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Viva la Muerte San Francisco Chronicle A Bloody, Revolting Film When General Millan Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion, returned to Spain at the start of the Civil War, he had only one arm, one leg, assorted fingers and a brain that recognized the enemy. " Down with intelligence ! " he cried in a famous confrontation with the philosopher Unamuno, at the University of Salamanca, " Long Live Death ! " " Viva la Muerte " title of the French-Tunisian film opening at the Richelieu today, became the battle cry of the Franco forces. A terrible chorus in the ears of children who saw their land and families ripped apart. The film, almost as bloody and revolting as war and betrayal, is the testament of one of those children. " It is a scream from my guts, " said Fernando Arrabal, who wrote and directed the screenplay based on his book " Baal Babylon. " Arrabal, a resident of France since 1945, grew up in Spain, the son of a mother who supported Franco and a pro-Loyalist father, a soldier in the Spanish Republic's army, who was imprisoned of the first day of the Civil War. The film, shot in Tunisia, begins on the last day of the war, as the boy Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) hears a truckload of Fascist soldiers announce their victory, still crying " Viva la Muerte ." He goes about the daily business of life and school, tortured by fears for his father (Ivan Henriques) and divided by his love for his beautiful mother (Anouk Ferjac). By accident, he discovers a letter revealing that his mother has betrayed her husband to the authorities. Fando tries to learn his father's fate, never quite believing his mother's story that he tried to commit suicide in jail and later died. Arrabal also treated the theme of betrayal in an earlier play " The Two Executioners, " about the dilemma of two sons whose mother has turned their father over to the executioners for an unspecified crime. In a bleak land inured to poverty and despair, Fando encounters cruelty everywhere. The schoolboys cut up insects, the bigger boys beat him for being the son of a Red, his sexually attractive Aunt Klara begs him to flagellate her, his grand-mother taunts him for his fear of the dark. A firing squad kills some Loyalists. One survives, but a soldier recognizes him as " that poet, the faggot, " and they kill Garcia Lorca too. In Fando's fantasy, the naked children tenderly take up the body of the poet, crying " assassin " at the killers. Fando's fantasies are directly portrayed the mother defecates on her husband, Fando vengefully emasculates a priest. The squeamish walked out when it was shown at the film festival in 1971. But for those of us who have never directly felt the brutality of war, the obscenity of Arrabal'' images was a revelation of nightmares we have been spared. The blood and gore are all there in Arrabal's film, in the tradition of Goya. The question is not whether this is an effective " anti-war " film. What is significant that this nausea remains for a main who was there and so the movie has unique and horrible validity. The grotesqueness is signaled from the start of the credits with a series of Bosch-like caricatures by Roland Topor. Each fantasy sequence is dominated by a single color : they were recorded on TV tape, electronically transferred to film and printed through color filters to achieve some astonishing visual effects. Throughout the film a Danish children's song tinkling and innocent serves as counterpoint to the adult world. When Fando learns his father has escaped from jail, the hope in that innocent bursts forth again in the exultant refrain from the Westminster carol " Gloria in Deo. " Arrabal's anti-clericalism has been matched in films only by Luis Bunuel. At Cannes where " Viva la Muerte " was premiered, Bunuel was asked if he thought he had influenced Arrabal. " Not at all, " Bunuel replied, " the only point we have in common is that we are both Spanish by the Grace of God. "
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Cannes Festival (1) :
Blood,.. violence, sex !
by Amos Vogel
CANNES, France
Two of the major revelations of this year's Festival Arrabal's
sensational first film, "Viva la Muerte, and
Dusan Makavejev's equally sensational "Mysteries of the Body"
employ violence and sex respectively, as tools of revolutionary
purification and liberation.
The famed avantgarde writer's "Viva la Muerte"
is a paroxysm of anguish, a scream for liberty and probably one
of the most ferocious, violent films ever made. Reminiscent of
Bunuel and Kozinsky, it mingles, in hallucinatory images, the
realities and nightmares or a 12yearold boy growing into manhood
at the moment of Franco's victory. (The film's locale though never
identified is clearly Spain, while its intent is antitotalitarian
in an international, contemporary sense.) Every few minutes it
veers from uncertain realism into the boy's imagination, beset
by monstrous tortures, violence, death, and a primitive sadism
that engulfs the spectator precisely because it does not impose
upon, but merely activates his own atavistic, subconscious fears
and desires. The unspeakable mystery of adulthood, the secret
temptation of the sin of sec, the inexplicable terror of government,
the Monstrous suspicion of the mother's denunciation of the father
to the authorities, are fully revealed in the boy's anguished
hallucinations; a document of a Catholic adolescence at a time
of civil war, replete with blasphemous, scatological, logical,
and incestuous incursions.
The nightmare sequences involve rephotographed television images
and manipulated color negatives, creating an unearthly, expressionist
ambiguity that makes the horror more pervasive for being indistinct;
our subconscious immediately, obligingly supplies our own phobias
to render the nightmare effective. Particularly horrifying is
the repented use of a strongly melodic Dutch children's song;
in the context of the nightmares portrayed, it assumes unsuspected
hideousness, changing into an ominous metaphor of innocence soiled
by corruption.
