Director: Carlos Saura Screenplay: Carlos Saura and Angelino Fons Cast: Ismael Merlo, Alfredo Mayo, José María Prada, Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, Fernando Sánchez Polack, Violeta García. Synopsis: Old ‘friends’ José, Paco, and Luis reunite after eight years for a day’s hunting, with Paco’s brother-in-law Enrique also enthusiastically tagging along. As the day wears on, old tensions become apparent and violence bubbles to the surface.
Generally considered Carlos Saura’s first masterpiece, La caza won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1966 (the director’s first international award) and is a landmark in Spanish cinema, one of the most representative films of what became known as Nuevo cine español [New Spanish Cinema]. It also marks a new stage in Saura’s career as the first of his collaborations with producer Elías Querejeta, and represents a stylistic leap on from Llanto por un bandido courtesy of Luis Cuadrado’s cinematography and the sharp editing of Pablo G del Amo (two members of Querejeta’s preferred team of technical crew).
Watching the film today – and cognisant of Saura’s continuous problems with the censor – it’s somewhat amazing that the film exists as it does. Set over the course of one scorching day as four men – former colleagues José (Ismael Merlo), Paco (Alfredo Mayo) and Luis (José María Prada), along with Paco’s brother-in-law, Enrique (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba) – hunt rabbits in the arid countryside. The film takes place in a location (specified in titles at the start of the film) that had been a battlefield during the Civil War, and ‘the war’ (the censors ensured that the Civil War is not explicitly mentioned) permeates the narrative and the relations between the men (the older three served together). Saura cannily employs the landscape as a metonym for the psyches of those who survived the war: battle-scarred, with secrets and remnants of violence hidden in darker recesses. In The A-Z of Spanish Cinema, Alberto Mira observes that the use of metaphor and strong imagery ‘went beyond narrative needs: the heat that drives characters to madness could be read in terms of the stifling atmosphere created in the country after the Civil War, and the butchery was easily read as a reference to the conflict itself […]’ (2010: 71).
For the most part the film is realist in its depictions, but frequent extreme close-ups of sweating faces (a technique that also signals how claustrophobically trapped each man is in his own behaviour), weapons and ammunition – and of rabbits in their death throes – ramp up the tension and give a slightly surreal edge to proceedings. It’s almost a ‘heightened’ reality, as if the camera is feeling the effects of that relentless heat. It feels like a very modern film, not just visually but also in our access to the interiority of the characters, conveyed through their private thoughts in voiceover and also in having them break the fourth wall in moments of honesty and confrontation (although talking to each other, they individually face directly into the camera as they speak). Likewise their states of mind – or at least the unspoken animosity under the surface – is signalled early on via the editing in the sequence where the men are preparing their weapons: a series of shot-reverse-shots show Paco in extreme close-up checking his sites facing right, then cuts to an extreme close-up of José doing the same but facing left (making it appear that they could be aiming at each other). The sequence of shots then repeats before a mid-distance shot establishes their actual positions in relation to each other (sitting alongside one another facing in opposite directions).
Saura’s use of the implicit includes the casting of Alfredo Mayo, who had a particular set of associations for contemporaneous Spanish audiences. As Marvin D’Lugo explains in his book on Saura’s films:
‘As a young man, Mayo built his career upon a series of forties films playing the role of the stalwart Nationalist hero fighting the Republican scourge. By far, the most influential of these was the role of José Churruca in Sáenz de Heredia’s Raza. Not only did Mayo play the part of the nationalist patriot; his role was fashioned as a sanitised version of the Caudillo, replete with narrative parallels to Franco’s own biography. Nowhere in [La caza] is there any overt reference to Mayo’s former screen persona, yet implicitly, the character of Paco seems to represent a sequel to the earlier Alfredo Mayo, film-actor-as-national-hero. It is a shattering statement of the passage of time and the transformation of a bygone mythic hero into a venal and narcissistic old man.’ (1991: 57)
In contrast, as an outsider to this clique – and crucially of a younger generation – Enrique is at one remove from the associations generated by the older men. He therefore acts as witness, and audience proxy, when bitter resentments and disappointments finally cause a breakdown and the men turn on each other with spectacular violence. The film ends with a freeze frame of his face in profile – his panting still audible on the soundtrack – as he runs from the scene in horror.
References:
D’Lugo, M (1991) – The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mira, A. (2010) – The A to Z of Spanish Cinema, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.
Director: Carlos Saura Screenplay: Carlos Saura and Mario Camus Cast: Francisco Rabal, Lea Massari, Lino Ventura, Philippe Leroy, Manuel Zarzo, Agustín González, Fernando Sánchez Polack Synopsis: 19th century Spain. The Spanish people have expelled the French but now have to deal with the unjust Fernando VII in their stead. A group of bandits led by ‘El Tempranillo’ garner a Robin Hood-like reputation by robbing only the rich, dealing fairly with normal people, and continuing to defy the King.
