ARREBATO

ARREBATO was largely overlooked on its original release but has since become one of the defining cult films of Spanish cinema. It was Zulueta’s second and final feature, which only adds to its reputation as the work of a filmmaker who pushed his own obsessions unusually far.

José is a frustrated horror director drifting through Madrid in a haze of heroin, failed relationships and creative paralysis. His routine is interrupted by Pedro, an obsessive amateur filmmaker who has become fixated on recording images at precisely controlled speeds. Pedro believes the camera can capture something beyond ordinary experience. When he sends José a film reel and a cassette explaining what happened to him, that obsession starts to look increasingly dangerous.

Iván Zulueta made ARREBATO during Spain’s transition out of the Franco era, at a moment when a younger generation of artists was testing how far cinema, music, sexuality and nightlife could move beyond the restrictions of the previous decades. The film later became closely associated with the culture surrounding La Movida Madrileña, but it feels far removed from celebration. Zulueta focuses instead on compulsion, dependency and the need to disappear into images.

The film moves between horror, experimental cinema and a portrait of addiction without neatly separating one from the other. Heroin, filmmaking and desire all operate through the same logic. Each promises escape but then demands more and more from the subject. Zulueta makes the physical act of shooting and watching film feel almost vampiric, as though the camera itself might be capable of draining something from the people who surrender to it.

ARREBATO’s reputation has expanded enormously after its initial failure. Pedro Almodóvar has named it among the Spanish films that inspired him (he also personally worked on the film and later recast many of the actors in his own films). Its ideas about cameras, addiction and images consuming the people who make them have continued to echo through later cult cinema, and the film is often discussed alongside works such as David Cronenberg’s VIDEODROME and Abel Ferrara’s THE ADDICTION. Seen today, ARREBATO feels like an important precursor to a whole strand of cinema in which media, desire and dependency become impossible to separate. This is high art masquerading as cult cinema.

20:30 Wednesday 2 September