Quentin Tarantino FAQ by Sherman Dale;

Author:Sherman, Dale;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: film
Publisher: Applause
Published: 2015-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

14

An Excellent View of My Foot

Frequent Visuals and Concepts in Tarantino Films

Whether you love or hate Tarantino, one of the first things you’ll learn from his movies is that he really has a deep, deep interest in feet. Namely the feet of the actresses in his movie. With lots of close-ups and nice lighting. Not gratuitous, mind you. No joke—he usually comes up with reasons within his scripts for his camera to pan down those gams and take a look at those toes (such as when Kiddo is trying to get her legs working again in Kill Bill, Volume 1, or Melanie being filmed only from the feet down in a sequence in Jackie Brown).

Yet the—rather mild—foot fetish (well, okay, him getting to suck on Salma Hayek’s toes in From Dusk Till Dawn is a bit of a kink, but—hey—he didn’t even direct that one, so you can’t blame him) is only one type of cinematic touch that repeatedly turns up in his films. There are several that Tarantino has used, some of which are almost expected by fans when watching one of his movies (when possible; for example, the audience may not get the traditional “Trunk POV” in Inglourious Basterds, but we do at least get a nice “Corpse POV” for the finale).

Besides such camera moves, Tarantino has also made a tradition out of certain props, clothes, or other elements that pop up in more than one of his movies. That gasoline can in Reservoir Dogs seems to travel a lot, for example. Such items can be seen as nothing more than coincidences, but others are clearly “Easter eggs”—a term that came into being when movies and television shows would be released on DVD with extra footage hidden on a disc and is now used to describe visual surprises in the background of movie scenes that may not be spotted at first, like the group of E.T.s in The Phantom Menace (1999).

There are some elements that pop up in more than one film that could fall under this definition as well, but a lot of these are standard type of textbook camera shots that really do not represent a consistent Tarantino touch (such as sequences featuring people talking in cars, which is seen in 99 percent of movies anyway). There have also been homages to his earlier films that don’t quite fall into this category either (such as Kiddo in Kill Bill, Volume 1 making the “don’t be a square” hand sign as an obvious tribute to Uma Thurman’s earlier role in Pulp Fiction). Instead, this chapter details some of the various repeated visual treats and other tricks of the trade that Tarantino has used in more than one of his films that aren’t quite as noticeable until you’ve seen a few of his movies.

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