The reception of Los golfos had demonstrated that depicting the Spanish here-and-now was a sensitive issue with the dictatorship’s censors, but if Saura thought that delving into historical drama might allow him some leeway, he was mistaken: Llanto por un bandido (1964) was heavily cut. The opening sequence in particular has been mangled so heavy-handedly that I thought my DVD had jumped a chapter. Here Saura mischievously used playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo (who deployed symbolism in his own work to criticise the Franco regime) as the town-crier, while Luis Buñuel (persona non grata in Spain at this point due to Viridiana (1961)) cameos as an executioner preparing to execute the condemned men by garrotting.
Whether because of the gaps left by the ‘editing’ or my own lack of familiarity with the historical period, I didn’t really pick up on the political subtext with which Saura apparently imbued this tale of a bandit (‘El Tempranillo’, played by Paco Rabal) who acquires a certain level of political consciousness when he comes into contact with a fugitive liberal – the argument for ideological commitment was seen as provocative. To be honest, I took his defiance of the King to be your normal bandit behaviour rather than an indication of solidarity with the Constitutionalists – the character is generally a bit of a thuggish arsehole, so the association seemed to be one of expedience as opposed to ideological inclination.
Overall, it’s not really my sort of film – I also haven’t rewatched it since my original run of the Carlos Saura Challenge, and there isn’t much about it that has stuck with me.
However – aside from providing Saura with additional impetus to be more oblique when presenting politically contentious perspectives – there are a number of elements that are significant in terms of how Saura’s cinematic style developed. Saura’s evident eye for painterly allusions and compositions – which José Arroyo highlights in a post on the film – can be seen most obviously in the homage to Goya’s Duelo a garrotazos / Fight with Cudgels in the fight sequence between Rabal (who several decades later would play the artist for Saura in Goya en Burdeos (1999)) and Lino Ventura where, buried up to their knees, they batter each other with branches. There is also already a distinctive use of music. This is manifested in the way that sequences are either cut to the music or actions on camera are timed to follow the rhythm of the music (for example, in the Rabal/Ventura fight scene their blows fall in time) in a way that seems unusual (to me) for the time. But it is also very striking that the music is often diagetic, i.e. we see the music being performed onscreen within the scene, emphasising musical performance (and specifically the performance of traditional forms of music from Spain, most obviously flamenco) in a way that would become one of the director’s trademarks.
Director: Carlos Saura Screenplay: Carlos Saura, Mario Camus, Daniel Sueiro Cast: Luís Marín, Oscar Cruz, Manuel Zarzo, Juanjo Losada, Ramón Rubio, Rafael Vargas, María Mayer. Synopsis: A gang of juvenile delinquents pool their resources to pay for one of their number to be put on the bill of a bullfighting contest.
To date, the only one of Carlos Saura’s 39 films that I have watched on the big screen is his directorial debut, Los golfos (1962). The film had long been unavailable in any home viewing format (I don’t think it has ever been released on DVD in Spain) and in my original run of the Carlos Saura Challenge, this was the 7th film I watched because – with no way of obtaining a copy – I’d had to skip it until a fortuitous screening at Manchester’s ¡Viva! Film Festival in 2014. A French DVD was released at the tail-end of 2013, but it has French subtitles only and was made with a far-from pristine print – as you can see from the images below.
The film shows a conscious effort to break away from the studio-set films of the time; wide establishing shots emphasise the urban setting, while domestic scenes play out in locations of palpable poverty and degradation. Unsurprisingly the film fell foul of the Spanish censor (its release was delayed for two years – and ten minutes was cut – after it was shown at Cannes in 1960) because the dreary backdrop builds into an implicit social critique, with the young protagonists (played by non-actors) fully aware that their social environment limits their prospects.
The excised footage appears to have been reinstated in the version I saw – at least there are no obvious gaps as there are in Saura’s subsequent film, Llanto por un bandido (1963) (which jumps about abruptly due to cuts). Although some of the editing choices cause sudden cuts, this would seem to have been deliberate on Saura’s part – to disrupt the ‘normal’ narrative form – rather than due to external tampering. At the time, productions had to go through ‘prior censorship’, the submission of their script before they could start shooting, and because the censors were not production specialists they usually focussed on the narrative form. Saura’s filmmaking to date had been in documentary – and he was not overly interested in questions of narrative – but you can see how the experience of going through major rewrites for Los golfos gave him ‘a deeper understanding of the ideological function of narrative as perceived in the censors’ minds’ (D’Lugo 1991: 33). Saura would subsequently move into a more opaque – or metaphorical – style of cinema, which made it more difficult for the censors to point to concrete elements for removal (although the director has said that this was not his primary motive for using metaphors, rather he had decided that he wanted to be more imaginative in the cinema he made), and with which he would make his name internationally.
There is not much in Los golfos that obviously connects to Saura’s later works besides a questioning of Spanish mythology (via bullfighting in this case) and a nascent interest in dance. The central narrative is that only one of the group has a skill that could prove to be their collective ticket out of there – Juan (Oscar Cruz) shows promise as a bullfighter, but is unable to afford the time to train or the exorbitant fee to enter an actual bullfight. On the prompting of senior member Ramón (Luís Marín), the gang agree to raise the money for Juan’s entrance fee through a series of ever more serious hustles and street robberies.
