Monthly Archives: March 2012

Viva La Muerta Fernando Arrabel (Fr 1971) Anouk Ferjak; Nuria Espert;
Mahdi Chaouch

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 16 March 2012
Ticket price: £5.00

Imagination as the primary act of resistance

Fernando Arrabel’s (FA) Viva la Muerta is a full frontal assault on Franco’s Spain, a country with its back broken by Franco’s fascist death machine; the people murdered or driven to madness and denial by repression and fear.

FA’s assault on the terrible damage wreaked by Franco and his allies the forces of political/religious conservatism, harnesses the intellectual and visceral power of savage satire exploiting the intermeshed expressive elements of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Dadaism, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd, to fashion a filmic expression of deep passionate anger.

The opening title sequence comprises a series of panning shots across a large scroll of sequential organised drawings, economically penned cartoons of distorted figures caricatured in bestial form and depicted in cameos of cruelty and sadism. The film starts with these disturbing images of body laid over a soundtrack that comprises the voice of a child who nonchalantly and brazonly sings a repetitive rhythmic refrain: to my ear a sort of crazy nursery rhythm. The repetition of the song chews into the consciousness of the viewer. I didn’t understand the words, which are in Danish (but may be ‘nonsense’ like all the best child’s rhythms) but this child’s voice is saying something that anyone can understand within the context of VM. The song is a challenge: it sets a mood and opens up a mental space through which the film can filtered and understood. This song defines VM. Repeated as a ritornello. a leitmotif, it carries the film’s key message. In its provocation, its invariance of tone, it communicates an indominitable mocking spirit. However deep we are in the shit, however they kill us and subject us to lies oppression torture and violence, we have within us the means to fight back. The song links our consciousness to the possibility of resistance and struggle. It is a challenge to view the film in the state of mind that spits in the face of the dealers in death.

This is the message FA has fashioned. A film grounded in a child’s song.

After the song the first words we hear are those of some fascist soldiers on the back of a truck, singing they will murder half the people if necessary in order to ‘save’ the country. Viva la Muerta!

A defining character of VM is that it is autobiographical. In terms of structure, VM is episodic in form, but intimate in content. And it is the quality of intimacy that colours and fills out understanding of FA’s film. Episodic films, employing dissonant disturbing images that define the content are usually remote and distant as socio-political critiques. L’Age d’Or never feels intimate; it feels produced to broaden consciouness as an ideological act.

Employing every technique in the agit prop lexicon of surrealism and theatre cruelty, VM is up close and personal. Using this broad palette of deranged imagery, FA is always in control of the effects of the images he creates and releases. I think this is because he knows these people. They are not abstract or abstracted tokens representing the forces of death. In flesh and blood they are the people who killed his father and wanted to kill him. What in episodic films can seem arbitrary and disconnected, in VM is hot wired to emotional necessitythrough the umbilical cord linking his life to that of his mother. The personal and the political are one.

The mother is the hub of VA. She is woman as living flesh. We feel her hand, smell her skin and witness her charged repressed erotic relation to fascism, the Roman Catholic Church and the forces of death. The film starts with a structured narrative core that connects through the eyes of the child (Fando) his mother’s betrayal of the father and her embrace of Franco. Interspersed in the key narrative (though the narrative is never absolutely straight in its telling FA is too supple in his conceptualisation for such restriction) are fantasial /dream sequences. In the film they are presented as hazy colour washed sequences, often savage and beautiful, psycho/temporal events in which cruel insights and visions are perpetrated and experienced. As VM progresses the distinction between the two strands breaks down, cracks up. The sequences characterised by the narrative ‘look’ open up to extreme expressive material, (the priest eating his own balls, the mother bathing in the blood of the slaughtered bull). In the world of Franco’s Spain there is no longer any means of distinguishing different aspects of life, the real – the imagined.. The deployment of systematic violence and cruelty has taken over the whole of the national psyche: everything is nightmare.

