Victims of Sin · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A baby lies in a trash can in an alley behind a Mexico City nightclub, and the light falling on him is the light Emilio Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa had spent ten years reserving for peasants and for Dolores del Río. Soft key. The garbage around him composed like drapery. Nothing in the shot is winking. That image is the film's entire method: take the discarded thing, photograph it with reverence, and let a woman stand over it and refuse to walk away.

Melodrama is where Deleuze is least often taken, which is a shame, because he built a category almost purpose-made for this film. He called it the impulse-image, and it works on two floors. There is the derived milieu: a real, dated, mapped social setting with hours and a payroll and a hierarchy of rooms. And there is the originary world showing through it, a formless place of appetite and refuse where people are reduced to drives and things are reduced to scraps. The cabaret is the derived milieu. The alley, the trash can, the rail lot are the originary world pressing up under the floorboards. Figueroa had shot Los olvidados the year before, Buñuel's film of children on a garbage dump, which is Deleuze's home ground for this concept. Fernández takes the same material and does the opposite thing with it. Buñuel strips the garbage of consolation. Fernández lights it like an altar.

The impulse-image runs downhill. Deleuze calls this the line of slope: not tragedy, which needs a height to fall from, but entropy. Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) loses the job, then the standing, then the room, then the body, then her liberty. Each station takes something and returns nothing. The one act she commits that actually changes her situation is a killing, and it buys her prison and a long deferral. That is what a slope is. You can act on it. You cannot climb it.

The cabaret is built as a vertical moral diagram: bandstand, floor, tables, balconies, back rooms. Deleuze's term for a milieu this total is the encompasser — a situation so saturating that it does not merely surround the action, it commissions it. With it comes the imprint, the bond by which milieu and character stamp each other. You can read Violeta's whole moral history off two facts: which level she is standing on, and whether she is looking up or down. The crane shots that boom from the band down into the dancers cross that diagram in one unbroken move.

Cinema 1 opens by separating two ways of making movement. You can sample it mechanically at any instant whatever, which is what a camera naturally does. Or you can build it from privileged instants, the posed moment that stands in for a whole action, the way a religious painting picks one gesture. Fernández chooses the old way on purpose. Gloria Schoemann holds the dramatic scenes long enough for each composition to be read as a picture, then switches to a hammering on-the-beat rhythm for the numbers. Suffering, spectacle, suffering. Every station of the melodrama is a set piece, and the martyr is framed from below. The film moves like a processional rather than a plot.

The deep focus is not Bazin's kind. Bazin praised depth of field as an ethic: leave the world whole in the frame, let the viewer choose where to look. Figueroa's depth, sharp from the bandstand to the back wall, is the reverse. It is a closed set in which every plane has already been assigned a moral value. The frame is an argument, not an offer.

The best light in the picture is machine light. Wet pavement as a second source. Cigarette smoke and steam as a medium that makes the beams visible. At the railyard, the locomotives generate their own light and shadow as they pass. Deleuze took from German cinema the idea of a non-organic life of things, where the light-and-dark gradient gives objects a vitality of their own. Here the machines do the lighting, and the railyard is exactly where the film puts its only durable tenderness, with Santiago (Rodolfo Acosta) at the dance hall by the tracks. The industrial world treats her better than the social one. Nobody says this. The lamps say it.

The numbers are not filler. Pérez Prado and his orchestra play themselves, Rita Montaner performs inside the fiction, and the music is diegetic, in a real acoustic space, at the crest of the mambo craze. Deleuze has a name for action transposed into spectacle instead of performed: the attraction-image, the figure that shows rather than does. The number states the film's thesis instead of advancing it. That device is inherited precisely. La mujer del puerto (1934) fixed the sung lament as an interruption that declares what a film means, and Santa (1932) fixed the house musician as the fallen woman's moral witness from inside the number. On Fernández's dance floor the crowd stops being individuals and becomes one pulsing body, what Deleuze calls a dividual: a collective that registers as a single affect.

Every tool here arrived with a pedigree. Tisse's filtered skies and low-angle peasant faces in ¡Que viva México! gave Figueroa his monumentalism. Paul Strand's fishermen in Redes, staged as sculptural masses under enormous skies, gave Mexican cinema its grammar of conferring dignity by composition instead of by dialogue. María Candelaria, made by this same unit of Figueroa, Magdaleno and Schoemann, codified the haloed close-up and the processional staging. Distinto amanecer was Figueroa's own prototype for the wet-asphalt nocturne. Fernández's invention is the transposition. He takes a method built to sanctify the indigenous village and aims it, at full strength and without discount, at a rumba dancer, a pimp's doorway, and a trash lot by the tracks. The low angle that once monumentalized a peasant now monumentalizes a cabaretera's body.

That is a moral claim made entirely in cinematography, inside a formula picture. The cabaretera was cheap product shot on standing nightclub sets, licensed by its moralizing frame to sell more skin than the story required. Fernández was handed the assignment at a moment when his prestige line had stalled commercially, and he declined to condescend to it. What the film demonstrates is that prestige craft is portable: the dignity lives in the camera height, not in the subject's respectability. The argument about who is permitted to be a mother in a modernizing country gets carried by lamps, levels and locomotive steam.

Watch it once for the story and the coincidences will look ridiculous. Watch it again for level and light, and ask of each shot whose side the camera is standing on. Then ask the harder question, the one the film never settles: does sanctifying the garbage redeem it, or only decorate it? Buñuel, one year earlier, with the same cinematographer, said decorate. Fernández spends the whole film saying otherwise. That argument is still open. Take Violeta's side. The film does, with everything except the plot.