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The key-scene of Volume I: The Bride fighting O-Ren Ishii

During the enormous martial arts scenes in the House Of The Blue Leaves Tarantino wildly plays with colors, with blooming black & white sequences and features about the highest body count to be seen in a long time. At a certain point the fight moves up the stairs where suddenly the light turns all blue and black silhouettes are fighting in front of a huge blue glowing wall. Even if this part is at least “heavily influenced” by the movie Samurai Fiction (1998) this is certainly Tarantino at his highest artistic quality and playfulness.
It leads up to the key section of Volume I, where Kiddo encounters O-Ren Ishii in the backyard of the House of the Blue Leaves.
Tarantino chose to set it in a neatly maintained garden where snow silenty falls and covers it in clean white. In the background a small fountain is quietly purling, rhythmically clacking and contrasting the nervous action of the sword fight.

While the two opponents are having a few lines of japanese dialogue there's absolutely no sound except for the occasional knocking of the water fountain. It's not until O-Ren gets out of her shoes that the song Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood breaks the muffled silence and starts off the fight. When the two hurt each other and O-Ren's leg gets injured, it's easy for Kiddo to defeat her. She cuts off O-Ren's scalp, we see it flying through in the air and O-Ren then – after saying her final line – drops dead to the snow. The Flower Of Carnage accompanies her last moments and again Tarantino manages to give a stolen idea (this time from Lady Snowblood) an unusual energy and a very distinctive signature.

-> Watch the scene on Youtube (allow pop-up)



A genuine genre-mix

As so often in Tarantino movies there are some kind of templates for these scenes: In the japanese sexploitation movie Sex&Fury (1973) for example there are fight scenes in the snow which clearly inspired him in the making of this part. Generally speaking, if one watches the Samurai movies of the 70ies it seems to be the whole imagery that influenced Tarantino; he takes existing ideas and jumbles them up to something entirely new.
-> Watch a comparison of Kill Bill and the movies it was inspired by on Youtube (allow pop-up)

He once stated about Kill Bill that each name on the death list represents a different genre or subgenre he likes to deal with. At the beginning there's a Pam-Grier-like suburban sequence with Vivica Fox followed by the japanese Manga part about the origin of O-Ren Ishii, et cetera..
In general Volume I is all mixed up with Japanese kung fu/martial arts/samurai/manga aesthetics whereas in Volume II the themes of spaghetti-westerns join in (which of course are already in part one but not as extensive) and plus, it strongly radiates the flair of a road movie in terms of Beatrix Kiddo approaching and hunting down Bill and a lot of desert/highway imagery. Tarantino masterly interweaves his spaghetti-western with parts of a horror movie when Budd buries the Bride alive and then suddenly the film takes off for a short flick of samurai-nostalgia with the Pai Mei character. So it's a truly stunning zig zag course between the genres of movie history, the director pays homage to everything he loves in films which is a lot due to his self proclaimed status as a movie junkie.

After Kiddo leaves back Elle Driver blinded and alone with a black mamba the movie cuts to Mexico where the last chapter takes place.



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