Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1980)

[Àngel Maeztu]

Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1980), the Spanish cult movie par excellence will be released on a 2-DVD set here in Spain early next month (unfortunately for you amigos, only with an audio track in Spanish). This set will feature the Iván Zulueta short Leo Es Pardo (1976) and a couple of documentaries about the Basque director.

Clip 1, Clip 2, Leo es pardo, & The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes: A Look at Ivan Zulueta's 'Lost' Cult Film

[bollibasher]

This is finally being released? Wow. Previously the only DVD edition was given away with El Pais newspaper.

No english subs though... which leaves me in the same position as with my downloaded version, i.e. still clueless!

[Trelkovsky]

I've just bought it and it looks gorgeus, like I've never seen it before. The documentarys seem really interesting. Unfortunately it doesn't include subtitles in any language.

[yrazor]

The German 2-Disc-Edition by Bildstörung is completely English-friendly. The feature as well as the bonus feature optional German & English subtitles.

[htshell]

Anyone seen the blu-ray for Zulueta's 1969 rock/pop music film Un, dos, tres… al escondite inglés?

[senseabove]

Per Bloody Disgusting, this has had a 4k restoration, a new 35mm print struck, and will be touring a few places, followed by an eventual home video release from Altered Innocence.

[therewillbeblus]

If Pedro Almodóvar set out to make a Raul Ruiz film inspired by the core idea around Infinite Jest’s titular subplot, this might be in the vicinity of the product we'd get. This is one of the most uniquely vibrant, unpredictable, and self-reflexive horror films I've ever seen. The meta references cover everything from Zulueta's own tragic drug habit, to cinema's intoxicating and addictive elements, to the narrative's seizure by aesthetic-influenced fugue states, to the relationship between dreams, cinema, and paralytic incarcerations externalized as a confessional of impotence to resist cravings for ecstasy. An undercurrent of themes is quite obvious: cinema is a drug, or worse, a monster like Dracula. Cinema turns us into vampires, kills us, annihilates our will to hold an identity without it, makes us powerless over its forces of infinite possibility in projected sensations. The "rapture" holds an amusing double meaning from its literal translation of immense pleasure (the short-term effects of Pedro's films, or heroin) and the biblical extraction of life from earth into the mystery of a Higher Power. Here that higher power is not God but a camera. For Pedro and José, pleasure- whether derived from heroin, sex, or film- obsessively controls thought and compulsively drives behavior. Like a drug’s power, the camera served as a participating variable in Pedro's concept of his life - the belief that the camera is sentient and providing him with energy as he sleeps formulates an absurdist narrative personifying the equipment. Perhaps this isn't so wild a leap when one's existence is overtaken by an external substance that makes their life unmanageable.

The camera, like an opiate, could be considered the addict's closest friend, to film experimental cinema without rules or logic but only feeling, chasing euphoria. It's interesting to choose experimental cinema in particular (humorlessly filtered through a more ostensibly-posturing horror genre) as capable of creating that enigmatic stimulation Pedro seeks, as this anti-genre's unpredictability walks a far less secure tightrope than narrative cinema, a shaky beam of intangible-signifiers to either fizzle out or ignite ineffable spiritual experiences for an audience. Pedros says that this cinema can give him the feeling he feels he needs, “to be on the brink of the abyss” with false expectations that it will help him gain comfortable bearings on his state of being. If it does, this will be fleeting, like any high, but the addict can only see two inches in front of their face. It's no wonder Almodóvar loves this film (and dubs the voice of one of the woman!)- for this labyrinthine narrative is like Borges on smack, and the art-house pop in phantasmagoric camerawork is disorienting and sobering at once; the inebriated style and narrative slippage as self-reflexive to the ideas of drug use, and cinema magic inducing real dreams that become hypnotic nightmares invading our consciousness with hypervigilance.

This film is rather inexplicable, and it surely won't be for everyone. The clear themes are nearly outmatched by the elliptical density of cryptic energy operating the characters like puppets, divorced from audience comprehension of typical agency-stripping in horror films revolving around the process of its loss. Here there is no 'process' of loss we can measure- the state of addiction already held and respectfully treated as nebulous to its own characters, rather than linearly gravitating to the audience's desire to be participants-by-proxy of the palpable steps of this depletion. It's an audacious strategy, and would be quite alienating for many if it weren't for the eccentric ideas continually subverting expectations and reviving any investment we may have lost along the way. The addict will understand what Zulueta is doing and will be able to peripherally align with these characters through intellectualized self-reference, but we're flooded with enough reasons to love this film via avant-garde bolded lyricism for that club membership to scarcely matter, birthing a vibrancy that will independently overwhelm viewers with candied saturation of cinema's vast potential.

