In Keoma (1976) the past and the present share a space and characters can walk in and out of memories. In Keoma interiority exists in songs on the soundtrack to create a dynamic juxtaposition between sound and image. In Keoma violence exists outside of normal time in slow motion as a kind of macabre ballet. Keoma is a spaghetti western that, through its stylistic exercises, subverts the genre and form to create a psychedelic meditation on death and freedom.
Director Enzo G. Castellari takes his cues from Duck, You Sucker! (1971) and Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973) to make his western Keoma. Castellari had, by 1976, branched out from the westerns he made early in his career. But in returning to the genre he wholly embraces the cinematic poetry of Leone and Peckinpah. The poetics of temporal displacement and slow motion spectacles embrace the mythologizing spirit of the western and execute it with all of the expressionism the cinema has to offer.
Keoma is so stylized and so grand in its formal gestures that it celebrates the genre even as it undermines its myth making apparatus. The tropes of the genre are so boldly designed in Keoma that they affect the audience while simultaneously revealing the plasticity of myth. Myth is, after all, a product of exaggeration. And in Keoma those exaggerations pinpoint where poetry and camp intersect.
In the context of its genre Keoma is considered an “acid western”; a film that utilizes the psychedelic modernism of the sixties as its primary cinematographic style. While this is undeniably true of Keoma, the film itself was made and released far passed the heyday of the spaghetti western as well as the psychedelic genre film. Keoma is the anomalous passion project of Castellari that exists in film history as a kind of coda to the movement of Italian-made westerns.
