Page 253 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

fine marksman who disdains the stab in the back'5 and as Dalf claimed, in the same year, about a man
apprehended for an act of pornographic exhibitionism, that his action was one of the purest and most
disinterested acts a man is capable of performing in our age of corruption and moral degradation'.6
Your uncluttered film form also falls between these two notions.
Your interest in the dispossessed and the forgotten quarters of the world reminds me of
Sokurov's preoccupation with the geographical and psychological limits of human existence. His
film Dni Zatmeniya (Days of Eclipse, 1988) which seems to concern itself with such groups in a
specifically backwater Eurasian context, and then in relation to a subtext of late Soviet Communism,
is one such example. You both investigate and chronicle the 'underground' as a kind of subterranean
annex to bourgeois society, an antinferno - somerhing that is not an aberration in itself but a
necessity for such a society. The expected method for such an endeavour (neorealism - also the
cry that greeted Los Olvidados in the 1951 Cannes Festival) is rejected in favour of an evocation of
the lineaments of the experience of such a zone. This is, in a literal sense, a 'cinema of exploitation'
(an experiential evocation of exploitation) and, in this respect, attacks the collective faith in the
ideological foundations of societies as being misplaced. So for you, unlike Godard, there was no
surprise in the face of'the world today', no earnest reaction necessary, and so no need for a call to
arms via a realignment of, let's say, the practice of film. It is in this way that your work remained
true to the spirit of surrealism rather than just acknowledging your first underground legacy via the
occasional narrative flourish or visual motif. You disrupted in a literally radical way, attacking the
very assumptions that are necessary to sustain notmality, assumptions that failed perceptive Godard
and so polemicised him.
This led Godard, Groupe Dziga-Vertov and others to the so-called 'Third Cinema', perceived as
the harbinger of aesthetic solutions to political problems (and/or vice versa). Yet this too had already
found expression in your ethnographic tendencies, many years before Terra em Transe (1967) and
Vent dEst (1969), Pasolini's 'Southern' tendency, Internationalism and 'Third Worldism' in general.
And, by then, even the old enemy, the Roman Church, had partly recognised the need for some kind
of convulsion, the necessity of an autocritique. Minor clerics, fired by Incarnational Theology, then
discussed (no doubt with the same earnestness) moving the Vatican to a generic Third World country,
so as to be on the new frontline of the third millennium of the historic mission. It inevitably brings
to mind, if considered literally, the kind of scenes that could only be from the Bufiuel lexicon: Papal
splendour reconstructed in some far-flung subcontinentalfaux-socialist state - gloriously redundant,
grotesquely outlandish (as if such scenes had been anticipated by the Mallorcan skeleton-bishops of
L'Aged'Or, 1930).

THE S U P R A S E N S I B L E IDEA AS 'TRUTH'

The 'underground' is not a transitory preoccupation for European cinema. Rather, it has historically
possessed an oppositional political use, partly as the area in which societal norms were tested and
challenged. If only this lesson was understood by our 'underground filmmakers' of today, by the
avant-gardists of the last couple of decades (or, we could say, since the death of Rainer Werner
Fassbinder). They have instead concerned themselves with a critique of form, a kind of relentless

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