The fevered, anxious Arrebato (Rapture), the 1979 feature by Basque-born director Iván Zulueta, is steeped in the hedonism and horror of addiction. The director and his collaborators nurse a heroin jones that is evident in nearly every frame, and as the characters constantly seek pleasure, the vanity of that existence, and even of the very act of filmmaking, ends up a death sentence. Mesmerizing and harrowing, this anguished cry for help offers only one solution: to stop feeding the monkey. That doesn’t just mean the end of sexual fantasy and the elusive high; Zulueta seems to suggest that the only path to survival is to stop making movies.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; Zulueta lived until 2009, but never made another feature. In an uncredited role, Pedro Almodóvar dubbed one of the female characters here. And in fact, several cast members went on to appear in Almodóvar’s films, and Zulueta would design posters for the director’s early films. But despite props from Almodovar, who called this his favorite horror movie, Arrebato was out of circulation for decades. Now, after a sensitive restoration that clarifies the action and remains true to the grainy celluloid vision, you can now see it on the Criterion Channel.
Eusebio Poncela stars as José, a low-budget filmmaker who’s working on a sequel to his werewolf movie. But as the film opens, we see another film being edited; this comes from his friend and nemesis Pedro (Will More), who’s packing up a Super 8mm reel to send off to José. The act of filmmaking is here immediately connected to an act of violence; Pedro pours a heaping dose of viscous, bloody goop onto the parcel; this turns out to be sealing wax, but it’s only the first of several times we see the troubled addict fixated on semi-liquid material that seems to have a bodily origin, but whose source remains uncertain.
José is a junkie—for film and for heroin. He lives with Ana (Cecila Roth), who’s already nodded out on their bed. José should be working on his new project, and at first, he resists taking a pill, instead flushing it down the toilet; but soon enough, he shoots up and joins Ana in bed, where they’re so out of it they can barely paw each other.
Soon, José manages to draw his attention to a mysterious package that arrived; this is the film we saw Pedro wrap up. Threading the Super 8mm film through a projector (which, in an obvious metaphor, he can barely keep upright), he begins to examine the footage while we flash back to the time José’s friend Marta (Marta Fernández Muro) introduced the fellow filmmaker-addicts.
As Pedro narrates this complicated personal history (in a gravelly voice that seems at odds with the young man on screen), he explains the troubling mystery: Pedro has begun making time-lapse films of himself at rest, but at a certain point in the night, the camera reveals only a series of completely red frames. What happens during the photographic blackout, which only gets worse as Pedro keeps filming himself?
With its sordid plot and graphic depiction of sex and addiction, Arrebato plays on one level like a telenovela as imagined by the Velvet Underground. But Zulueta is so fully immersed in his art that this track-marked melodrama turns deliriously experimental. And not just on the visual side, though the film grain is a constant reminder of the analog source. The score, credited to Negativo but also put together by Zulueta, keeps returning to an eerie electronic motif that seems to evoke both the addict’s arc and the mechanics of film: the sound begins with a rapid, pulsing tone that accelerates to a frenetic pace before dropping off and slowly petering out with a percolating, percussive drip. This sound seems to chart the rise and fall of the addict’s euphoria, but it also resembles the whirr of a completed film reel winding down and gradually coming to a stop.
As much as Arrebato depicts a desperate search for pleasure, the tone is melancholy; you can see the sweat and tension build to an unbearable level. Roth has a great presence here—you can see why Almodóvar would turn to her again and again. But it’s Poncelo who carries this awful burden on his shoulders, and you can sense the actor’s exasperation until the final act of celluloid violence.
In what seems like a throwaway remark, the character of Pedro misses a chance to go to the holy site of Lourdes with his aunt. Arrebato portrays souls lost in a hell of their own making. It’s unpleasant, and unforgettable.
The post Rediscover: Arrebato appeared first on Spectrum Culture.