Sam Peckinpah, Straw Dogs, 1971, still from a color film in 35 mm, 118 minutes. Amy Sumner (Susan George).

“Times have changed,” says newly elected sheriff Pat Garrett to his erstwhile partner, Billy the Kid, at the beginning of the 1973 Sam Peckinpah film that bears their names. “Times, maybe, not me,” replies the Kid. It’s as good a summation of Peckinpah—the work and the man—as any critic’s encomium. Best known for his “revisionist” westerns, mostly set in the early twentieth century, Peckinpah evoked an America that had run out of frontier, doubled back on itself, and was beginning to fence land, pave roads, and enforce laws. This was the country where his characters—Billy the Kid, the Wild Bunch, Cable Hogue—tried to shoot or scheme their way out of anachronism, almost always to fail; the country where technology and “progress” took the Wild out of the West and made it safe for organized capitalism, much like an industrious colony of ants smothering a scorpion.

Peckinpah is an American maverick who makes Clint Eastwood look like John McCain. His legion of imitators—has there ever been a director whose style has been so shamelessly, and shallowly, lifted?—mistook the bloodshed for bloodlust, deep melancholy for cheap comedy. For every Martin Scorsese, there’s three or more pale riders—Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, and Robert Rodriguez, say—whose balletic orgies of violence go no more than skin deep. You can laugh (I have) at a cop getting his ear sliced off or at Bruce Willis with a discipline ball in his mouth in a Tarantino film. You can also laugh at Warren Oates in Peckinpah’s 1974 classic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (I certainly have), losing his clip-on tie while trying to talk tough with the big boys or having his tête-à-tête conversations with Al’s severed head in the passenger seat. But in Tarantino, laughter is all that’s warranted. In Peckinpah, you’re laughing to keep yourself from crying.

“To live outside the law, you must be honest,” Bob Dylan, a bit player in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, once said. This is true for Peckinpah’s honorable antiheroes, who would rather commit suicide in an apotheosis of futile bloodletting than live within the law in an institutionally corrupt “civilization.” His films speak to us more now than they did in the ’70s. Who today will refuse to shut up and take the money, like Oates at the end of Alfredo Garcia, even if it means his certain death? Who today will simply say no? Peckinpah puts us all to shame.

— Andrew Hultkrans

“Sam Peckinpah: Blood Poet” screens at Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA, from September 5 to September 12. For more information, click here.

Olaf Nicolai, Rodakis, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 12 minutes.

Though Brangelina visitations may be what creates mob scenes at the Toronto International Film Festival, the “Wavelengths” program has quietly become one of the festival’s best assets. Named after Michael Snow’s 1967 slow-zoom wonder (and in acknowledgment of Canada’s disproportionate influence on cinema’s avant-garde), the program was added only eight years ago, and its experimental offerings leave no room for the Oscar bait and celebrity vanity projects that can clog up TIFF’s other arteries. Indeed, the six screenings—which take place at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall from September 5 to 8—constitute a fest within the fest, one in which formal daring and ingenuity take precedence over the medium’s usual priorities.

Not that this subsection of international cinema lacks its own brand of stars—the 2008 edition showcases new material by Nathaniel Dorsky, James Benning, Jennifer Reeves, and, in his first solo work since the death of partner Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub. A key figure in American film and visual art since his pioneering series of installations in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Pat O’Neill is represented here by the latest version of Horizontal Boundaries, his ongoing study of Los Angeles and a film whose shape shifts as much as the city that has long fascinated the artist.

The constant lateral and vertical motion of various categories of images (trees, housing, beach scenes) has a richly hypnotic effect, especially in tandem with a sound track that intermingles ambient noise and composer Carl Stone’s grinding drones, one of the new additions for the 2008 version of the work. A maestro of the optical printer, O’Neill packs the screen with an abundance of detail, though it soon becomes clear that the boundaries that interest him are not just those at the edges of the city but also those that separate the individual frames of film.

O’Neill’s twenty-three-minute movie is included in a program on September 6 that includes six more experiments in form. Particularly cunning is Eriko Sonoda’s Garden/ing (2007), a trompe l’oeil exercise in which a camera’s repeated half-circle motion in front of a screen door eventually dismantles the usual laws of perspective. “Trips,” the shorts program on September 7, includes two other provocative explorations of physical space. Rodakis (2008), an elegant twelve-minute film by Olaf Nicolai, consists of fixed-camera shots of a nineteenth-century house on the Greek island of Aegina. Despite the confident tone of the unidentified narrator, the exact significance and history of this place become increasingly ambiguous in Nicolai’s architectural mystery tale. In Flash in the Metropolitan (2006), the British team of Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer provide eerie views of antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum’s Near Eastern, African, and Oceanic collections, lit only by a strobe. This silent sequence of briefly illuminated objects calls to mind both some mysterious rite and a nighttime expedition by thieves who may be eager to return these objects to their original homes.

A similar effect dominates Black and White Trypps Number Three (2007), another exhilarating installment in an ongoing series by Chicago’s Ben Russell. Here, the light falls on the rapt, sweaty faces of indie hipsters as they lose their collective shit at a Lightning Bolt concert. A burst of noisy mayhem, it couldn’t be more different from the “Wavelengths” program’s more serene selections. But like the series’s most remarkable titles, Russell’s work boasts a bracing degree of rigor and vigor.

— Jason Anderson

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom, 1975, still from a color film in 35 mm, 145 minutes.

JUST IN TIME for the back-to-school season, Criterion has reissued the DVD of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s pedantic bloodbath Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), an apologue so heavy-handed that it includes a syllabus in the opening credits. (Barthes, Blanchot, Beauvoir, and Klosswoski all make the list. The film just preceded the publication of Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality [1976], otherwise it would have been a probable candidate.) Made just months before Pasolini was gruesomely murdered by a hustler who ran him over with his own car (though this story is currently in dispute), the film is a modern update of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, structured according to a “Dante-esque” logic: Instead of the traditional chronological narrative, viewers encounter four overlapping “circles” (the “antinferno,” the “circle of obsessions,” the “circle of blood,” and the “circle of shit”). Set in a palazzo in Saló, a short-lived republic Mussolini created in northern Italy near the end of World War II, the film was envisioned by Pasolini as, among other things, an illustration of the “choreography of fascism” and an indictment of capitalism’s objectification of the human body.

No take on Salò is complete without a litany of the vile debauchery enacted by the libertines (and their well-endowed adjutants) on the eighteen teenage boys and girls captured for the occasion: torture, rape, coprophilia and -phagia, necrophila, branding, scalping, tongue cutting, eye gouging—to name but a few. In Vincent Canby’s 1977 review for the New York Times, he argued that the film was “a perfect example of the kind of material that, theoretically anyway, can be acceptable on paper but becomes so repugnant when visualized on the screen that it further dehumanizes the human spirit, which is supposed to be the artist’s concern.” In her 2004 piece on torture, Susan Sontag remarked that Salò was “near-unwatchable,” though I wonder now whether she was actually speaking to the film’s arid pretentiousness rather than to the revolting scenarios it plays out. Salò will probably seem quaint—certainly campy—to anyone who plays Grand Theft Auto or bookmarks the “Extreme Videos” section on eBaum’s World. This ho-hum element raises the hackles of critics who like to dilate on voyeurism’s ethical implications and of those anxious about a society inured to violent images. Of course, what to some might appear a symptom of vacuous morality could read to others as increasing audience sophistication regarding the fiction of images.

Amaury Voslion, Salò: Yesterday and Today, 2002, stills from a black-and-white and color film, 33 minutes. Right: Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Part of this sophistication comes from our growing familiarity with the mechanics of films—how they’re made and how they work. A compelling section of the documentary Salò: Yesterday and Today, one of the DVD’s supplemental features, illustrates the droll banality of filmmaking, as Pasolini instructs the actor Aldo Valletti in his role during the film’s rapturous denouement, which depicts a violent torture tableau in a courtyard. One of the other actors greedily approaches the director: “Don’t you have some nasty little role for me?”

“Wait till you see what you do in the next scene,” Pasolini reassures him.

“Thank goodness.”

“You can’t imagine.”

“Thank goodness.”

Everyone just wants their fifteen minutes. Later in the documentary, the captivating Hélène Surgere, who plays one of four narrating prostitutes, notes that, “on the set, paradoxically, the mood was jovial and immature. When I saw the film, I wondered how we’d made something so awful without realizing it.” This scission between the making and the made isn’t a deep one; most of us, when faced with a particularly nasty image, can draw on rather simple reasoning: It’s only a movie. (And an incredibly hyperbolic one at that—how can anyone get worked up over something that’s trying this hard to get a rise?)

All the lashings, slashings, and bawdy sexual pantomime quickly become cloying—which, it seems, was at least partly the point. But the disturbing thing about Salò is not its sexuality and violence, its pornographic register; rather, it is the film’s posturing as social critique, its misleading diagram of the mechanics of the ideological state apparatus and the way subjects are produced in consumer societies. Consumers don’t choke on the shit that they eat (as the ephebes are shown doing in the dining hall), they enjoy it. They’re not coerced, they’re cajoled. To articulate power in the way that Pasolini does—indeed, to conflate critiques of fascism and critiques of consumerism—is to dissimulate power’s workings, to make it more insidious, not more exposed; it works to power’s advantage.

Speaking of consumers, it’s a hard call as to whether shoppers should go for the Criterion DVD or hold out for the BFI Blu-ray edition, due out in the UK on September 29; that version boasts such fun extras as Ostia, a 1991 short by Julian Cole, featuring Derek Jarman, about Pasolini’s last days, as well as a new music video for Coil’s 1987 song “Ostia (The Death of Pasolini).” It’s a bit late for freshman orientation, perhaps, but perfect for those looking for something to keep them busy during fall break.

— David Velasco

Chris Smith, The Pool, 2007, still from a color film in 35 mm, 95 minutes. Nana (Nana Petakar) and Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan).

WITH HIS MINIMALIST AESTHETIC, working-class politics, deadpan humor, and empathy with the uncommon aspirations of unsung Americans, Chris Smith is one of the more successful and least categorizable of American independent filmmakers. The MoMA retrospective “Chris Smith: An American Original” includes his two fiction features: American Job (1996), a painfully funny, spot-on depiction of an overqualified midwestern minimum-wage slave, and The Pool (2007), which, because it was filmed in India, seems a world away from American Job but nonetheless has the same working-class sympathies. Also on the MoMA program are Smith’s three documentaries, of which The Yes Men (2003) is the most hilarious and politically prescient. Directed with Dan Ollman and Sarah Price, it follows the eponymous political performance artists as they expose the audience’s failure to resist even the most absurd pretense of authority, precisely the lazy, uninformed, scared-ass mindset that led to the reelection four years ago of George W. Bush.

The Pool, which opens for a run at Film Forum on September 3, has a lyricism that is new to Smith’s work. Based on a short story by Randy Russell, the star and cowriter of American Job, it focuses on Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), a young man who scrubs floors and delivers cups of chai in a hotel in Goa. He projects his dreams of a better life onto the glittering blue surface of a backyard swimming pool that belongs to Nana, a wealthy man—played by one of India’s greatest stars, Nana Patekar—who lives alone with Ayesha (Ayesha Mohan), his beautiful, rebellious daughter. Shot with a handheld 35-mm camera that gives a fairy-tale radiance to the riot of colors on the city streets and in the lush gardens around the rich man’s house, The Pool roots its fantasy in the details of daily life. Ventatesh escapes the hotel by becoming Nana’s gardener. The scenes in which the two repot plants and clip hedges are as magic as those in which Venkatesh and his best buddy make friends with Ayesha. For a few weeks, at least, they throw class to the wind and share the possibility of a freedom unknown to both Hollywood and Bollywood.

— Amy Taubin

The Museum of Modern Art in New York presents "Chris Smith: American Original" from August 29 to September 1. For more information, click here. The Pool screens at Film Forum in New York from September 3 to September 16 and will be screened at theaters across the United States throughout September and October. For more information, click here.

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Day of Wrath, 1943, stills from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 97 minutes.

GIVEN ALL THE EXECUTION by burning in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), it seems only natural to open a discussion of the film by asking what’s at stake. It’s not just witches. The Danish director’s 1943 tale of forbidden love during Europe’s seventeenth-century inquisition puts many things into the, er, crucible: the soul’s fate, the consequences of extreme repression, even narrative coherence. Dreyer unifies them so masterfully in pursuit of higher truth that Day of Wrath is often classified as his best work.

A reclusive type and a solitary figure in film history—no lofty predecessors to speak of, and no followers—Dreyer was not known for his edge or humor. His films are frequently described as “chaste.” Less angsty than Ingmar Bergman, the other Scandinavian auteur enthroned in cinematic Valhalla, he stubbornly played down the experimental nature of his work, which has roots in both the German Kammerspiel, or chamber drama, and the parlor magic of Vermeer. Critics have, with some justification, found nothing especially groundbreaking about the subjects of Dreyer’s fawning close-ups, wide-eyed martyrs seeking God. But his stylistically daring 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is undeniably a high point of the international avant-garde. No other movie shows such devotion to the expressive powers of the human face—“that landscape one can never be tired of exploring,” as Dreyer called it.

He drew the camera back a bit for Day of Wrath, but it is still a very unconventional film. Based on a Norwegian play Dreyer had seen performed in Copenhagen three decades earlier, it is the story of Anne, the unhappy second wife of a pastor, Absalon, who is many years her senior. When Anne and the pastor’s son, Martin, fall in love, Absalon’s mother suspects her of witchcraft. Anne uses her sorcery to kill Absalon, whose mother then denounces her. Martin, horrified by the weight of their sin, refuses to defend Anne, and she is sentenced to death by the church.

