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. .
Plot summary
A low budget horror filmmaker gets in touch with an eccentric who is trying to film his consciousness during drug abuse. The eccentric get obsessed with the film of the low budget horror filmmaker and research what happened with the author which disappeared. The research will lead the characters to fall deeper in drugs addiction. Finally it is discovered that the low budget filmmaker was absorbed by his camera and the eccentric prepared himself to be absorbed too.
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Bizarre and outlandish film , resulting in a hallucinatory and claustrophobic experience
Occult!
José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela, The Cannibal Man) is a frustrated horror film director who is addicted to heroin and his relationship with Ana (Cecilia Roth, who was in several Almodóvar movies). The cousin of an ex-girlfriend - someone he only met twice - sends him a package that contains a cassette, a reel of film and the key to his apartment. Those moments were integral to the man's life, as the first time they met, José discussed film with him, watched his home movies and then sent him an interval timer so that he could explore time-lapse photography.
The second time, José had brought Ana and somehow, Pedro had a doll that belonged to her in childhood. As they listen to the tape that he's given them, he describes how his camera started turning itself on by itself and filming him while he slept. As time goes on, red frames show up and he is not in those images. He has started to disappear overnight, but if he does not film himself, he starts to go into withdrawal. Even more interesting, those red moments of film leave him in a state of rapture.
He asked his cousin Marta - José's ex-girlfriend - to watch him while he sleeps to see what the red moments mean. She disappears as the film turns to red.
A film about addiction made by a man who was using heroin throughout, Arrebato (Rapture) is an astounding piece of filmmaking that is rarely discussed in the U.S. Director Iván Zulueta is mainly known for his poster designs for the films of Pedro Almodóvar*, but spent most of the 80's hidden away, dealing with his addiction, before directing some television work that feels very much like David Lynch in the best of ways.
A Spanish architect had funded this film, but the film was difficult to film and release, as it was too strange for audiences at the time. Actually, it may be too weird for them now, a meditation on the nature of being obsessed with image and working toward perfection as being the same thing as a needle in your veins.
Pedro's footage within the movie is indicative of the style of movies that Zulueta was best known for, combining filmed images of scenery with music - think Koyaanisqatsi - filled with vast hidden meaning. As Pedro says, they are filled with "occult rhythms."
By the end of the film, José has been invited to experience the same red addiction and gladly complies. I understand - finding the perfect movie, chasing the high of a new discovery and then worrying that there won't be anything that magical or weird again - that's the smack that I can't stop injecting into my eyes and brain.
*He also dubbed one of the female voices in this movie.
An extraordinary, oblique, and disturbing celluloid nightmare!
Extraordinary, oblique, disturbing, and somewhat rare Spanish feature from 1979. This stylish piece documents the gradual subversion, and inexorable collapse of a young, dope-addled, wholly jaded filmmaker's life. A dark, surrealist nightmare about the apparently vampiric properties of a hypnotic, phantasmagorical super-8 film that once seen is not soon forgotten! (including the viewer and main character alike!) 'Arrebato' is a strikingly lucid and fiercely imaginative work of pure cinema that includes some genuinely unsettling sequences; the narrative enigma grips right from the terse opening gambit, and swiftly immerses the giddy viewer in its unrelenting maelstrom of hallucinatory strangeness.