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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
peckinpah is more about death. what to do in the face of it. that's where he gets me-- it's one of my major preoccupations in life. is peckinpah a more skilled director of actors than ford? of course not. but his view of the world is just exactly where it matters to me.
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the more i think about it, the more i believe peckinpah wasn't about "ultraviolence"-- it was more about having his eyes wide open to life's basic realities and not wanting to look away from them. MOST works of art will flee to ideas, to mythologies, to ideals, but this fucker did not flinch one bit. not one bit. he kept staring.
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I never knew about the buddhist thing but it's interesting, especially in his treatment of violence. I could kind of make the connection
if he simply showed it how it is, as a kind of natural force, but doesn't his excessive use of slo-mo, etc, only ultimately serve to make it something other than what it is? For me it does become idealised, mythologised. Surely it's impossible to read the final scenes of a film like Straw Dogs any other way. Even Slim Pickens' death in Pat Garrett, which I love, is ultimately a glorification of death through violence.
Ford's western's are noted by their general lack of violence compared with pretty much any western. Even big gunfights are either shown off camera or in such a way that they appear uneventful. Even his portrayal of the gunfight at the OK corral in Clementine is a bit of a non-event, relative to its treatment in other films. Not sure if that's attributed to his Irish catholicism but it's something I've always liked about his films: as though he saw violence as a socially necessary but ultimately banal act.