That the film is filled with Arrabal's own obsessions is both
undeniable and inevitable; it has been tempting for some to therefore
write it off as a narcissistic, psychopathological document ;
in reality, however, having passed through the monstrous turbulence
of his imagination, we are restored, through violence, to a possible
hope, a steely new humanism of the 70's informed by Franco, concentration
camps, Abomb. and Vietnam. Arrabal's audacious film was only recently
released from its French censorship ban ; it will pose a significant
challenge to American critics, distributors, and exhibitors.
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Film: 'Viva La Muerte'
Having seen and disliked Alexandro Jodorowsky's screen adaptation
of an early Arrabal play, "Fando and Lis," and having
duly noted the symbols of horror, the rituals of disgust, the
obligatory and unfelt eroticism, and the pervasive allegory, I
was in no way prepared for Fernando Arrabal's own first film,
"Viva la Muerte," in which those elements
reappear but charged now with an intensity and a complex vitality
that I have not seen equaled in recent cinema, especially not
in any recent cinema of the absurd. "Viva la Muerte''
("Long Live Death") has begun a series of midnight screenings
at the St. Marks Cinema and, though no perfect movie, it seems
to me inescapably a major work.
Its hero (Mahdi Chabuch), a young boy, is also named Fando, and
its story closely parallels the early life history of Fernando
Arrabal, whose mother betrayed her leftist husband to the Fascists
during the Spanish civil war and who taught her son that his father
was dead, whereas in fact he was miserably imprisoned. Fando searches
for his father and never finds him, as Arrabal never found his,
but he remembers him and imagines his fateand in a series of harsh
monochrome fantasy passages, memory and imagination largely define
the unique life of the film.
The Imagery of "Viva la Muerte" the defecation,
self-mortification, strange and unusual punishment - reads like
an illustrative footnote to some surrealist manifesto. It is as
if the famous razor across the eyeball that opens Bunuel's "Un
Chien Andalou" had never, lost its cutting edge, its sharp
capacity to peel back fair surfaces and reveal the soft sources
of corruption underneath. As an esthetic program this has its
limits, but within those limits it allows fop Insights not only
of hard brilliance but also of a sometimes shockingly compassionate
humanity.
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The Cast
VIVA LA MUERTE, directed by Fernando Arrabal ; screenplay (French
with English Subtitles) by Mr. Arrabal; music by JeanYves Bosseur;
produced by Jacques Poitreneaud; released by Max L. Raab In association
with Paul Bartel and Elinor Silverman. Midnights at the St. Marks
Cinema, Second Avenue and St. Marks Place. Running time : 90 minutes.
(Not submitted at this time to the Motion Picture Association
of America's Production Code and Rating Administration for rating
as to audience suitability.)
The Aunt.................................... Anouk Ferjac
The Mother................................. Nuria Espert
The Father ................................. Ivan Henriques
The Boy..................................... Mahdi Chaouch
The Girl .................................... Jazia Klibi
The enemy in "Viva la Muerte" seems
not so much the Fascist state or its police, as the women who
fear it and collaborate with it: the mother, an aunt, a grandmother,
all in black, like ministers of death, and yet in mourning for
the suffering caused by their own ministry. The mourning is genuine,
as is the crueltyand it is Arrabal's great distinction not to
undercut the one by the other, but rather to hold each in balance
so that no contradictory impulse is lost on us. He is fortunate
in having as the mother Nuria Espert, an actress of striking beauty,
strong and graceful gestures and an emotional range that takes
her from near frenzy to a languid sensuality without ever losing
contact with a role that might seem to comprise half a dozen different
characters.
Near the end of "Viva la Muerte" it is
discovered that Fando has tuberculosis (as Arrabal had), and he,
is taken to a hospital ship and eventually operated on. From his
recovery room he is abducted by a mysterious little girl, also
in black, who keeps a pet turkey and whom he has known and casually
tormented all through the film. A captive now of his own sweet
bitter fate he is wheeled off into a part of the gorgeous and
landscape that is the film's locale. And bay, and girl, and great
improbable bird enter a configuration that outlasts the generations
and is not explained but it somehow understood as an emblem of
unending torture and delight.
By ROGER GREENSPUN
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c u e
VIVA LA MUERTE (Raab) At the St. Marks Cinema. In French; English titles. One of the artistically important films of the year is coming to us on the new midnightdistribution circuit. It is the turbulent and crushing autobiographical work by Fernando Arrabal, Spanish playwright in exile, who now proves he also has skill as a movie director. His film is to be avoided by those repelled by stomachturning, violent imagery and sexandviolenceentwined assaults on religion. But the subject matter legitimately calls for the most vivid expressions of torment, repression, and unleashed hatred, A boy, played in serious, subdued fashion by Mahdi Chaouch, recalls seeing his father carried away to prison by Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War era. He discovers that his mother, portrayed with cool beauty by Nuria Espert, was responsible. The boy's ensuing search for his father is punctuated by his wild flights of imagination. He visualizes his mother defecating on his father and supervising his torture and execution. Religious authoritarianism evokes thoughts of castrating a priest and forcing him to devour the leavings. There is much, much more of this kind of graphicness. A cheerful children's song counterpoints the horrors. Reminiscent of Bunuel, the film becomes a stinging vision of terror, repressed in reality, but exploding in one boy's mind. While dealing specifically with Arrabal's demons, the intensely creative drama has a universality in its probing of thoughts too hideous to be allowed to surface.
WILLIAM WOLF
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