The robberies are carried out stylishly in the chiaroscuro shadows of a moving elevator or with sharp timing in the blazing sun of a parking lot – there is a slickness to these sequences that is difficult to square with other Saura films. However, the truck stop parking lot robbery reminded me of certain sections of La caza (1965); it’s something to do with the lighting (a blazing sun burns with a white heat that almost comes through the screen), but also the combination of that sharp timing with a certain economy of movement. Although Saura didn’t work with Elías Querejeta and his ‘house team’ (including acclaimed editor Pablo G. del Amo) until La caza, there is a kernel of something here that would blossom in that film. The perception that I’ve come across in my reading is that Saura managed to create his first masterpiece with La caza because he started working with Querejeta and Co. at that point, but the flashes of brilliance in Los golfos suggest that something was already forming.
In front of frame, Chato (Juanjo Losada) waits to give the signal to those outside, while Julian (Manuel Zarzo) is on lookout in the rear of frame. The truck driver is sitting at the table behind Chato.Chato is looking at the parking lot where Ramón (Luís Marín – in the foreground) relays the signal to Manolo (Rafael Vargas – standing between the trucks), who in turn gives the signal to…Paco (Ramón Rubio) who proceeds to break into the truck. Saura rapidly cuts between close-ups of each of the men, ramping up the tension.
References:
D’Lugo, M (1991) – The Films of Carlos Saura: The Practice of Seeing, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
When I first decided to set myself the challenge of watching all of Carlos Saura’s films (back in 2013), the project had two purposes: to fill in a large gap in my knowledge of Spanish cinema (I had only seen a handful of his films); to occupy myself while I was stuck in part-time employment (a situation I’d been in since graduating with my PhD in 2010). The idea had formed months earlier but it took me some time to track down access to the films (some are only available as VOD but I’m watching the majority on unsubtitled DVDs), and to work out whether I could get hold of enough of them as to make the challenge worthwhile. For a long time a lot of ‘classic’ Spanish films were unavailable in any kind of home viewing format (the label Divisa has been addressing this in the past few years); at this point Saura had 37 feature films to his name (that figure is now currently 39), some of which have never had a DVD release and many of those that had seemed to be OOP. After 6 months I had found/acquired 30 of the films, and so I started the initial run of the challenge in February 2013.
My initial intention of short posts on each film interspersed with longer pieces about groups of the films never really materialised, although I covered 6 of the films in the first couple of months. In May 2013 I finally managed to get a full-time job and I didn’t sustain any momentum with the challenge after that point – the gaps between posts got bigger and bigger, until I stopped altogether. This was partly to do with lack of time (and energy) but also a resistance to having the challenge turn into a chore (e.g. I would have had to watch 2 or 3 Saura films each month in order to stay on my original schedule, which was fine when I was part-time, but now that left very little time for watching anything else) – the enjoyment disappeared. The last time I wrote about a Saura film for the challenge (on the old blog) was in January 2015…and then I ground to a complete halt. But I don’t like leaving things unfinished, and obviously I now own almost all of the films (I have access to 38 of the 39 films – there is only one that I’ve been completely unable to track down).
But I wasn’t particularly motivated to re-start last year because – as I detailed in my end-of-year post – my interest in cinema generally plummeted, as did my enthusiasm for writing about films. I decided to take a break from blogging for the first half of this year. I can’t say that my enthusiasm has reignited but I don’t want to get completely out of the habit of writing (I did so in the aftermath of completing my PhD and it took me a long time to regain any feeling of dexterity with language or confidence in my own voice – a situation I have no wish to repeat). So I started thinking about the Carlos Saura Challenge again – could this be a way of getting back into writing more regularly? I started rewriting the original posts, rewatching some of the films when my memory wasn’t clear enough – rewriting seemed like a good way to ease myself back into writing without being confronted by a completely blank page. Posting as and when I’d watched and written about a film didn’t work the first time around, so my intention was to get everything written and then post all of it together over the course of 4-6 weeks, maybe towards the end of the year (the writing is more important than the publishing). Then doubt set in – am I just setting myself up for a fall given that I’ve always struggled with momentum on this project, and I’ve still only watched a third of the films?
The size of Saura’s filmography is slightly overwhelming – he has been working consistently for more than 50 years. Looking at a list of his films, I started to consider where I could draw possible lines of division to break them into smaller groups. The director has said that his films can be roughly divided into three categories: the ‘musical’ films (although, as he points out, music is important in all of his films); the fictional films; and films that he describes as ‘personal essays’ about figures who have inspired him (e.g. Buñuel and Goya). But I don’t want to divide them along thematic lines (and I’ll say now – as I did during the original run – that I’m not sure exactly how I will approach the musical/dance films because I lack both the technical expertise and vocabulary for those art forms). So rather than theme, or ‘phases’, I’ve gone with decades as the dividing lines: 1962-1979; 1980-1999; 2000-2017. The films don’t divide equally between those time periods (13, 17, and 9 respectively) but this was the simplest way to do it. I am sticking with my plan of writing everything for a given collection and then publishing it as a sequence over a number of weeks, but completing the whole thing this year is unrealistic; given the number of films in the 1980-1999 collection, that set will likely not appear on the blog until early 2018 (with 2000-2017 to probably follow by that summer).
