Arrebato

Iván Zulueta, the madman responsible for Los Brincos' Contrabando album art wasn't just into art; he was mainlining the stuff. His debut flick, "Arrebato", isn't just batting its eyelashes at the medium; it's a full-on, drug-fuelled ménage à trois, a wild ride that transports you straight into Zulueta's transgressive cinema.. We're talking about a movie that flips the bird to narrative rules, opting instead for a glorious, unhinged freefall.

Our dubious hero on this descent into chaos is José (Eusebio Poncela), a horror director whose sunken cheeks and nicotine-stained fingers are a testament to his chosen lifestyle of editing cinematic garbage between heroin power naps. He tumbles headfirst into the bizarre world of Pedro (Will More), a peculiar acquaintance who drops a bombshell in José's mailbox: a confession tape, an audio diary charting Pedro's ever-deepening, almost vampiric love affair with film itself.

From that moment on, it's a tight, airless journey where reality and hallucination start doing a dizzying dance. A relentless tide of heroin pulls José and his on-again, off-again squeeze, Ana* (Cecilia Roth), deeper into its clutches. Zulueta shoots this like someone who's stared into the abyss and found a movie camera. Every frame practically oozes. The camera practically salivates over José's veins as he ties off. Pedro's homemade films hiccup and sputter, punctuated by jarring flashes of red-like celluloid actually bleeding. There's sex, but it's all clammy skin and fumbled attempts at connection. A threesome in an elevator that feels less like an erotic fantasy and more like a macabre dissection.

Pedro isn't just filming; he's striking a Faustian bargain. The camera sips his time, his sanity, his very life force. By the time the credits roll, he's not just behind the lens; he's become the lens. José, of course, follows suit. Because what is addiction, really, if not trading your mortal coil for a sublime, fleeting rush? Zulueta knew this intimately; he was deep in his own addiction when he brought this beast to life.

Ultimately, "Arrebato" delivers a truly singular and unforgettable experience-a straight-up Lynchian odyssey through the darkest back alleys of cinematic obsession. It's where the camera itself morphs into a hungry, vampiric entity, draining the very essence from anyone brave enough to fall under its spell. When it all clicks-when Pedro's flickering films and José's dissolving face meld into the reel-it's more than just cinema. As one character so eloquently puts it, perfectly capturing the film's twisted heart: "All my life, it was like a huge wank without cum."

José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) is a frustrated horror film director of short budget stories and heroin addict in a thunderous relationship with Ana Turner (Cecilia Roth) . The cousin of his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernandez Muro) , outcast Pedro (Will More) , sends him a reel of film , an audio cassette, and the key to his apartment despite the fact that the two have only met twice. As José and Ana listen , the audio cassette narrates the two occasions when the two men met . The strange Pedro, who is an obsessive maker of homemade films , snorts heroin with José and asks if he knows how to film time-lapse photography. Pedro shows José his home movie s, which he has never shown to anyone . Later on , José , mails Pedro an interval timer that would control his camera's shutter, shooting at specified intervals . Shortly after , the rare and offbeat Pedro is suddenly missing . As the druggie filmmaker will investigate what happened with the author while shooting his brief consciousness during drug abuse which subsequently disappeared. The research will lead the characters to fall deeper in drugs addiction.

A plain and simple plot dealing with a short budget horror filmmaker gets in touch with an eccentric young who is attempting to shoot weird movies becomes into a confuse yarn in David Lynch style resulting in a quasi-lysergic experience for the spectators . This is a ¨cult movie¨ deemed to be the fundamental and essential film of the ¨Spanish Movida¨ of the late 70s and early 80s that took place mainly in Madrid , and away from the thematic and technical assumptions of conventional cinema . The picture chooses to play freely with the elements of audiovisual language with a claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of shoot itself with astonishing time-lapse frames . It results to be a challenge for movie exegesis , that's why some reviewers panned extremely the film because of it contains uncompelling characters and "inscrutable" screenplay . Trio starring : Eusebio Poncela , Will More , Cecilia Roth , giving nice acting . They are accompanied by brief appearances and cameos from Elena Fernán Gómez , Luis Ciges , Alaska , Pedro Almodovar , some of the uncredited. Special mention for the film's cinematography by Angel Luis Fernández , mood , strange musical score and director Zulueta's building of tension . It packs an atmospheric and eerie soundtrack by Negativo and Iván Zulueta himself but uncredited , adding fragments from Siegfried's Funeral March written by Richard Wagner and a song : I Want You, I Need You, I Love You written by Ira Kosloff and performed by Cecilia Roth .

