Llanito (1971)

Llanito is the first of Lyons trio of films shot in and around Bernalillo New Mexico and it is also the screen debut of Willie Jaramillo The twelveyearold boy acts as a guiding force for Lyon and his audience reading out the names on gravestones and relating the stories of the people buried there He is the focal point of a group of mostly young men with whom Lyon would remain friends and continue to document for the next several decades The film meanders through the town and among its inhabitants passing between groups of people at times with the keen instinct of a desert eagle and at others in a drunken stupor stumbling from one scene into the next with the visceral and irrational inevitability of a gravitational pull