But for the next fortnight, the 1962-1979 schedule is as follows:
I’ve recently had cause to consider Iván Zulueta’s underground classic on two occasions – someone emailed me to ask whether I had any information on the availability of the film (this is the subtitled version I directed them towards), and I happened to spot that it will be screening in Manchester at ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Festival in April as part of their focus on films from the Transition. These two things led me to read over what I’d written about Arrebato on the old blog – it was one of my favourites of the films I wrote about there – and as a result I thought that I’d briefly suspend my break from blogging in order to revisit it here within my Reprint series. The original post (my 200th on the old blog) was written in December 2014 as my contribution to Shadowplay‘s annual event – The Late Show: Late Movie Blogathon – which focuses on films from the twilight of people’s careers. What follows below is a revised version of that piece. (Update, August 2017: where I’ve reprinted something here, I’ve decided to remove the contents of the original on the old blog and instead leave a link there to the new site (it doesn’t make much sense to have the pieces appear in two places) – however, in this instance, I have left the original to host the clip referred to further below because I have no way of transferring it).
Iván Zulueta’s career as a filmmaker was short – he made only two feature films – but if he is little-known outside of Spain, his influence is nonetheless far-reaching within subsequent generations of Spanish filmmakers. He had spent time in London and New York during the 1960s and 70s, and was strongly influenced by both the Carnaby Street vibe and psychedelia of the former and the underground filmmaking (specifically Warhol) and grubby aesthetic of the latter. His first feature – Un, dos, tres, al escondite inglés (1970) – was a pop musical about a group of music fans attempting to boycott a song contest (one that sounds similar to Eurovision), and is often described as taking inspiration from Richard Lester’s films with The Beatles. He made a multitude of abstract and experimental Super 8 films during the 1960s and 70s: a large proportion of them were either confiscated or lost, but several can be found online (they are all dialogue free – Frank Stein (1972), Masaje (1972), Aquarium (1975), En la ciudad (1976-77), A Malgam A (1976), and Leo es pardo (1976)). From the 1970s onwards he was also a film poster designer for a range of Spanish directors including José Luis Borau (his mentor), Manuel Gutiérrez Aragon, Luis Buñuel (Zulueta’s poster for Viridiana (1961) – a film the Franco regime declared didn’t exist – can be seen on the wall of José’s apartment in Arrebato) and Pedro Almodóvar (including one of my favourites, Entre tinieblas / Dark Habits), and also for the San Sebastián Film Festival (Zulueta’s father had been the Festival Director between 1957 and 1960). Zulueta made two further shorts – some ten years after Arrebato – but when he died in 2009 (at the age of 66), he had spent years in the wilderness in thrall to heroin addiction and a self-imposed exile in San Sebastián (his home city).
Given the emphasis placed on his visual focus by those interviewed in tribute programmes made after his death (almost everyone describes him as incredibly knowledgeable about all aspects of art and design, but someone who never read books), it is perhaps appropriate that my first experience of watching Arrebato was a copy with no subtitles and murky sound (one of El País‘s collection of DVDs): I clung to the images like a life raft.
To summarise the plot: In the present (Madrid in the late 1970s), film director José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) returns home to find that his actress ex-girlfriend Ana (Cecilia Roth) – a heroin addict like himself – has returned to his apartment after several weeks of absence. In between arguing with Ana and sliding into a drugged oblivion, José starts listening to a recording – and eventually watching a film – sent by an old acquaintance, Pedro (Will More), a younger man who is obsessed with shooting film. A lot of the film plays out in flashback as the recording causes José to remember his first strange encounter with Pedro, and also their second meeting a year ago (when Ana was also present). In the last section of the film, José goes to Pedro’s apartment to try to solve the mystery contained within the recording and accompanying film.
I can usually get by without subtitles but here I think I would have struggled even with clearer sound because the script is full of gnomic utterances, and More’s delivery is deliberately strange (Pedro’s voice is usually exaggeratedly deep, but rises when he becomes excited or ‘enraptured’ and increasingly childlike) with large parts of the film conveyed via his voiceover. The desire to lose yourself in something (or someone) is a common enough impulse but in Arrebato this ecstasy is tinged with horror, suggesting that both cinema and drugs (the chosen routes into the sublime) are vampiric forces. The film is full of moments of beguiling but unsettling beauty (cinema as enchantment) in conjunction with a building sense of claustrophobia. The latter is generated via the film’s limited locations (José’s apartment during the course of that one night, the country house where he first meets Pedro, or the bedroom of Pedro’s Madrid apartment), the action frequently taking place in the shadows (faces usually illuminated by the flickering lights of projectors), and aurally through certain repetitive elements on the soundtrack (a recurring theme features the sound of children’s toys in an uneasy lullaby, but there’s also the insistent clicking of the timer on Pedro’s camera).
The film’s title refers to a state of being that the central trio – or at least the two men – are seeking. As Pedro explains it, what they are pursuing is that sense of being enraptured in something that we have as a child, when we could spend hours focussed on one thing and in our own little world. That an object is involved is important because for Pedro this state relies upon the act of looking, but all three of them also use drugs as their gateway into rapture. Zulueta described these symbolic items as “an object that condenses a whole series of things that have shaped you” [I’m assuming that this quote comes from one of the documentaries on the subtitled DVD – I didn’t note the source in the original post]. Pedro tests the (rare) people he meets by trying to find a) their special object, and b) how susceptible they are to being enraptured.
