The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah - 1969
I was really very impressed by this. Peckinpah is cinematic; it's about his images. And what... striking....ones they are.
How does Pecknipah operate here? Quick cuts, always quick cuts. That doesn't have to mean close-ups though, or at least not extreme close-ups. We go between lots of medium shots much of the time, even pretty long shots. These aren't classically set up, but they're pretty long. The pananvision adds to this impression. It's not in the edit Peckinpah tries to really hit you, but what's going on in the scene. He can move from closer to longer with no real pattern; just whatever is visually best at that time.
The film seems broken up into longer and shorter segments. The longer ones are contemplative; I don't feel Peckinpah is a master of novelistic narrative. He rather wants to go for the look, that sweaty circulairty of time. The sound mix is, as with all elements, grubby, dusty, not clean dialogue. People growl lowly, or pretty much give the defintion of 'bark' at each other.
I saw the 135 minute 'director's cut' (one of many, I believe). Yet even this seemed, in mayn ways, to be a cut of a longer film. Bits are skipped over pretty quickly. There are all kinds of things thrown in, quite telegraphed flashbacks, sudden departures. Their isn't really a clear line of drama; I'm not sure if Peckinpah was trying to build up suspense, but he doesn't really succeed in doing so, cutting all wrong compared to the Hitchcockian methods of that.
From these contemplative scenes, bathed with ant covered scorpions, shots of children, men looking moody, nasty things happening, we are then delivered to the action sequences, which notably open and close the picture. Devices used in these are shared throughout the film; lots and lots of zooms, long lenses, fast panning and scanning, editing that is not non-continuity, but very loose.
These clear are pretty sensational, for all the copying. Extremely quickly edited, we don't really know where we are. We have the slow-motion movements, flying everywhere. Most acutely, we have those spatterings, blow-ups of blood off.
And we have woman thrown in front of the guns, people just being horrendously nasty, no honour, no happiness, no nothing. People bursting out laughing over torture, no such thing as trust or any good values, just completely negative. That is Peckinpah's world, and it remains shockingly brutal. The only ones who escape being a lacivious whore, an idiot man money-grubbing, or something equally horrendous, is a couple of older males, who are all these things, but remember that a moral compass once existed. That these figures are the only ones who have even a memory us what makes the mysoginisitic element. We should at least remember, having said that, that Pecknipah creates such a complete world that it's pretty complicated to assess as clearly as that. Any and every character can torture, murder, humiliate, and most importantly, degrade, and always responf 'why not'?'/
There isn't really comradeship, except in how they laugh together at something brutal. I would argue Peckinpah's relation to the genre is subverting by staying within, extending; that murder and so on are always there. He just takes it beyond loyalty or trust or these 'old fashioned' things, and gives us scorpions, kids with guns, every person about to be brutally killed, dwelling on horror. All in cinematic ways.