of the type of samurai showdowns in Kurosawa’s older films like Zatoichi or The Seven Samurai. The word, “chanbara”, directly translates to “sword fighting”, and while the original Kurosawa films were period pieces, Tarantino uses the action techniques from these genres of movie for Kill Bill. The first obvious influence is that of samurai cinema, or chanbara, that Akira Kurosawa made so popular throughout his life. Quentin Tarantino uses a variety of eastern influences for these Kill Bill volumes, specifically genres that came to fruition in China and Japan during the second half of the 20 th century. But I will try and dive deeper into the origins of the genres he mines from, how he applies it to elements and images in his movie, and try to break down what he is trying to convey by using these older movie influences and techniques. These movies are absolutely loaded with appropriations from certain types of eastern cinema, and might have even been created simply to pay homage to these films. While he has appropriated these genres in his own movies like Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Reservoir Dogs, I will be discussing one of the better representations (and one of my personal favorites), the Kill Bill volumes. Tarantino has, with every movie production, paid homage to some sort of obscure genre that he discovered in his job as a movie rental store employee. One can look no further for cultural appropriation in film than Quentin Tarantino. Cultural appropriation is an adoption of a certain culture for a new meaning or intention by another.
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