José’s object is an album of collectible stickers depicting scenes from King Solomon’s Mines (Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, 1950) (from Zulueta’s own childhood collection), for Ana it is a Betty Boop doll, but for Pedro it is (or will be) his own Super 8 films. His sharing of his film collection during José’s first visit becomes a performance of grimaces and pained squeals as he hasn’t managed to capture the precise (but ephemeral) thing he is after. By José’s second visit – between which times José has sent the younger man a timer for his camera so that he can record his time-lapse images with more precision – Pedro has accomplished his filmmaking intentions as far as he can at home, and in the aftermath of the visit will set out into the world to capture new images. Much like José and Ana he will slide into a world of sex and drugs (the latter eventually curtailing the former), but Pedro’s dissatisfaction with those experiences leads him back into his cinematic obsession with an even greater intensity. At the point at which he sends the recording and film to José, he has come to believe that his Super 8 camera has taken on a life of its own, and is vampirically taking his life force from him while simultaneously allowing him to reach an ever-heightened state of rapture.
Even during my somewhat incomprehensible first viewing, the charisma and chemistry of the central trio was plain to see. Eusebio Poncela – already associated with nonconformist roles at this point – was the most experienced of the three, with a certain amount of blurring between life and art given his participation in the movida (a cultural phenomena in post-dictatorship Madrid; some of its key figures, including Zulueta, appear in Pedro’s Super 8 film of a party). Despite José’s uncertain disintegration (the vampire film he has just directed is turning into a disaster, his relationship with Ana is mutually-destructive, and he’s in a downward spiral with drugs), Poncela’s stillness is the calm centre around which the more volatile other two circulate. In the reunion documentary (included on the subtitled DVD – filmed in 1998 and therefore doesn’t feature Zulueta, who was in self-exile at that point) both Poncela and Will More state that their character is Zulueta’s alter-ego – more likely the two represent different aspects of the director. More was also part of the same social crowd and had appeared in one of Zulueta’s Super 8 short films; the role of Pedro was written specifically for him. By turns childlike and sinister, More’s performance is unsettling with deliberately exaggerated vocal tics and gestures, and a breathily insinuating style of delivery on the recording. More so than José or Ana, Pedro is someone on the margins by inclination rather than social circumstances (in terms of class and money he seems comfortably off, and unlike the other two he doesn’t work). Arrebato would be More’s only significant role – he accompanied Zulueta into heroin addiction and cuts a ravaged figure in recent footage.
Although the film is undoubtedly ‘about’ the men, Cecilia Roth is nonetheless equally memorable in what was her first substantial film role. She says during the reunion documentary that as the youngest member of the team (she was 23 at the time of filming, whereas her co-stars and director were in their 30s) she was worried about playing a character older than herself – a woman “with a past” as she describes it, whereas she feels that Arrebato was “the beginning of my own past”. Roth (like Poncela) obviously went on to significant roles with Almodóvar, but arguably she has never been as incandescent as she is in the sequence in Arrebato where she dresses as Betty Boop and sings along to the record player. It is an overt and conscious performance by Ana – she stands in front of the projector screen, with the light of the projector acting as a spotlight – and an attempt to win José back (although undercut, as I noticed on my second viewing, by the fact that the song she sings is the one that plays in the scene where he introduces her to heroin). She is so alive that she jolts the camera into movement – in the only travelling shot of the film, and possessing a dynamism that is otherwise only seen in Pedro’s films, the camera follows her as she dances towards José (the original post has a clip of the sequence at this point – I no longer have the file and haven’t been able to replicate it because VLC isn’t working for me). It’s a genuine ‘a star is born’ kind of sequence, in someways at odds with the rest of the film but perhaps all the more effective for that.
Arrebato‘s reputation as a film maudit was established from the outset. It was turned down by both Berlin and Cannes on the basis of its pro-drugs attitude (although that is arguably a matter of perception given that those onscreen are devoured by their addictions) and it had a limited release in Spain, sinking more or less without a trace. In the documentary Iván Z (Andrés Duque, 2003)* – a series of conversations with Zulueta, who by then was on methadone and attempting to reenter the film business (without success) – he says that he was burnt out after Arrebato but had known while he was making it that it would likely be his only chance. He is animated when discussing cinema (and his admiration for David Lynch) and very candid about his addictions, but falters when talking about his then-current situation (he was back living with his mother in the house he was born in and likens it to The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) – the sensation of being stuck in the same place but not knowing how to get out). A sense of loss accumulates in the recurring assertions of his former colleagues that he was a genuinely exceptional talent, and a unique figure in Spanish cinema, who could have had an international career.
The influence of his second feature film however has had a far greater reach than one might suppose for a film that never had a proper theatrical release (and belies the ‘cult’ label that is often attached to it). Pedro Almodóvar is the most obvious (and possibly facile) example. He was a near contemporary (his voice appears in Arrebato – he dubbed Helena Fernán Gómez) and his 1980s films share certain aspects of Zulueta’s aesthetic style (and indeed most of Arrebato‘s cast). But there’s a freshness to Arrebato that survives, and its influence lives on more than thirty years later. My first viewing of the film was just a couple of weeks before I saw El Futuro (Luis López Carrasco, 2013) at the Bradford International Film Festival in April 2014, and it’s a clear point of reference for the latter (confirmed by the director in this interview).
Arguably Arrebato‘s current reputation within Spain means that it is now part of the acknowledged pantheon of Spanish cinema; in 2016, when the film magazine Caimán cuadernos de cine surveyed 350 film writers (critics, journalists, festival programmers, film historians, academics – no filmmakers were asked) to create a top 100 Spanish films, Arrebato occupied 5th place (ahead of it were Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961), El espíritu de la colmena / The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973), El verdugo / The Executioner (Luis García Berlanga, 1963), and Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961)). Writing in 2002, and arguing that the film deserved better than to be fetishised with the label ‘cult’, critic Ángel Fernández-Santos summarised Zulueta’s film thus:
Arrebato is a dark instance of pessimism. It is intricate cinema, unfathomable at some points of its crooked and tumultuous journey. And it is, above all, cinema in a raw state, disturbing, painful and great, that situates us with rare elegance in front of a vigorous and devastating image of the dissolution of conscience and the search for death. The film was conceived and built – in a long and bumpy creative process – by a complex and refined filmmaker, a one-off, gifted as few are to perceive and express feelings of desolation and despair. [my translation – the original is here]
So not exactly a laugh riot, and it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But it stayed with me for the seven months between my first viewing and when I tracked down a subtitled version in order to write about it for Shadowplay’s blogathon (the fact that I kept thinking about it was part of the reason I decided to write about it in that context). My second viewing – with the luxury of subtitles to clarify some things (but not everything) – elevated it further in my consideration, and underlined the sense that Zulueta’s subsequent disappearance was a loss for cinema. Arrebato is a haunting film, one that gets under your skin. If you get the opportunity to see it, whether on DVD or at a festival screening, take it.
*Iván Z is also included on the subtitled DVD, but can be found on YouTube with subtitles – I particularly recommend it because aside from showing Zulueta talking lucidly about himself, rather than his being filtered through other people, it also features examples of his paintings, illustrations and film posters (some of them are stunning).
I have previously written about the 4th and 5th editions of this Spanish online festival. Specifically dedicated to films – from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and Ibero-America (Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin American countries) – whose form, style, or duration mean that they will struggle to access the normal distribution routes or obtain a commercial release, Márgenes initially takes place in key cities in Spain, Mexico, Chile and Uruguay at the start of December, before moving online during the second half of the month. Documentaries and experimental films tend to dominate the selection.
The online side of the festival makes the films free to view. Sometimes there are rights restrictions on specific titles in certain countries – at the moment Generación Artificial and Santa Teresa y otras historias aren’t visible to me, but I don’t know if that’s a rights issue or just a glitch on the website. Films that aren’t in Spanish tend to have Spanish subtitles, but in past years the majority of the Spanish-language films have had English subtitles. The subtitles aren’t listed on the website – I’ve put a * next to the trailer links below where the festival has used a trailer with English subtitles, which is often a good indication of there being subs on the film as well [UPDATE: this hasn’t been a good indicator this time around]. But given that the films are free to view, you aren’t going to lose anything by starting a film to see whether subtitles appear. I never manage to watch everything, but I will update this post to indicate the presence of subtitles on any films I watch [UPDATE: I’ve watched two and looked at a third – I’ve added thesubtitle infobelow].
The previous editions I’ve explored have revealed gems such as África 815 (Pilar Monsell, 2014), El gran vuelo / The Great Flight (Carolina Astudillo, 2014), and La sombra (Javier Olivera, 2015) (the latter was my favourite in last year’s festival). I can recommend No Cow on the Ice (I reviewed it earlier this year) and personally will be aiming to at least catch Pasaia bitartean, Santa Teresa y otras historias (if it’s available), and Las letras (on the basis that I’ve read positive things about them in relation to other film festivals). The festival announced its prizes yesterday – I’ve marked the winners below as well.
This is the line-up of titles in the 2016 official selection (clicking on the title will take you to the streaming page for that film):
The Márgenes Festival 2016 also includes a retrospective of the work of Lluís Escartín, titled ‘no tengo nada que decir, prefiero escuchar. 30 años documentando lo invisible‘ [I don’t have anything to say, I prefer to listen: 30 years documenting the invisible], and a cycle dedicated to Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva, ‘Un lugar en el mundo‘ [A place in the world] – they are likewise free to view online until 31st December.
One of my favourite short films from the last few years has been put up on Vimeo by its director. I saw Lois Patiño’s Montaña en sombra / Mountain in Shadow on the massive IMAX screen at the Bradford International Film Festival in 2014 where it accompanied Patiño’s feature debut, Costa da Morte / Coast of Death – in my 5-star review of the latter, I mention the short in the last paragraph. I feel privileged to have seen it in an ideal viewing environment originally, but it’s also nice to have the opportunity to watch it again (even on a small screen).
Lluís Miñarro’s opulent and riotous Stella Cadente (which means ‘falling star’) is being released on DVD in the UK next week courtesy of Second Run.
