Now that's a thought.
What kind of time-frame are we talking about on this Peckinpah and Lombardo thing? Before SP had even started making features? Also, which (possible) quotes from Gance and Dreyer are you referring to? I'm not looking for an exhaustive list, just a fer-instance or two.
To answer your first question, according to David Weddle's book IF THEY MOVE... KILL 'EM!, Sam was so wary of the studio destroying another film of his, as they had with MAJOR DUNDEE, he made sure he had a young unknown editor (but with talent) on his his side for THE WILD BUNCH gig.
He had met Lombardo when shooting NOON WINE for TV, in his first "wilderness period". Lombardo was part of the camera crew, but Peckinpah, while having a drink with him, learned that his ambition lay in editing.
Shooting on that film started on March 25th, 1968, and Lombardo was hired just before the crew went south to start principal photography. According to Lombardo, he showed Sam his multi speed, multi POV TV sequence (an episode called MY MOMMY GOT LOST) just before production started.
As seems to be the case with many of Pekinpah's movie's, his editor was at work on cutting the picture as soon as rushes were available (mainly because of the sheer quantity of material running through the six cameras).
For the second question, during the snowball fight sequence in NAPOLEON, the editor cuts frantic, multi speed, multi camera shots into a delerious montage, probabaly the best bit in the (often pompous) picture. There are even shots where clockwork cameras were thrown in the air, and clips used from the results.
Thinking about the Dreyer film in retrospect, I think I was a bit hasty with that one. If he was quoting anything from Dreyer, it would have been from VAMPYRE, rather than JOAN OF ARC, which I don't think has any slow mo action in it. VAMPYRE does (the whole film feels like a stifling, slow motion dream), and Truffaut wrote an interesting short essay on it called THE WHITENESS OF CARL DRYER. Been about 20 years since I last saw it though, so I can't name specific moments.
