In one of the first scenes of Arrebato (1979), José (Eusebio Poncela), a B-movie director, argues with an editor over the final scene of what’s unmistakably a low-budget vampire flick—specifically, whether or not to include a shot of an actress making eye contact with the camera. “It’s the only interesting thing in the whole picture,” he says, yawning. “She stares at the audience, and they’ll get it that she’s delighted to be a vampire.” What seems so obvious that it’s boring to José is likely an homage to Bill Gunn’s ignored–in–America but adored–in–Europe Ganja & Hess (1973), which ends exactly as he describes: with a freshly–christened Ganja, dreamily locking eyes with viewers.
Ganja and Hess / Arrebato
Despite his pretensions, José refuses to continue working—“Fuck the movies,” he says not a minute later. On his way out, he smears a few fingers’ worth of fake blood on his neck and caps his canines with plastic fangs. “In the end, it isn’t me who loves cinema, but cinema that loves me,” he says in a ghoulish affectation, shutting the door behind him. We won’t see him in the studio—or engaged in any other type of moviemaking—for the rest of the film.
The scene articulates a hard to swallow truth for plenty of would-be auteurs: that an appreciation for film doesn’t necessarily equate with one’s ability to produce them. Bluntly speaking, this was the case for Arrebato director Iván Zulueta: a seminal figure in Spain’s post–Franco, countercultural Movida Madrileña (Madrid scene), whose close friend Pedro Almodóvar once described as “much better than me” during the brief period the two were peers.
Arrebato marked Zulueta’s second and last feature. Shortly after its release, he vanished from the up-and-coming scene in apparent surrender to a well-known drug addiction. The film’s tale of a heroin-hooked movie maker obsessed with his craft and disappearing into a void, eerily foreshadowed the circumstances, and the plot thickened further when Arrebato was pulled from distribution circuits after an extremely brief run. It has remained difficult to source outside of Spain, holding out as a rare “lost” film well into the 21st century. The newly remastered, 4K Altered Innocence edition represents the first time it has ever been commercially available in the United States. (Anthology Film Archives in New York City will also be doing a run of the film—on 35mm and DCP—starting October 1, 2021, followed by a national rollout.)
In Arrebato, Zulueta is represented by Pedro—a fey, mercurial figure with a perennially pallid, haunted look—in addition to José. The film begins with Pedro sending José a package containing a singular film reel, an audio cassette, and a key to his apartment. The rest unfolds over flashback, with Pedro’s voice recording providing narration.
The two first meet when Pedro’s cousin brings José to visit their bucolic, childhood home. The two bond over a shared interest in filmmaking (and heroin), but a distinction is clear: while José regards his profession as just that, cinema has “chosen” Pedro. He seems to possess mysterious powers—hypnosis and the ability to manipulate time—analogous to a filmmaker’s ability to enchant with imagery, and to exert absolute control over a made reality. He’s prone to crying fits whenever he views his work (compulsively shot, impressionistic Super 8 footage), and admits that he believes these spasms will kill him.
Sans explanation, Pedro demands that José teach him how to film “at a precise rhythm.” José sends him an interval timer instead, but the effect is the same: life-altering. “Now I didn’t have to rely on my pulse, which was a bit unsteady,” Pedro offers in explanation. Like someone cured of a lifelong affliction, he sets off to see the world and capture “so many rhythms, all distinct, that I’d never heard before…”
Yet the wide world proves too much to handle for Pedro. Shored up at a penthouse in Madrid, he succumbs to a decadent lifestyle that leads him to the brink of suicide. Until one night by accident, he leaves his camera on, “click clicking” as he sleeps. He discovers a single red frame in the reel the next morning and interprets it as a sign of life; a signal from another realm (“A rapture took place without me doing anything”). He pivots to a purely passive, unaffected M.O. and watches with feverish excitement as the red squares multiply each night, creeping closer and closer to consuming him completely.
Audiences watching Arrebato for clues as to Zulueta’s disappearance got hard evidence instead. Production had allegedly run overlong due to an opium den-like atmosphere on set, and Arrebato’s copious scenes of unsimulated heroin use confirm—nay, document—this. The mystique that surrounds Zulueta exists in spite of the reasons for his early retirement being far from a mystery.
As an autobiographical, fantasy allegory, Arrebato is more elusive. While one force that compelled Zulueta to retreat from the limelight is plainly depicted, others are obfuscated—often, ironically, by drug scenes that leave nothing to the imagination. Like an addict whose habit takes precedence over obligations, the progression of Arrebato is frequently interrupted by overlong scenes showing needles inserted into arms and lines of powder being methodically cut like film strips. The pace of Arrebato flatlines during these sequences, resulting in a momentum that could best be described as arrhythmic.
Zulueta toys with our perception in other ways. Pedro repeats lines of his narration verbatim (or does he?) and at one point, a female’s voice is replaced with a male dub (Almodóvar?) With these tactics, Zulueta makes characters’ substance-induced confusion contagious. Still, while Arrebato is challenging to follow, one never gets the sense that Zulueta is deliberately trying to throw us from his scent. When the film was released, some elements may have been more clearly recognizable (and explicable) as self–referential. For example: Pedro’s hallucinogenic shorts were actually Zulueta’s. The character’s fixation with rhythm is reflected in these pieces, which were created during a period when the director was experimenting with time and tempo. “It was not my intention to make an avant-garde, elitist film, because my deepest wish is to communicate with my audience the most intensely I can,” author Roberto Curti quotes him as saying. The delirious atmosphere of Arrebato was likely an accurate portrayal of Zulueta’s world at the time, when cinephilia and drug addiction were coalescing into a bizarre and fearsome new reality. Indeed, Arrebato’s central conceit could be communicated in a tagline of the sort of B-movie José trades in—“Arrebato: A camera that eats!” One can imagine.
The horror-movie theme of ingestion is present from the onset of Arrebato (“Just listen and watch,” Pedro advises José at the beginning of his narration, “or better yet, eat and digest it”). Critics have also noted the presence of vampire mythology beyond the first few scenes, adding yet another dimension to the film’s convoluted relationship with time. In a definitive take, professor of Spanish Film Alberto Mira writes:
As a balancing act between the avant-garde and more commercial narrative cinema, Arrebato goes as far as telling a story using classical devices... but then refuses to provide satisfactory closure. We can read this as a failure of classical narrative, or as a suggestion that whatever Arrebato is ultimately about can only exist beyond the limits of (classical) language. The vampire image straddles the worlds of narrative light and avant-garde twilight.
It’s tempting to draw a neat connection between drug addiction and blood-sucking, as many filmmakers have done before and since Arrebato (Bill Gunn with Ganja & Hess, among them). But this risks overlooking Zulueta’s characterization of the camera itself as a parasitic force. It stalks Pedro in his sleep, leaving behind its own version of a trail of blood on the captured film reel. When the entity devours him completely, it ushers him into the immortal realm of a film reel. The last time José encounters Pedro, it’s on the Super 8 footage he’s left behind. Staring straight through the celluloid strip, he beckons and mugs, echoing back to the vampiress we saw at the beginning of Arrebato, in José’s movie.
To compare Zulueta to Arrebato’s two directors, Mira places him side-by-side with Almodóvar, writing that the latter “has been celebrated as the Movida success story, and from that same perspective, Zulueta now belongs to the margins of the Movida mainstream... and more generally stands for everything about the period which was impossible to assimilate; his work speaks of frustration, obsession, powerless to deal with everyday realities.”
This description is attuned to the popular, tragic narrative of Zulueta (and suffice it to say that Arrebato’s protagonists are “powerless to deal with everyday realities”). But in fact, Zulueta’s fate was less horrific than might be extrapolated from Arrebato. His career as an artist never truly faltered. Even while in recovery, he continued to create, designing posters and helping to foment the look and feel of Movida Madrileña and especially Almodóvar’s early work.
Though often classified as a horror film, Almodóvar writes of Arrebato’s ending in triumphant terms. “Not for nothing was it the Super 8 camera... that enraptures the prostrate and expectant bodies of the protagonists Will More and Eusebio Poncela, that ushers them to a better, or non-world.” Of this “non–world,” Almodóvar adds for context: “The element in which [Zulueta] felt most comfortable was abstraction. The pure image, brimful of meanings but freed from the burden of fiction.” The ether that Pedro is drawn to may represent the figurative abyss “staring back,” but for a cinephile like Zulueta, it also seemed to signify a gloriously lit exit sign.
For all its mysteries, Arrebato was—among many other things—a swansong to filmmaking—a proclamation of “Fuck the movies” from someone tired of making them, but wed to them on a spiritual, near-physiological level. If it eerily portended the exodus of its maker, it’s only because he was already halfway out the door.
