Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies

by Stephen Prince

More than any other filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah opened the door for graphic violence in movies. In this book, Stephen Prince explains the rise of explicit violence in the American cinema, its social effects, and the relation of contemporary ultraviolence to the radical, humanistic filmmaking that Peckinpah practiced. Prince demonstrates Peckinpah's complex approach to screen violence and shows him as a serious artist whose work was tied to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. He explains how the director's commitment to showing the horror and pain of violence compelled him to use a complex style that aimed to control the viewer's response. Prince offers an unprecedented portrait of Peckinpah the filmmaker. Drawing on primary research materials—Peckinpah's unpublished correspondence, scripts, production memos, and editing notes—he provides a wealth of new information about the making of the films and Peckinpah's critical shaping of their content and violent imagery. This material shows Peckinpah as a filmmaker of intelligence, a keen observer of American society, and a tragic artist disturbed by the images he created. Prince's account establishes, for the first time, Peckinpah's place as a major filmmaker. This book is essential reading for those interested in Peckinpah, the problem of movie violence, and contemporary American cinema.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Stephen Prince teaches film history, criticism, and theory at Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts . He received his Ph.D from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly, a convincing thesis that Sam Peckinpah's concentration on violence has been misunderstood and misinterpreted. Following The Wild Bunch, writes Prince, Peckinpah steadily moved away from the idea that violence produces a catharsis in the viewer. Instead, he claims the filmmaker adopted ever increasingly techniques of visual and dramatic alienation along the lines of the theories of Bertolt Brecht. The book not only contains some thoughtful ideas, it generates them, too. It does become repetitious in the second half and the application of Brecht needs a somewhat fuller understanding of Brecht's works that includes such things as Dreigroschenoper and Kuhle Wampa. But overall I doubt you can come to terms with what Peckinpah tried to achieve without reading this.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently saw the Blu-ray edition of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and it included some very interesting commentary from film critic Stephen Prince, who had previously written a very interesting book on Akira Kurosawa, so when I saw that he had written a book on Sam Peckinpah, Savage Cinema (1998). It is a well researched and somewhat academic look at one of the more controversial directors of the late 60s and 70s. While Prince discusses all of Peckinpah's films most of the conversation is about his two finest films, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, however, some other violent films include: Bring Me the Head of Alfedo Garcia, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Cross of Iron, and The Osterman Weekend. Prince points out that his main stylistic feature, that influenced later film makers like Scorsese, Tarantino, and Woo was his distinctive slow motion montage style used in fight scenes. He was in turn influenced by the likes of Akira Kurosawa and Sergei Einstein. There are several insightful comments about the misunderstood director such as:

His cinema is, therefore, caught in a contradiction between the aesthetic excitement it offers viewers through its montage editing and the moral revulsion toward violence which the narratives, characters, and dramatic situations often convey.

That Straw Dogs has been Peckinpah's most misunderstood film is curious, but the reasons for this misunderstanding are clear. The film has been generally perceived as Peckinpah's most notorious celebration of brutality, a work that promotes a caveman ethic of dominance by the strong.

Pauline Kael's notorious description of Straw Dogs as a fascist work of art disturbed Peckinpah precisely of his historical understanding of the term. He drafted a reply to her in which he pointed out his distress over this analogy. "...I don't appreciate the description of the film as a fascist one, because it has connotations which to me are odious."

Witness to the bloodshed of the 1960s, attuned when sober to the price of his own rages, Peckinpah could not work as a romantic celebrant of violence, a sentimental exponent of gore. Instead, as he said, his best films show the it s ugliness, the way it diminishes human potential.

The book is divided into five sections: 1. Peckinpah and the 1960s, 2. Anesthetizing Violence, 3. Melancholy and Morality, 4. Interrogating Violence, and 5. A Disputed Legacy. It is a well-researched, if not too academic at times, look at a misunderstood master of cinema.

[Van Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another good cinematic study of Peckinpah!

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prince’s rigor towards situating Peckinpah’s filmmaking stratagems is fantastic and well constructuted. I could do without his overly polemic final chapter in which he fails to see cinematic violence as something of value both as it ages ethically and physically.

[Hilary · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very analytical book about the rise of ultra-violent movies, but as the title suggests, it REALLY focuses on Peckinpah. So if you're interested in anyone else, don't bother picking this one up. The author also spends quite a bit of time trying to validate his reasoning for focusing on Peckinpah, and the over-validation makes me really doubt that Peckinpah was worth writing an entire book on.