The post-war Western film is often seen as a major locus of American national myth-making, a reflection of triumphal optimism and liberal consensus in an era of unprecedented affluence and global ...power. The Western also sometimes challenged the potentially destructive tendencies of capitalist progress. For example, Richard Slotkin sees the Western as expressing tension between the progressive forces of civilization and the populist criticism of their costs. At the time, this was criticism at the margin, as most films tended to support a consensus vision of a progressive, vital center America. The films of Sam Peckinpah have been frequently read in this mythopoeic context. Peckinpah's films such as Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969) do not erase so much as revise the Western myth of the heroic individual who redeems the progressive community in the wilderness that is both a central theme of the Western and a core component of American identity. Most of these readings largely neglect his last major Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Slotkin, for instance, devotes twenty pages to The Wild Bunch, treating it as the last of the mythopoeic Westerns.
Written exclusively for this collection by today’s leading Peckinpah critics, the nine essays in Peckinpah Today explore the body of work of one of America’s most important ...filmmakers, revealing new insights into his artistic process and the development of his lasting themes. Edited by Michael Bliss, this book provides groundbreaking criticism of Peckinpah’s work by illuminating new sources, from modified screenplay documents to interviews with screenplay writers and editors. Included is a rare interview with A. S. Fleischman, author of the screenplay for The Deadly Companions, the film that launched Peckinpah’s career in feature films. The collection also contains essays by scholar Stephen Prince and Paul Seydor, editor of the controversial special edition of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In his essay on Straw Dogs, film critic Michael Sragow reveals how Peckinpah and co-scriptwriter David Zelag Goodman transformed a pulp novel into a powerful film. The final essay of the collection surveys Peckinpah’s career, showing the dark turn that the filmmaker’s artistic path took between his first and last films. This comprehensive approach reinforces the book’s dawn-to-dusk approach, resulting in a fascinating picture of a great filmmaker’s work.
In this essay, then, I turn to a cultural text—the 2011 Hollywood thriller Straw Dogs, written and directed by Rob Lurie—that helps us see how the contemporary US South continues to function as the ...nation's internal other, and how similar processes have operated in another national context across the Atlantic. Because Lurie's Straw Dogs is a remake, the movie and its textual antecedents—a novel and another film—facilitate a fuller comparative, transnational analysis of how nations' regions function ideologically. Amy and her screenwriter husband David (James Marsden) plan to redevelop Amy's storm-damaged childhood home, the Wilcox farm, following the death of her father. Amy becomes the object of a struggle between cerebral, bespectacled David and buff, self-declared "redneck" Charlie Venner (Alexander Skarsgård), leader of a work crew contracted to repair a barn on the farm, and Amy's high school sweetheart. The drama climaxes as Charlie, Norman, fellow crew members Chris (Billy Lush) and Bic (Drew Powell), and their former football coach Tom Heddon (James Woods) lay siege to the farm after learning that the Sumners are harboring the mentally challenged Jeremy Niles (Dominic Purcell), who has accidentally suffocated Heddon's teenage daughter Janice (Willa Holland).
This paper focuses on the issue of violence in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) through explaining some of the cultural and historical implications of violence in the 1960s such as Vietnam War, ...the Mexican war and also the explosion of the feminist movement and some other important social and political upheavals that shaped the cultural context of the 1960s in America. It also sheds light on Sam Peckinpah’s approach of violence screen and stylizing violence and the representations of violence as a tormenting and brutalizing reality that matches the spirit of the age in addition to the social, political, and colonial conflicts of the 1960s. Violence and the implications of violence in The Wild Bunch whether social , cultural, psychological, or humanistic have been discussed in brief in order to show the critical approach of the film as being a rich and didactic film to watch, especially in terms of its rich cultural and historical contexts.
Like the audience of Phaeacians, Americans have listened attentively to the stories of soldiers returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to evaluate, with inevitable frustration, the ...moral and psychological impact of war on the self. Meineck approaches the conflicts staged during the City Dionysia as a healing ritual, one that addressed the psychological needs of a polis beset by almost constant warfare in the fifth century. the author's own experiences directing the Aquila eater's Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives program for communities of contemporary veterans across the United States ofer telling comparanda: those insights of twenty-first century veterans prompted by the reading of ancient tragedies, especially those that foreground the psychological wounds of a life devoted to incessant violence. Tatum's analysis of various eforts to capture news from the battle lines draws out the poignant futility of them all: those oficial dispatches ("All quiet tonight", "Nothing new") that have peppered accounts of war inevitably reduce the complexity and horror of life in combat to neat statistical uniformity. en again, we should ask ourselves when confronted with the hesitant expression on the face of the returning soldier, not to mention the emotional resistance staged by Odysseus, whose tears bring the songs of the famously skilled Demodocus to a halt, how should these horrors be told? Hall cites the pleasure audiences experienced in the films of Sam Peckinpah, though that director has explicitly stated that his graphic depiction of bloodshed, and its consequences spelled out with slow motion camera, was ofered as an implicit criticism of on-screen violence, especially pointed in light of the real-life contemporary violence of the Vietnam War (Peckinpah is quoted at length in Prince 176).
Introduction
The Velvet light trap,
04/2019
83
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The development of highways in the United States and the representation of these highways on film reflect changing perceptions of the rural as idyllic and wholesome. ...attention to geographical ...history offers new models for interpreting film genres and style. Annie Laurie Sullivan's article on WGPR-TV, the first US television station owned and operated by African Americans, focuses on infrastructure to examine the intersection of race, local media, and city politics. In this instance, local and activist efforts to protect the Emek Movie Theater provided an opportunity to resist not only urban change but also the government's misguided initiatives. ...Yasar's research encourages us to consider the role of film and its attendant culture within larger social and political histories.
In this enthralling memoir we follow Evans and Peckinpah through conversations in bars, family gatherings, binges on drugs and alcohol, struggles with film producers and executives, and Peckinpah's ...abusive behavior--sometimes directed at Evans himself.
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