Page 257 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

of underdevelopment, but of a return to bestial, primordial times. The urchins seem more like a
'primal horde' than any Dickensian underworld mob, pre-moral rather than amoral. This, and the
obscenity of the rubbish dump mausoleum, brings to mind the recollections of the disregard for
human life that characterised those moments of the twentieth century which came to define historical
periods of profound change (dying imperial monarchism to emergent totalitarianism) rather than the
unrestrained capitalist ethos in general.
Prof Dr W. W. Krysko recalls - towards the end of the twentieth century - a terrifying scene
that greeted his ten-year-old self in the spring of 1920. As the snow melted in the field outside
his father's factory in Rostov, mounds of corpses and skeletons appeared. Thousands of bodies
had been dumped there for eventual burial. There were horses' carcasses too, whose rib cages
became shelters for hundreds of wild dogs, wolves, jackals and hyenas. A n d among them lived
bands of equally wild children, orphaned or abandoned.9

So can we conclude that this return to the bestial is not some accidental regression, bur part of a wider
system? The Scottish author Ralph Glasser, who chronicled a life not unfamiliar with the margins
of civilisation1 0 once told me that in Los Olvidados you had 'gone too far'; that you had spoken an
unacceptable 'truth'. Let us take this speculative conclusion to be this 'truth'.
Remember the shot in which a boy is seen suckling a pig? Rather than dwell on this, or find critical
distance from it, you blast the audience with it (an 'unacceptable' image, one that breaks rules of
tasre and decency), then a swish pan to the right and a rapid fade - leaving us to react to the ghost of
the image as it vanishes. The way in which this moment is delivered underscores the way in which it
counterpoints the scene of Jacobi's fate. In both instances you do not frame and deliver the image in
a way that suggests a critique or judgment. Rather, you confront and shock us with the image and so
force us to pass judgment. A n d the choice is clear - be reduced to the status of a beast or be eliminated.
And why this imperative, of a rush towards a new prehistoric age? To prepare the way, outside the
First World, for what we would now term globalisation.
To establish the historical precedent of your strategy, allow me to quote your fellow travellers
André Breton and Diego Rivera, from the manifesto written with Leon Trotsky and published
in 1938, 'Towards a Free Revolutionary Art'. This was written during a period in which 'Every
progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as "degenerate". Every free creation is called
"fascist" by the Stalinists.'11 A n d Trotsky, understandably, was drawn towards the dissident European
intelligentsia:

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realises that the role of the artist in a decadent
capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms
which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the attist the
natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play and which
psychoanalysis has analysed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral 'ego'
and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration wotks to the advantage of the 'ideal of
self,' which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior

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