On the surface an account of the short reign of King Amadeo I of Spain in the early 1870s – although this is a film where surfaces can be deceptive – Stella Cadente also functions as a metaphor for contemporary Spain and its ongoing state of crisis. But this is far from being a fossilised heritage drama – the afore-mentioned deceptive surfaces are manifested via a state of Wonderland-like limbo within the walls of the palace, and Miñarro laces the film with perverse humour and surreal juxtapositions (if I recall correctly, Àlex Brendemühl’s Amadeo is dancing to the anachronistic sound of 1970s French chanson in the above image). I was rather bemused by the ‘busy-ness’ of the film when I saw it at EIFF in 2014 (my Eye for Film review can be found here) but liked it sufficiently to import the Spanish DVD the following year – its chief pleasures are sparky performances by Brendemühl and Bárbara Lennie (who plays Amadeo’s wife, María Victoria), and the sense of reality being challenged by illusion in the layered theatricality created by Miñarro (for me, this confusion of reality versus illusion – in combination with the royal milieu – brought Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño / Life is a Dream to mind, although the director didn’t seem overly keen on the comparison when I asked about it during the Q&A). As I noted in my review, the film also includes my favourite subtitle of that year: “Set these rabbits free!”
Second Run’s presentation also includes one of Miñarro’s documentaries, Familystrip (2009) – while his parents have their portrait painted, the director converses with them about their lives, respective childhoods, raising a family in post-War Spain, and the social changes undergone by the country during their lifetimes. It combines oral history with a deeply affectionate cine-portrait of his family. You can buy the DVD directly from Second Run (it is also available from other retailers).
Carlos Marques-Marcet’s feature debut, 10,000 Km (also known as Long Distance), won him the ‘Best New Director’ award at the Goyas in 2015 – the film is available to view on Mubi UK for the next month. The use of social media and new technology onscreen is often cringeworthy but Marques-Marcet and co-writer Clara Roquet on the whole manage to utilise familiar forms of online interaction in a naturalistic way, and create an immersive experience – technology becomes both a point of connection and something that heightens different kinds of distance when a couple (Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer) try to maintain a relationship over the course of a year apart. The film is essentially a two-hander, and I wrote in my review from 2014 that:
Tena and Verdaguer make what could have been an inert series of monologues (we often see them as the other character would, meaning that they are talking direct to screen) into conversations with dramatic and emotional heft. […] That we see neither of them outside of their respective domestic spaces illustrates both the hermetically-sealed nature of Alex and Sergi’s relationship (they are each other’s world) and the limits of their interactions when they are so far apart. The time difference means that their communications are rarely spontaneous, instead becoming a rote series of appointments that make the lack of physical contact glaringly apparent – it is difficult to slow dance with a laptop (although they do try).
The rest of my review can be found at Eye for Film. Take advantage of the film’s appearance on Mubi because a) it’s a well-made romantic drama that is imbued with emotional veracity, and b) there is no UK DVD (although the Spanish DVD has optional English subtitles).
I originally wrote about Guerin’s Tren de sombras / Train of Shadows on the old blog in February 2014 (Update, August 2017: where I have reprinted something here, I have decided to remove the contents of the original on the old blog and instead leave a link there to the new site (it doesn’t make much sense to have the pieces appear in two places)). I am substantially revising that post for this entry in my Reprint series because I have partially rewatched the film this evening (I watched the opening 10 minutes or so and then the last 40 minutes) and subsequently reconsidered at least one element of my earlier piece.
I originally watched Guerin’s film because it had been mentioned multiple times in relation to El Futuro / The Future (Luis López Carrasco, 2013), in Spanish coverage at least, and having not seen the film I wasn’t sure what was being referenced. But it could also stand as a companion piece with Aita (José María de Orbe, 2010) – which I watched for the first time shortly before watching Tren de sombras – focusing as it does on a combination of (apparent) archival footage and a grand house. The connection to El Futuro is the recreation of an era, not simply representing the past but constructing a film that looks as if it was made in the era depicted. Guerin’s film is almost wordless and the only contextualisation for what we see are the opening intertitles explaining that in 1930, amateur filmmaker Gérard Fleury made a home movie in the grounds of his house, a film that would be his last as he died a few months later in mysterious circumstances while filming on a nearby lake. The intertitles also tell us that film had been in such a fragile condition that it was in no state be projected but that it has now been restored.
Back in 2014, I thought that I had misunderstood the French intertitles (there were no English subtitles on the format that I watched) precisely because I initially thought that they had managed to reassemble the 1930s family film when in actual fact Guerin recreated it (something that becomes apparent as the film progresses – so after a certain point I thought that I had confused ‘restored’ and ‘recreated’). As it happens, my French was better than I thought and the opening intertitles are a deliberate piece of misdirection on Guerin’s part. Conceived when the centenary of cinema was approaching, Tren de sombras was a manifestation of Guerin’s desire to explore the origins of filmmaking and a kind of cinematic immersion. The film’s title is a reference to a line from Maxim Gorky’s essay ‘The Kingdom of Shadows’ about his experience of watching moving pictures (by the Lumière brothers) for the first time in 1896 (there is an English translation of that text, here). It might be more accurate to say that Guerin created – as opposed to recreated (because I’m not sure that there is any Fleury family film other than the one shot by Guerin) – a realistic representation of 1930s filmmaking. It’s a testament to the quality of this reconstruction that it is perfectly believable as a 1930s film – indeed a number of reviewers have taken it at face value and refer to the film as making use of ‘found footage’.
The film opens with this 20 minute ‘home movie’, showing Fleury’s extended family at play in the grounds of their home and the surrounding countryside in the summer of 1930. We then switch to ‘the present’ and the nearby town (now in colour), before moving into the grounds of the Fleury home and then the house itself (the interior of which is not seen in the 1930s segment). It is at this point that Guerin’s film foreshadows aspects of Aita; although this house is evidently inhabited, the attention to textures, patterns, reflections – as well as the use of doorways and mirrors to frame our view and the ‘layering’ of the image (by which I mean that the depth of field alters, allowing us deeper into an image) – reminded me of the later film. This sequence is extraordinarily lush with rich colours and patterns in the interior of the house and verdant greenery outside – in conjunction with the music on the soundtrack, it put me in mind of the kind of magical otherness that I associate with Powell and Pressburger productions. The detailed layering and framing hints at what is yet to come, as Guerin and his camera turn detective and revisit the 1930s footage to peel away its layers and reveal secrets within.
In almost a cross between Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) and the kind of analysis that the Zapruder film has been subjected to, Guerin slows, replays, freeze frames, and enlarges different sequences of the film to follow the sightlines of those on camera. This gives new emphasis to the play of shadow and light at the back of the image and brings hidden connections and relationships to the surface. Guerin effectively plays with the language and form of cinema on the screen. The film is broken down to its constituent parts and then put back together with the grain of the image acting as a ‘witness’ to the supposed veracity of what we’re presented with, when in fact it is another layer of the show constructed by the director (the film was degraded by hand during the post-production and editing stages). The sequences that ‘reveal’ the most (shadows of simmering passions and traces of a possible love triangle) are then performed in front of us anew in colour, which is quite jarring. The use of colour in the recreation is the point at which the fakery seems apparent – I am slightly confused that those reviewers who take the 1930s footage as genuine don’t notice that it is the same actors (namely Juliette Gautier and Ivon Orvain) who appear in colour, although with some deliberately exaggerated elements of costume and make-up. In the colour section the camera moves between the different fields of view within the image, illustrating the layering of the image (and again demonstrating the importance of depth of field). As with Aita, at the end of the film I felt like I had just watched a magic show.
There is a French boxset (this one) containing Guerin’s Innisfree (1990), Tren de sombras, and Unos fotos en la cuidad de Sylvia / Some Photos in the City of Sylvia (2007) with optional English subtitles on all of the films.
I am changing my tactics in relation to working my way through Carlos Saura’s filmography. I ground to a halt more than a year ago having originally started in 2013 but only having watched 10 of his films (around 25% of his entire career). I have since watched a couple more but haven’t written about them – I think I need to have a time constraint involved in order to keep going but not one so rigid that it becomes a routine chore. I also think that what I’ve done to date has been written over such an elongated period of time that I would be better to start again from the beginning with a different format. What I have in mind is similar to the Almodóvarthon I had on the old blog in August 2011 with something published on each of the films in a concentrated time frame – but, given that Saura has made almost twice as many films as Almodóvar, realistically it will need to be spread over longer than one month (maybe 5 – 6 weeks). It will take me several months to watch all of the films and write something about each of them so that they can be posted sequentially within the designated weeks. Longtime readers will know that my place of employment goes through some sort of managerial disruption virtually every summer, so – taking that into consideration – November seems like a reasonable month to aim for (all other non-blog circumstances permitting). [UPDATE: events referred to in this post mean that November will not be possible – so it will likely be in early 2017 instead]
UPDATE (June 2017): I have reconsidered how I’m going to approach the challenge – outlined in the second half of this post.
Desistfilm‘s 10th issue – titled ‘From the Pixel to the Glitch: Foundation, materiality and fictions’ – has arrived online today. It’s an exploration of the use of digital media in experimental film or how digital media is used by filmmakers to experiment with different textures and formats. Mónica Delgado (editor of desistfilm) writes that:
In this issue we want to explore about digital media and its variations in experimental cinema as variations of this media. How can digital texture open new paths in cinema opposed to analog cinema? How are the so called internet artists working the digital media? How about the glitch art or impressionist digital art? But we’re also interested to explore films about certain technologies and their expressions: glitch, memes, gifs, which circulate in Twitter or Facebook… how are they material to talk about youth sensibility in the new century? From intimate drama to wacky horror cinema, digital media from its materiality and virtuality in fiction.
I haven’t had the chance to take a proper look yet but there are four central articles in the dossier and an assortment of other related articles, profiles and interviews throughout the site. There is also a reviews section, which is where my own small contribution can be found. I have reviewed Hermosa juventud / Beautiful Youth (Jaime Rosales, 2014), which doesn’t initially have much to overtly connect it with desistfilm‘s thematic focus but the film undergoes a dramatic stylistic shift about halfway through wherein Rosales adopts an innovative approach to depicting the ‘digital generation’. My review is here.
Nobody Knows Anybody 