Fernando Arrabal’s Viva la Muerte is a mostly autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s youth during the Spanish Civil War that intermingles with disturbingly surreal dreams and fantasies. This alienation effect is rendered all the more unsettling since Arrabal opts to shoot the imaginal sequences on heavily color-filtered video, aligning them with Nam June Paik’s avant-garde video art. Another sort of alienation may stem from some unsimulated violence against animals, in particular a jaw-dropping scene in a slaughterhouse that combines the in-your-face verité of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts with the dynamic writhing of Isadora Duncan.
Viva la Muerte opens at the end of the war, with a jeep full of fascist soldiers declaring the titular phrase and vowing to kill half of Spain’s population if that’s what it takes to cleanse the nation from the pernicious influence of atheism and communism. Young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) looks on,...
Viva la Muerte opens at the end of the war, with a jeep full of fascist soldiers declaring the titular phrase and vowing to kill half of Spain’s population if that’s what it takes to cleanse the nation from the pernicious influence of atheism and communism. Young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) looks on,...
- 9/4/2024
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
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