Watch: Quentin Tarantino’s Choreography in Slow Motion

In Quentin Tarantino’s films, movement is everything. If his characters are not moving, they are about to move. In ‘The Hateful Eight,’ the maneuvering of the devious travelers around each other in Minnie’s Haberdashery, with its rambling architecture, is every bit as important as the words they say to each other, or the shots they fire at each other. The ability of a Tarantino character to move or not move can often be telling: consider the lonesome death of Vincent Vega on the toilet in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ or the sky-bound pirouettes of Uma Thurman’s Bride in the ‘Kill Bill’ films. So when Tarantino slows down the motion of a character in one of his films, whatever the external reason may be, the ultimate take-away is this: Tarantino notices. He is attentive to human movement, to human physiognomy, almost with the attentiveness of Eadweard Muybridge. When he slows down a character’s motion, then, we, as viewers, are intended to see everything: muscular shifts, the different ways clothing falls on the moving body, the beauty of the body moving through space–and we are supposed to consider what the movement might mean. In his sixth (sixth!) video piece on Tarantino, Jacob T. Swinney brings us up close to Tarantino’s study of motion by focusing on his slo-mo scenes. What do we learn? Well, why don’t you look and tell me?