The first major composer to write for film was Camille Saint-Saens, who supplied music for L'Assassinat du Due de Guise in 1908. In later decades, Copland in the United States , Walton in Great Britain , Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the Soviet Union were important composers who also importantly composed for film. Silvestre Revueltas belongs in this select company. Redes (1935) was the first of 10 Mexican films Revueltas scored. It was co-directed by Emilio Gomez Muriel and an Austrian emigre: Fred Zinnemann, later the Hollywood director of High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man For All Seasons . The cinematographer was an American: Paul Strand, called by Susan Sontag "the biggest, widest, most commanding talent in the history of American photography."

"Redes" refers to fishing nets. (In the United States the film was released as The Wave ). The story of this 60-minute film is of poor fishermen victimized by monopoly control of their market. It argues for organized resistance as a necessary means of political reform. Redes has a tangled background. Strand had come to Mexico in 1933, attracted by the revolutionary government and its reformist program. Like Copland the year before, he had been invited by the composer Carlos Chávez. With Chávez, Strand conceived what became Redes and engaged Zinnemann. But in 1934 a new government (under Lazaro Cardenas) came to power. Chávez was replaced as Director of Fine Arts by Antonio Castro Leal. Leal reassigned the music of the proposed film to Revueltas.

This bumpy history may partly account for other discontinuities. Redes sits uneasily between two genres: fiction film and documentary. Most of the actors are non-professionals. Long stretches eschew dialogue. Curiously, the spoken word is almost never backscored - the music speaks when the actors don't, and vice versa. And yet the contributions of Strand and Revueltas are indelible - and indelibly conjoined.

Visually, Redes is a poem of stark light and shadow, of clouds and sea, palm fronds and thatched huts, with Strand 's camera often tipped toward the abstract sky. Metaphor abounds: a rope is likened to a fisherman's muscled arm. Pregnant, polyvalent, the imagery invites interpretation equally poetic: music For a child's funeral, Revueltas furnishes more than a dirge: his throbbing elegy combines with Strand 's poised, hypersensitive camera to fashion a transcendent tableau. The recurrent visual motif of nets that catch fish subliminally suggests the confinement of men: a metaphor underlined by the musical motif of massive tolling brass. At every turn, Strand and Revueltas elevate the film's simple tale to an epic human drama. The poet Octavio Paz pertinently paid tribute to Revueltas as follows:

All his music seems preceded by something that is not [simply] joy and exhilaration, as some believe, or satire and irony, as others believe. That element, better and more pure, is his deep-felt but also joyful concern for man, animal and things. It is the profound empathy with his surroundings which makes the works of this man, so naked, so defenseless, so hurt by the heavens and the people, more significant than those of many of his contemporaries. His music occupies a place in our hearts above that of the grandiose Mexican murals, that seem to know all except pity. Neither the paintings of Orozco, or Siqueiros, or Diego [Rivera] contain sympathy, joy, or compassion. Redes was first screened with live musical accompaniment in Mexico City , and subsequently given in this fashion by the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Tonight's performance is the East Coast premiere. Like similar presentations of The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The City (1939), with music by Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, respectively, a coarse 1930s soundtrack is as transformed as a painting restored from centuries of grime. The influenceof Redes on these two classic American documentaries (likewise products of the politics of the thirties) is ponderable: Strand was a cinematographer for The Plow, and Copland was a known admirer of Revueltas. In a 1937 article for The New York Times, he hailed its American premiere as follows:

Revueltas is the type of inspired composer in the sense that Schubert was the inspired composer. That is to say, his music is a spontaneous outpouring, a strong expression of his inner emotions.  There is nothing premeditated ... about him. When seized with the creative urge, has been known to spend days on end without food or sleep until the piece finished. He writes his music at a table in the manner of the older musicians, quite unlike the musical procedure of the modern composer, who, because he uses complex harmonics and rhythms, is as a rule forced to seek the help of the piano. I mention this as an instance of Revueltas's extraordinary musicality and naturalness. His music is above all vibrant and colorful. ... The score that Revueltas has written for [Redes] has very many of the qualities characteristic of Revueltas's art....