Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Pat Garett and Billy the Kid’: The times maybe a changin’, but not me…

By Vivaan Shah
The images from Sam Peckinpah’s films seem to bubble and swell out of the filmmaker’s subconscious – what Freud called ‘the dream state’. Time and again he abandons chronological continuity and traditional film grammar in favour of the figurative. He has non-linear sequences instead of non-linear narratives, and deconstructs the very medium of cinema itself in an aggressively proto-Godardian fashion.