Shadow of '68 1968 - 1969 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 18

The eighteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 18: Shadow of '68"

Shadow of '68

For four chapters, the energy of the sixties built and built, until yesterday it exploded, the sort of explosion that only builds upon itself, growing larger and larger. Today, in the chapter representing 1968 - 1969, we might expect to find its climax. After all, the whole world was in the throes of uprising, revolution, war, changing consciousness, rebellion - from the Tet to May '68 in Paris to the Prague Spring (and subsquent repression) to Chicago to...well, you all know the litany.

But on this screen today you'll find few Molotov cocktails, little long hair, no drugs. There'll be plenty counterculture tomorrow, in the last sixties entry, but today's chapter embodies cool restraint, dark intensity, and collected contemplation. Several scenes feature suited squares acting as if the whole world isn't falling down around them. This is not the surface tumult we are all familiar with, but rather its shadow, in several senses.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch, 1969, directed by Sam Peckinpah

Story: After being set up in a bank heist, the dwindling and aging Wild Bunch (a band of outlaws operating in the American frontier of the early 20th century) crosses into Mexico. Pursued by bounty hunters led by one of their former members, the Bunch agree to steal a cache of weapons for a corrupt Mexican warlord – but eventually, they must decide what’s worth more: his gold or their vaguely maintained code of honor.

The Wild Bunch is notorious as a subversive take on the Western genre, with the opening lines of Pike (William Holden) – “If they move, kill ‘em!” – supposedly a declaration of independence from the old-fashioned sanctities of the form. And the ensuing massacre would seem to confirm that we’re a long way from the moralistic shades of High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), what with old ladies of the Temperance Union being killed in the crossfire by careless deputies, cowering bank tellers being taken hostage and used as live bait by the titular antiheroes, and the innocent babes of the town wandering through a town square littered with the corpses of their elders as they imitate the outlaws’ gunfire. Meanwhile, other children light a bonfire over battling scorpions and red ants, piling violence upon violence in a microcosm of the film’s pathology: lethal but somehow poignant old cretins – the bunch – pitted against the ruthless, small-minded hordes – the bounty hunters and Mexican soldiers and railroad men who are just as violent as the outlaws, but somehow more petty.