Sam peckinpah

Grandson of an Indian chief, Sam Peckinpah (Fresno, California, February 21, 1925 – Inglewood, California, December 28, 1984) studied law and later enlisted in the US Army. Graduated in Dramatic Art, he worked as an assistant director for Donald Siegel in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and was a scriptwriter and director of various television series, such as the popular The Man with the Rifle and The Westerner .

A “cursed” filmmaker at the beginning, due to the tacit control of his films by the producers -some were mutilated or altered in the editing-, Peckinpah would be one of the innovators of the western genre, to which he gave an intellectual, violent and subjective far from the then prevailing topics: Duel in the High Sierra (1962), Mayor Dundee (1965) and Wild Group(1969), esp. By demystifying the Far West and consolidating the twilight genre, after the crisis caused by the European spaghetti-western, he reaffirmed himself with these statements: “I’m not interested in myth; I only care about the truth. And the myth of the West is found in the exploitation of the people who were going to get land. If you want to make a film about the West, you have to make it about these people who went and had land. And that they robbed and killed the ‘damn’ Indians. But I changed that, or at least I hope I got it in Wild Bunch . One of my purposes in making this film was to break the myth of the Far West.”

It is obvious that, at the level of filmic-aesthetic creation, his cinematographic pulse and narrative originality are notable, as are his use of color and the internal climate that he conceived in his films. That is why his bloody idling was famous, like a ballet, also through authentic natural settings. However, in her acclaimed work he incurred in erotic and violent or cynical and humorous excesses, which perhaps would give him more fame than her mere artistic values.

Sam Peckinpah drew themes from the West, affirming that he had never made westerns, to pronounce himself on the traditional “hero”, on the society of yesterday and today; at the same time, he pilloried the defects of the American idiosyncrasy and of contemporary man immersed in a context with which he disagrees or seems corrupted to him. Thus, puritanism, hypocrisy, pride, exploitation, triumphalism, misery, paternalism, ambition, conventions, a sense of love and violence appear clearly… And, for this, he used some very characteristics and limit-situations full of “keys” difficult for the general public to grasp, due to critical sharpness -between the lines- and symbolic insinuations, as happens, for example, in Junior Bonner(1972), with Steve McQueen as the legendary leading cowboy.

Somewhat stubborn and individualistic, the Peckinpehian universe is somewhat skeptical, pathetic and tormented: a suffering world, where man -anti-hero and “loser”- is irretrievably trapped, as can be seen in Straw Dogs (1971); or else he is doomed by technological progress, as also evidenced in The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970). Hence, his work offers a mosaic of individual and collective despair about a society that is destroying itself and that is only considered “surmountable” through even greater violence, as demonstrated in The Flight (1972) and Pat Garrett . and Billy the Kid(1973). Violence, in short, as liberation; Peckinpah himself would state: “Everything is confusing and I don’t know what to do. I am learning because I have no answers, only questions to ask.

After making the nihilist thrillers I want the head of Alfredo García (1974) and Los aristocratas del crimen (1975), the Brechtian anti -war film The Iron Cross (1977) and his bitter parody Convoy (1978), a testimonial film that demonstrated his mastery as a narrator, perhaps he would feel tired of fighting against the system and he was five years without a job as a filmmaker. When he had just turned 58, Sam Peckinpah said goodbye to the cinema with a failed spy film, Clave: Omega (1983). Possibly his early death was, like his redskin ancestors on Peckinpah Mountain, the demise of the last warrior.