Horrorshow moniker aside, ‘Bloody Sam’, as director Sam Peckinpah became known, is one of those rare artists who knew how to tell a violent story without making viewers feel numbed by over-exposure. His trademark high-body-count plots, featuring slow-motion bloody sequences and rich visuals, are much more poetry and grit than shock and awe.
In homage to the polarising filmmaker, SESC Santo Amaro has organised a small film festival with a few outstanding pieces from Peckinpah’s body of work. Screenings take place on Tuesdays in February.
Among the selected titles are famous westerns like 1969’s The Wild Bunch and 1973’s Pat Garret & Billy the Kid. Both films are known for being unusually barbaric for the genre, but beneath the blood there’s a considered reflection about the lonely, gruff men trying to reconcile their ethics and honour codes with the material interests that rule their lives.
Other works, like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), contain a more nihilistic view of the world. The film is the hopeless ballad of a small-time gangster hired to hunt down the man responsible for impregnating the daughter of a dictatorial Mexican patriarch.
Despite what his films might suggest, Peckinpah wasn’t an apologist for violence, but rather, someone who examined confrontation as a possible method of conflict resolution. If you’re intrigued – and if you think you’ve got the stomach for it – make some time for this festival’s brutal beauty.
Santo Amaro
Telephone (11) 5541 4000
© 2011 - 2012 Time Out Group Ltd. All rights reserved. All material on this site is © Time Out.
Newsletter
RSS feed
Twitter
Facebook
Other Time Out cities
Print
Email