The picture was original but rarely directed by Iván Zulueta . Iván was born in 1943 and died 2009 in Donostia-San Sebastián, Guipúzcoa, País Vasco, Spain . He was a director and writer, especially known for this Arrebato (1979) , Un, dos, tres... al escondite inglés (1970) and a lot of shorts as A mal gam (1976) Frank Stein , Masaje , Kinkón, among others . Zulueta with Arrebato won several nominations and prizes as Chicago International Film Festival 1980 Nominee Gold Hugo Best Feature Iván Zulueta ; Fantasporto 1982 Winner Critics' Award Iván Zulueta Winner International Fantasy Film Award Best Screenplay Iván Zulueta Best Actor Eusebio Poncela ; Nominee International Fantasy Film Award Best Film Iván Zulueta and Mystfest 1980 Nominee Best Film Iván Zulueta. Rating : 6.5/10 . The flick will appeal to ¨Cult Movies¨fans. .

If you want to explore the prehistory of modern Spanish arthouse and counterculture landscape, you must follow the antecedents, and will find many connections and influences behind names like Almodovar, Banderas, and other popular names of the Spanish "Movida" and associated film scene. You might start taking a quick look at Jaime Chavarri's "Mi querida señorita" and "El desencanto" to understand some of the latent energies that exploded fast forward in a counterculture piece like "Rapture".

Zulueta studied graphic design in New York, at the prestigious Arts Students League in Manhattan Midtown, where in 1964 he discovered Warhol's Superstars at The Factory, Paul Morrissey, and other vanguards of the underground movement; Jonas Mekas' and his Film-Makers' Cooperative and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque.

We can be safely assume that being the son of the director of the San Sebastian International Film Festival helped him establish contact with names of the New American Cinema like Jack Smith, Brakhage, Bogdanovich and Cassavettes.

Their influence on Zulueta's work is clear, especially on his first shorts, in which he also departed from narrative and pursued oblique storylines, mostly based on abstraction and minimalism, favoured, by budget constraints too. These shorts, by the way, are amply self-referenced in "Rapture" in combination with more Structuralist influences that result in a rather interesting underground genre mix mush.

The year is 1979, Spain's cultural elites are staging their transition to democratic modernity with a glittering explosion of slow-cooked vibes. The Punk and Post-Punk counterculture imported from nearby London is revitalizing the cultural landscape, awakening sleepy influences and reinvigorating them, permeating henceforth into "Rapture" narrative composition, making an extensive use of fashion, photography, comics, cartoons and wall art elements to which Zulueta, himself a pictorial artist, was already especially fond of.

Alongside these representations, Rapture also appealed to the marginal crowd by purposely hinting to an emergent LGBTQ+ community, facilitated casually through some recreational drug use depiction, these however do not come out as some sort of queer militancy but as positively bristled, campish and wildly comic sexual energy, as a necessary and somehow accidental consequence of sexual liberation.

These energies however clashed heavily with moods that dominated the official narratives, homosexuality was still de facto criminalized, unorthodox personalities were profiled and harassed as socially dangerous. Liberalization efforts however, galvanized and inspired the youth and a more open approach regarding the new gained "modernity" spread and subsidized other artistic endeavours in the form of what it came to be known as "La Movida".

Plot summary: José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela), director of Midnight horror movies, is in a creative and personal crisis. He is unable to consolidate his breakup with Ana (Cecilia Roth) and also receives news from a disturbing acquaintance Pedro (Will More), addicted to filming in Super 8 and utterly obsessed with discovering the essence of cinema with help from Marta (Marta Fernández-Muro), his loving and worrisome cousin who helplessly pays him attention and care despite his ungrateful extravagance.

The film revolves mainly these around two characters who, after a couple of previous meetings, will connect for the last time through letters, a cassette and some Super8 tapes.

Pedro disappears but entrust to Jose a kind of final revelation; claiming that film provoked something that only the Jose can decipher. Ana (Cecilia Roth), an actress and José's ex-girlfriend, hands him some of Pedro´s letters hoping for reconciliation or a way out of the relationship.

José and Pedro, fascinated by each other, use cinema and drugs in a completely different way. The first, the result of excesses, has gradually lost his genuine passion for cinema and now only sees it as a job. Pedro, who perceives Jose´s vampire, presents him his own as a way of redemption and ultimate act.

Because "Rapture" is mainly a horror film, drugs on the one hand and cinema and existential boredom sucks the protagonists´ blood. Above all it is a vampire movie because it works as a metaphor for what happens to you when your will disappears, when you are becoming a vampire, when passion and boredom begins to be self-destructive and cannot be stopped.

Zulueta demonstrates a wide knowledge of cinema, its rhythm and patterns. He valued naturalism, poetry, and emotion, and believed that only a new use of language was able to expand the boundaries of cinema. Like Artaud he also believed in the interconnectedness of the art; did notice a lack of evolution in cinema, sought a new way of approaching reality and was not interested necessarily in logical coherence.

However, in "Rapture", Zulueta confirms himself as a highly formalist filmmaker, unsurprisingly as he wanted to make a Roger Corman-Easy Rider-style film for young people with a low budget, but one that would perform well on screen and be well received by the public.

He ended up foregrounding the medium from a personal perspective, the subject and the social object of the film. Playing with frame, projection, and time was no longer important. He aimed to present the story in its bare components as an anti-illusionist rather than as an academic "structural film," Zulueta however, was not fond of categorizations.

In "Rapture", more attention is paid to how creator, characters and alter-egos are cast, rather like a work of art, to the point where the plot itself hardly matters. To the point that makes the audience experience not just a movie, but a work of art, the auteurist "real" that fits with the mood of the audience for which the film was originally intended.

"Rapture" can be assessed on several levels but all viewers have the feeling of watching perhaps the most accurate autobiographical feature film that Spanish horror cinema has produced. One realizes that Zulueta worships fetishes, POP objects, film or television screens, mirrors... and one finally realize that THOSE strange things that happen to the characters have also happened to Zulueta.

This film has a meaning that is not for everybody, just like poetry is not for everyone, which is a bit elitist. The message works through intuition, it has to do with emotion, those that horror films arouse, with the emotions of fascination, and deep down beyond. Thus, "Rapture" is an underground film, because it reveals a series of sensitivities that are off the surface of society, rather, they have to be explored in depth as Jose Sirgado's character does when he delves into Pedro's life, inside many other aspects of it.

We are definitely facing a cult work that has been gaining followers over the years. This is because "Rapture" was far ahead of its time in 1979, this type of cinema was not made in Spain. Zulueta had the ability to absorb foreign currents to create his own. "Rapture" condenses in itself the fabrication of some fascinating characters, the autobiographical tone and the film essay.

It would be quite a challenge to try to explain the film based on logic, under a specific structure and conclusion; each viewer can extract a different reading from it, abstraction works like that. Image is full of meanings but when freed from the burden of narrative sits comfortably amid a rich variety of mindstates.

Through the persistence of spatial metaphors describing character lives creates a universal dramatic switch that masks the real and uneven relationships between characters and audience. Thus, Zulueta achieved something like a magical psychonautic catharsis that conforms a charming, beautiful and strange film, an exercise in creativity and freedom, an aesthetic experiment, and an artistic document that is also a historical document of beautiful and exciting time.

The clearest influences come from Murnau and the German expressionism, had to be as it is a vampires´ tale, closely related, there are also strong Kafka´s Metamorphoses vibes though simmered through influences of Antonin Artaud, Battaille, the Dadaists and their poetics of ritualism, paradoxical experience, divine ecstasy and extreme horror all the way to Jonas Mekas and the actionists elements of gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) of the radical New York art scene.

Of course than this is a posteriori intertextual interpretation. He made clear later on that he wanted to follow Dennis Hopper and Roger Corman styles with a touch of Goddard at most. But "Raptures" escapes beyond Goddard´s "Lacanian" Live-limit experiences. Zulueta rejoices on the use of the poetry of Anguish, Alterity, Eroticism, Disembodiment and Abhumanity stepping far beyond Robert Mulligan´s "The Other", "Peeping Tom", "Blow Up", Oshima´s "Ai No Corrida" or Kenji Mizuguchi's "Ugetsu" which are the most obvious and direct references.

He was original even on who he identified referentially with in terms of atmosphere and theme. But there is a clear will to challenge the conventions laid down before with an anti-idealist philosophy conditioned by "the impossible", breaking "rules", until something beyond all rules was reached.

Which is why he embraced the abject and explored themes that transgress and threaten our sense of propriety. Is unavoidable to compare it with "Eraser Head" by David Lynch or Cronemberg´s "Videodrome", even if they come from the same depths, they are contemporary but thinly relate to each other. Experimental to the utmost, the viewer will notice that Rapture pre-dates visual narratives and treatments in later influential films like Pulp Fiction or The Ring series.

As usual with Cult classics, the great virtue of the film is that all its defects converge to make it even better.

Get hold of it if you can. Best vampires movie ever without even showing any teeth...

If you thing you are committed to your work, see the protagonist of this movie.

The director had to adapt to stern constrains in number of characters and locales and still he came up with a modern classic, catching the spirit of the "movida madrileña" ( a musical an cultural boom in Madrid eighties) and providing a metaphor for the trail of wasted talent this outburst leave, because of drugs, diversion and basic human frailty. In my personal top 5 Spanish movies of all time.

Arrebato by Ivan Zulueta is a wonderful, strange movie. The desire and the magic of cinema full the screen. This extremely beautiful film describes clearly the darkness state of things, the joy and pain of living, taking drugs, being and loving the cinema. A little big jewel to feel.