Page 252 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

I'm sure this was said in earnestness, even though it undoubtedly brings a wry smile to your
lips. You, after all, had elucidated the lot of 'the wretched of the earth' in Los Olvidados (1950) and,
most movingly with its naive form and didactic tone, Las Hurdes (1933). Godard had articulated a
notion of the use of the 'underground' long since implicit in your films. Today, looking at Godard's
work and directions from the end of this turbulent period, a period in which he partially succeeded
in aligning a cinematic 'underground' with the emergent geopolitical 'underground', one struggles
to avoid a sense of déjà vu. I mean not only in terms of the questions and actions that gave rise to
the 'new revolutionary politics' and its milieu; I'm thinking specifically of Ici et Ailleurs1 and the
urgent and sustained questioning of our relationship with the Palestinians. Let us note, pragmatically,
that the occupation that concerned Godard continues, and that the historic failure to solve this has
suggested an inherent weakness that has been eminently, and bloodily, exploited.3
But perhaps the perspective on the struggle for liberation has changed. Godard accused us of
being unable to empathise with the reality of the Palestinians' struggles on a day-to-day basis wheteas
now, it has been argued, in general terms we find ourselves unable to empathise with our own - but
can recognise a genuine and moral interaction with the realpolitik in the footage of the Palestinian
militant resistance. The phenomenon of this déjà vu suggests the very opposite of the implications of
Godard's contemporaneity ('in the world today') as qualifying his response to the question about
a notional underground. Is it not the case that Godard rendered the seemingly transient timeless
through abstracting ideas of struggle, revolution and emancipation?
Your films, however, are formally (that is, thematically, narratively, socio-politically) embedded in
their specific periods. Your method, your analysis, is handed to us as a case study, to then be applied
to other scenarios, to new questions and actions - a challenge it is difficult to avoid.

THE EXPLOITATION OF PROBLEMATIC IMAGES

The difference is clear: you, Luis, often place your dispossessed within a wider sense of a world system
- as the unfortunates who have found themselves, through no fault of their own, in a quarter of
no use or interest to the imperialist powers of the twentieth century. They are the abandoned, the
forgotten, they are those beyond the ken of any concrete bourgeois political system. It is here that the
underground, in its preferential option for the poor, can remain naive and didactic in form since it is in
such quarters that imperialist death throes are blatantly manifest.4 This form happily accommodated
the 'exploitative' aspect of many of your films or, rather, the finding of such an aspect in the films in
their 'exploitative' contents, presented, then, so as to shock (which then became a foundation for theit
promotion; I'm thinking of the wonderfully lurid posters advertising the films).
You need not disrupt the narrative or 'contaminate' the film form to invoke alienation and
ambiguity. From the very outset, in a series of images that startled and offended (in Un Chien
Andalou, 1928), you discovered that film was capable of delivering, straight-up, an impact sufficient
to outrage the audience, to make them flinch, or even look away. In the context of the infinite
underground of violence and oppression, as identified by Godard, it was always enough to simply
allow the film to parade problematic images that seemed to resonate with outrage at the scandal of the
twentieth century - a form of counter-terrorism. As Jean Vigo commented, in 1930, ' M . Bunuel is a

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