Sources: Wikidata · OpenAlex. The record of the motion picture, not an assessment of this cell.
FILM NOTES
Kill Bill: Volume 1 arrived in 2003 from Miramax, the culmination of Quentin Tarantino's long gestation of a single sprawling script eventually split into two volumes. The film reasserted Tarantino as a director working in dialogue with genre cinema itself, stitching together Hong Kong action, spaghetti western scoring, anime interludes, and Japanese revenge pictures into something unmistakably his own. Uma Thurman's turn as the Bride became one of the defining performances of the decade, and the film's release renewed serious critical and commercial attention to stylized, referential violence as art house spectacle rather than pulp footnote.
A title card is the film announcing itself before story begins, the frame where studio branding gives way to authorship, and here that threshold belongs to Kill Bill as a whole. Collectors seek these pieces because they mark the exact instant a picture declares its identity, untethered from any single scene or character, a clean artifact of the production itself. This cell stands as the opening signature of a film built from homage and reinvention, the moment audiences first understood they were entering Tarantino's particular reconstruction of genre history rather than any one franchise's conventions.
Authentication Findings8 checks
Consistent with a 35mm theatrical release print of Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003).
Gauge
35mm, four perforations per frame on both edges; the strip holds three frames.
Perforations
Four per frame on each edge, evenly spaced; punching appears clean with no torn or deformed holes visible.
Soundtrack
A variable-area optical track is visible running along the lower edge beside the picture area, with what appears to be a blue-tinted bilateral or variable-density stripe; a separate thin line consistent with a DTS timecode track is also visible adjacent to it.
Edge print
Not visible in this capture at sufficient resolution to read manufacturer codes or key numbers.
Base & colour
Base appears with a slight cyan-teal tint in the sprocket areas; the picture area dye image reads as strongly saturated with deep blacks and vivid red title text, showing no obvious fading or red shift.
Projection history
No splices, cue marks or significant scratches are visible in this capture.
Picture
Positive image; all three frames show identical title card content running consecutively, consistent with a title sequence from Kill Bill: Volume 1.
Era check
The combination of a 35mm four-perforation format, optical soundtrack stripe, and apparent DTS timecode line is consistent with a theatrical release print from the early 2000s, matching the 2003 release date on record.
Read from the original intake capture shown below. Observations only — film is authenticated, not graded.
This original motion picture film element has been examined and authenticated by Crown Grading in partnership with National Film Vault, and encapsulated for archival preservation.
Why so little survivesRelease prints were leased to theaters, not sold. When the run ended they went back to the distributor to be destroyed, and most were. What collectors hold today came from the prints that escaped that order, and no new 35mm prints of these films are being struck.
CROWN SERIAL 000062971
Original Film CaptureAs received
Photographed on the light panel at intake, before encapsulation — tap to open full size
Tap to enlarge