[kubelkind]

Thanks for this wonderful and perceptive analysis. This is one of my all time favourites, and has a strange facility to become a different film on each rewatch. Sometimes the campy humour takes precedence, sometimes the horror aspects, sometimes the avant-garde and philosophical aspects. Sometimes I feel like I've understood everything in it, sometimes not (it is very like Ruiz in that respect!). Is Zulueta using (his) drug addiction to discuss (his?) cinema or vice versa? Pedro's films are of course Zulueta's own earlier experimental works. After reading your analysis, I want to watch it again and definitely will when I get a chance to see the new restored version.
A couple of other points: Almodóvar seems to have been pretty much a protégé of Zulueta and has written about his influence. Another is that I'm told this is very much a film about Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Franco regime. I'm not Spanish and can't really comment on that at all, but I suspect that the pursuit of euphoria here has a very strong political (post-dictatorship) dimension to it. A friend once told me he heard from another friend in Spain that immediately after the death of Franco people were "high on freedom" and doing hysterically reckless things like deliberately driving fast on the wrong side of the road. Maybe someone here with more knowledge of Spain at that time could comment?

[beamish14]

It really is a remarkable discovery, and it's heartbreaking that Zulueta was never able to make another feature.

Can I just say that I love how Altered Innocence's theatrical arm has released this under the "Anus Films" banner, and has an appropriate logo for that?
The 35mm print looks great. The Nuart in Los Angeles showed both that and the DCP at different screen times.

[therewillbeblus]

Sometimes the campy humour takes precedence, sometimes the horror aspects, sometimes the avant-garde and philosophical aspects.

The first film I thought of while watching this was oddly Peter Strickland's In Fabric, which accomplishes all of those ideas you mention boiled down into one gonzo tone in a surreal haze that demands immediacy of attention, much like this film

Is Zulueta using (his) drug addiction to discuss (his?) cinema or vice versa? Pedro's films are of course Zulueta's own earlier experimental works.

SpoilerShow

It seems important that José deliberately engages in self-destructive behavior around his latest film at the start of Arrebato, destroying valuable elements in the editing room that would provide potential for a good movie. Is this self-destructive behavior emulating his addiction, provoked by his somber state following a breakup, or a rejection of art due to apathy? I think it's perhaps a combination of all, but certainly related to the latter- the tolerance gained from repeated drug use, or creation of cinema, causing low levels of stimulation for pleasure-seekers, and prompting José to ruin his own movie to give him some sense of mild high by actualizing his agency in a novel manner, stirring the pot for a fleeting moment rather than mechanically going through the motions with no feeling. It's also important to note that addicts often aim to seek pleasure as a self-delusion when they're really trying to cope with dysphoria. The characters speak of chasing euphoria, but they only do so because the alternative is to sit in boredom, with feelings of meaningless existences, with their own uninteresting selves, and the painful emotions and thought patterns that come with that exposure to self. Once they have experienced these higher levels of stimulation, there's no turning back, and life as we know it becomes bleaker to look at, and unbearable to sit in sober.

So, to answer your question, I think Zulueta is using his own experiences with raising the bar away from the gravity of dysphoria in the present, real world- be it by increasing doses of heroin or experimenting more creatively with cinema- to reflexively admit his own self-destructive fatalism through this film. Zulueta knows that Pedro and José are not engaging in logical behaviors of self-interest, but he also acknowledges the internal logic of their hopelessness to see outside of the narrow mindset of the 'next big high'. They both accept their fates knowingly that the camera will trap them, but this seems like the last resort left once they've exhausted the limitations of filmmaking and other avenues of ecstasy-chasing, as they see it. Your point about how Pedro's films are Zulueta's own works make this even more tragic, as they clearly mark for the director a time when making these movies were 'enough' to fulfill his needs of satisfaction, before the holds of desensitization moved the goalpost yet again. They are beautiful to look at, and when he (through Pedro) speaks of being "on the brink of the abyss” while making them, we sense a filmmaker who can see glimmers of the beauty he was once restored by in his early films, and truly remembers and longs for a time when this was sufficient to meet the needs of his self-gratification. Zulueta shows us these films, trusting that we too will be in awe, but he's already prescribed his own death with cognizance.

This film feels like a suicide note from an artist who can peripherally observe and communicate the process of numbing pleasure to the point of self-immolation, but can't bring himself to do anything about it. Whether the filmmaker is using his art to discuss drug addiction or drug addiction to discuss relationship to art seems like a trivial causal link to focus on, when Zulueta is using both in parallel to both surrender his will and fondly remember previous stages of lower-bar pleasures with vitality. That he can express any, let alone all of this, including his submission to death, with such vigor is a testament to his symbiotic passions for cinema and living life to the fullest, even if after the film is over he knows he will be lost, with yet another bar of tolerance set that he cannot surpass.