VM is a totality of commitment by FA to record what he saw and heard as a child, with nothing unobserved through the scales of innocence. But this commitment, to stand up to fascism ( when it was still a live force in Spain) communicates through all who took part in the realisation of VM. In answering the need to oppose Franco’s Spain VM is part of the creative will of all those who contributed to its making: the mask and prop makers, the cinematographer, the editor, but in particular the actors who were prepared to undergo privation and undertake provocation for the film to be made. Adrin Neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Honour of the Knights (Honor de Cavalleri) Albert Serra (Sp 2008) Lluis
Carbo; Lluia Serrat.

Viewed Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle AV festival) 15 March 2012; ticket price £5.00

Touched by immanence

Honour of the Knights (HK) is about the immanence of vision. I note that some critics have commented that Serra’s (AS) interpretation of Don Quixote depicts an aimless rambling. But I don’t think this is the case, it is simply that the film’s actual movement is not so much upon the earthly domain rather it is on the metaphysical or celestial plane.

HK is grounded in the contrasting physicality of the two principle actors. The squire Sancho presents as a mass, a mountain a colossal being of the earth, a man of the clay. That he can move at all seems in defiance of gravity, an act of will to move when his physical nature seems to demand immobility. Yet when he moves he has a lightness of foot, a nobility of demeanour and when in water the effortless motion of the cetacean. The knight is a being almost without body. A body that is ethereal even when strapped into his metal cuirasses and pauldrons. It is as if he were not there, an immaterial being locked into the material. With his whitened hair, pale skin, white chemise, Quixote, a shimmering luminescence.

And there is no doubt as to who leads who follows. The earth bound, head bowed squire follows the knight who head up moves upward released into his vision. AS takes Cervantes tale and extracting a critical motif, makes it his own. AS recasts Don Quixote as a fable from an age now past where spirit guided the body. Not always successfully perhaps, but nevertheless a fabled time when the desires of the body ultimately ceded primacy to the yearnings of the spirit. A fable of course, but in an era defined by the over arching imperative of consumption and the circuits that amplify individual desires, it’s a shock to be presented, even in fabulous form, with a simple statement of another possibility, another way of being.

Quixote is of course moving, and moving with huge acceleration towards death. It is not a death that is oppressive of life. It’s a death that is at one with life. Death that Quixote equates with the oneness of God. God is all creation in immanent form. To die is simply to experience this oneness. Quixote is a becoming more luminous as he moves through the keys of nature into vision. It is vision that attracts Quixote and vision is the metaphysical gravity that attracts him upwards pulling him out of his body out of the skin bones and white chemise, that contain but no longer delimit him.

The world is an evil place corrupted by actions of men but the chivalric calling transcends it. As Quixote moves on his journey he realises the presenting power of water, the presenting power of the trees of the moon and the sky. Their intensity signifies the nature of the world and of man, as being God given. It is an insight that is mystical whether in the Sufi Christian or Hindu tradition, where life is union.

HK is realised with defining simplicity by AS. The film comprises only of exteriors which are shot both day and night without lighting. The shots sequences and dialogues are refined to simple gesture both of body and speech. The editing decisions are never based on match cutting or continuity in reverse shots, but seem to have been made to affirm the integrity of ‘the moment’ whether it be Sancho’s bodily integrity or Quixote’s translucent integrity as his voice affirms the presence of God and his body and face reflect the affect of this realisation.

I think for AS Sancho follows Quixote because he realises a lacking a void within himself. Sancho does not perhaps understand the transformed state of mind of Quixote. He does not understand or share Quixote’s vision of immanence of life and death. Sancho does understand that Quixote’s vision is something that is important and that if he can be of use to Quixote then this will have been of worthwhile importance. Perhaps in time Sancho will understand things better. Or not. But for now he can be useful in an ultimate sense of the term, helping a man to die well. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk