The Filmic Cut and "Switchback" in the Plays of Sam Shepard

Abstract

In Shepard criticism to date, attention has been given both to the film references within the plays and to the playwright's attitude to film as an American institution. As regards the former, there has been elucidation of the many allusions to films in both the plays and prose pieces: George Stambolian, for example, has pointed out Shepard's debt to John Huston in Mad Dog Blues (1971), and Florence Falk his debt to John Ford in The Tooth of Crime (1972). As regards the latter, Carol Rosen has drawn attention to Shepard's paradoxical attitude to film; she suggests that he seems strongly drawn to the "dream–machine identities" which people appear to derive from movie myths, but at the same time seems to realize the "self-destructive power" inherent in a merely passive absorption of them. In her article on Angel City (1976), she is mainly concerned with thematic analysis, but she tantalizingly suggests that: "The play does, in fact, have a structural logic, but it is a logic of film transplanted to the stage; the play jump-cuts from one image, one metaphor to the next, as if two films were being spliced together.”