It has been more than a year since the Texas Theatre reopened on Jefferson Blvd. in Oak Cliff, and since the opening, the theater’s programming has leaned in the direction of something D Magazine music writer Christopher Mosley has called “genre purist.” By this, I believe Mosley means that the Texas Theatre’s programmers favor films in which thematic richness is subordinate to texture, tonal boldness, definition of milieu, and clarity of niche. Preferred are movies that confound more traditional aesthetic distinctions between “A-” and B-Movie” filmmaking. They favor films that excel at being vivid, unapologetic, knowing, and ironic. These are filmmakers’ films, and lean towards national cinemas that are themselves characterized by clear genre distinction, particularly Asia, as well as the obscure, cult, horror, and gore. For pure genre fans, the best movies are often ones that, as director Quentin Tarantino, the fan boy filmmaker of fan boy filmmaking, put it, are “funny, solemn, beautiful, and gross – all at the same time.”

Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Vol. 1

The Texas Theatre has put together a wallop of a genre-film double feature this weekend. The first film is a 35 mm second run of Tarantino’s own densely derived, kung-fu camp, action-sploitation, Kill Bill: Vol. 1. That movie will run alongside a 35 mm restored print of Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black. The films are a natural pair, both revolving around a vengeful bride who ticks off her victims’ names in a little black book. But despite the fact that Kill Bill is itself a conglomeration of riffs, Tarantino says he never saw Truffaut’s film. I suppose we have to take this denial at face value considering the director’s willingness to divulge the dozens of other films from which he borrowed not only themes and scenes, but shots and characters for Kill Bill. In fact, it’s this dissociation between the films that makes the pairing even more intriguing, each film hardwired into a mythic zeitgeist, albeit tapping divergent routes.

The figure of the vengeful bride is an ancient one, and Truffaut seeks out its mythic origins in The Bride Wore Black. In one scene, he fashions his lead character, Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau), as the goddess Diana, the hunter and guardian of virgins and women. Kohler poses for an artist dressed as the goddess, brandishing an arrow, and aiming it at her soon-to-be victim, with whom she also seems to be falling in love. It is a complex, laden image made possible through a kind of obtuse symbolism that seems most at home in genre filmmaking.
While Truffaut seems intent on making his sources available to the viewer as a way that informs our understanding of the overall project – its intertextuality — Tarantino has said that Kill Bill isn’t an “artsy meditation,” arguing instead that he simply wanted to make a balls-to-the-wall, kung-fu exploitation film. Yet, despite his claims, the very density of Tarantino’s sources – not to mention the director’s overt knowingness of his sources – contributes to the movie’s enduring fascinating as a commentary on itself. Kill Bill is an experiment in cinematic language, and Tarantino uses the visual and audio styles of fringe filmmaking with the same instinct D.W. Griffith showed for cross-edits and narrative timelines.

Opening with a knife fight between “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) and one of her former assassin colleagues Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Kill Bill: Vol 1 sets its first combat sequence in the quieted confines of an idyllic Pasadena, California. It is a moment that, like the Diana scene in The Bride Wore Black, works by overlaying both complementary and conflicting symbolic connotations. The shocking, deadpanned viciousness of the scene is intensified by the sudden appearance of Green’s daughter, who witnesses the violence. This is more than a tonal stroke; it sets in motion the conceit of Kill Bill’s entire mythic world: the fetish-ization of violence by way of voyeuristic representation.

Tarantino on the set of 'Kill Bill'

Also an experiment in adopted style – albeit that of Alfred Hitchcock and not Asian kung-fu films – Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black also takes up themes of representation and image. These come across most strongly in the scenes with the artist, but are implicit in the the bride’s relationship with her other victims, whom she seduces through a series of role-playing ploys. What is most important to Truffaut is how he can use the style of the mystery/suspense genre to create tension around the relationships between the murderer and her victims. Truffaut humanizes the five men that are Kohler’s targets, casting each as kind of masculine predator – the philanderer, politician, pervert, artist, etc. – yet also seeking to evoke our pity or identification with their characters, focusing on the seductive allure of his protagonist as an ingredient in the men’s demise. The Bride Wore Black is not fixated on violence, but it uses murder as a way of approaching the unspoken undercurrents that fuel human attraction.

In light of this, it is not surprising that Tarantino has said he is not as interested in Truffaut’s films as he is in another giant of the French New Wave, Jean Luc Godard. Like Godard, Tarantino uses genre as a way of reinterpreting cinematic language. Truffaut is less flashy, but no less intriguing, creating a genre picture that doesn’t just mimic, but expands upon a style’s thematic capacity.