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Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah's <I>The Wild Bunch</I>

Sam Peckinpah's <I>The Wild Bunch</I>

Stephen Prince, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
March 1999
Available
Paperback
9780521586061
£17.00
GBP
Paperback
USD
eBook

    Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is one of the most influential films in American cinema. The intensity of its violence was unprecedented, while the director's use of multiple cameras, montage editing, and slow motion quickly became the normative style for rendering screen violence. Demonstrating to filmmakers the power of irony as a narrative voice and its effectiveness as a tool for exploring and portraying brutality, The Wild Bunch fundamentally changed the Western, moving it into a more brutal and psychopathic territory than it had ever occupied. This volume includes newly commissioned essays by several leading scholars of Peckinpah's work. Examining the film's production history from script to screen, its rich and ambivalent vision of American society, and its relationship to the Western genre, among other topics, it provides a definitive reinterpretation of an enduring film classic.

    • Treats not only this particular film but also origins of graphic movie violence
    • Leading scholars write from a variety of perspectives
    • In the popular Cambridge Film Handbooks series

    Product details

    March 1999
    Paperback
    9780521586061
    244 pages
    228 × 151 × 16 mm
    0.33kg
    36 b/w illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Sam Peckinpah, savage poet of American cinema Stephen Prince
    • 2. The Wild Bunch: the screenplay Paul Seydor
    • 3. Peckinpah the radical: the politics of The Wild Bunch Christopher Sharrett
    • 4. 'Back off to what?' Enclosure, violence, and capitalism in The Wild Bunch Michael Bliss
    • 5. Ballistic balletics: styles of violent representation in The Wild Bunch and after David A. Cook
    • 6. Revisioning the Western code: myth and genre in The Wild Bunch Wheeler Winston Dixon
    • 7. The Wild Bunch: innovation, retreat, and the unproductive schism David McKinney.
      Contributors
    • Stephen Prince, Paul Seydor, Christopher Sharrett, Michael Bliss, David A. Cook, Wheeler Winston Dixon, David McKinney

    • Editor
    • Stephen Prince , Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University