Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (cambridge Film Handbooks)

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch 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 inhabited before. This volume includes freshly 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. Stephen Prince is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the author of Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultra-Violent Movies; Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film; and Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Film. CAMBRIDGE FILM HANDBOOKS SERIES General Editor Andrew Horton, University of Oklahoma Each CAMBRIDGE FILM HANDBOOK is intended to focus on a single film from a variety of theoretical, critical, and contextual perspectives. This "prism" approach is designed to give students and general readers valuable background and insight into the cinematic, artistic, cultural, and sociopolitical importance of individual films by including essays by leading film scholars and critics. Furthermore, these handbooks, by their very nature, are meant to help the reader better grasp the nature of the critical and theoretical discourse on cinema as an art form, as a visual medium, and as a cultural product. Filmographies and selected bibliographies are added to help the reader go further on his or her own exploration of the film under consideration. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch Edited by Stephen Prince CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521584333 © Cambridge University Press 1999 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Sam Peckinpah's The wild bunch / edited by Stephen Prince, p. cm (Cambridge film handbook series) Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-58433-7 (hardcover). ISBN 0-521-58606-2 (pbk.) 1. Wild bunch (Motion picture) I. Princ