Although the religious extremists, as we would dub them today, seem to win out in the exquisitely moving finale, Dreyer’s film benefits from a highly unorthodox formal approach. David Bordwell has noted how Dreyer constructs a “circular” mise-en-scène through montage and camera movement—tracking one way, panning the other—that flout Hollywood’s code of carefully coordinated match-on-action cuts and impenetrable “fourth wall.” Space is revealed gradually, in the round. The viewer’s sense of it—in particular the rectory living room, where most of the drama unfolds—is not immediately clear, and Day of Wrath is not about cutting to the chase. Dreyer, who believed that “tension grows out of calm,” may have in fact shot and edited his films this way in order to slow them down.

It’s also safe to presume he wanted to loosen the film’s link to the natural world. The austere, somewhat theatrical set design also helps keep Day of Wrath from getting bogged down in the material. Dreyer’s nontraditional lighting schemes make the walls seem to glow, and the film’s tonal juxtapositions—a forest-idyll scene includes wood for a witch’s pyre; children sing as she burns at the stake—have an otherworldly quality. “Abstraction allows the director to get outside the fence with which naturalism has surrounded his medium,” Dreyer once claimed. You could say that Day of Wrath is tailor-made for transcendence.

The fact that Anne’s struggle does not, as in the Italian Neorealist cinema that emerged around the same time, take place against a battered backdrop—or against any sort of tangible backdrop, really—makes the intrusion of worldly suffering all the more startling. Early scenes in which an old woman is stripped and tortured by church officials, then sent plunging into the flames, haunt the rest of the film. Somewhat miraculously, Day of Wrath was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. With it, Dreyer very aptly revived the issue of social and spiritual repression. But just as the film floats somewhere between the ground and the ether, it also belongs to no one time in particular.

— Darrell Hartman

A newly struck print of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath screens at the IFC Center in New York from August 29 to September 4. For more information, click here.

Left: Fred Halsted, L.A. Plays Itself, 1972. Still from a color film in 16 mm, 55 minutes. Right: Fred Halsted, Sextool, 1975. Production still.

BORN IN LONG BEACH IN 1941 and raised all over the state of California, Fred Halsted rarely left his adopted city of Los Angeles. Capturing the city as few other films could, L.A. Plays Itself (1972), Halsted’s first film, has come to be regarded as a classic within the genre of gay porn. It looks more like an experimental film than a porno, and, in its time, it garnered Halsted the kind of celebrity that simply isn’t possible today. Halsted never held a regular job; he didn’t teach; he had no gallery representation; he had no agent; he didn’t shoot commercials or advertising campaigns; he didn’t even have a social security number. He made films and performed in them, published a magazine (Package), ran a sex club (Halsted’s), and, for a while at least, kept all of these ventures afloat.

During the ’70s, Halsted also directed the remarkable short Sex Garage (1972) and an attempt at crossover success, Sextool (1975). He gave provocative interviews in a wide range of publications and wrote a small but fascinating body of erotic stories. The apogee of Halsted’s unprecedented career came when he presented his films at the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired prints of them for its permanent collection.

After these successes, the ’80s were unkind to Halsted. He continued to direct, but his films from this period have little to recommend them beyond the obvious attractions. Pornography made its gradual transition from monstrously profitable and intermittently interesting outlaw form to almost respectable, formulaic corporate content, and after the transition, there was little room for Halsted’s artistic concerns. In 1986, AIDS deprived Halsted of his main lover/partner/tormentor, Joey Yale. Despondent over Yale’s death, unable to find his bearings in an age not to his taste, financially and creatively destitute, Halsted sought refuge with an unsympathetic brother, who put him up in an apartment building he owned in Orange County. It was there that Fred committed suicide in 1989.

Untimely deaths, legal complications, and the day-to-day indignities of living in a city devoted to ruthless development harassed Halsted the artist. Today, access to his work is all but impossible, due largely to the indifference (or hostility) of his family. Only a handful of his friends survive. Halsted’s films have fallen out of distribution, though scenes from them can be seen on various bargain-DVD compilations. The city made available to us in L.A. Plays Itself, the Hollywood of lost boys on mean streets, has nearly been eradicated. To reconstruct Halsted’s history is to imagine another world, a time when a man with no formal training in filmmaking and a small amount of money could make a sexually explicit experimental film starring himself, and the result could become a hit that enabled him to embark on a career.

Artist William E. Jones presents Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage at Light Industry in Brooklyn on August 26. For more information, click here. His book on Halsted will be published next year by Semiotext(e).

— William E. Jones