Almost all the works that lead this list maintain a human and sensitive dialogue, almost always devoid of rowing militants, with a sordid past, marked by four decades of obscurantism. The boldest is a gesture as radical as Raptureby Iván Zulueta, cursed filmmaker and author of a single feature film (Discounting A, two, three … to the English hiding placeaccredited to José Luis Borau), who broke into the arid landscape of Spanish cinema as an anomaly, unprecedented clear or recognizable heirs. Was, at the same time, vampire cinema and film trial, plastic experience and appearance queeravant -garde artifact and febrile self -portrait.
Misunderstood at its premiere in 1980 – it was only 13 days on the poster in the missing blue cinema of Madrid -, Rapture He heads this selection today, perhaps against prognosis. Born from the distracted beauty of the Plaza de los Cubos and other spray landscapes of a Madrid that then became the cradle of modernity, the film is now revealed as a kind of threshold. “Rolled in the summer of 1979, he symbolically marked the beginning of the eighties in a Spain that began to shake the shadows of the past and, without knowing it, to enter new ones,” confirms Cecilia Roth, co -star of the film with Eusebio Poncela, during a theatrical tour in Uruguay. “Every time I see the movie – which has not been so many – adheres to me as another body of the body. That I think happens. When it enters you, it does it forever, crossing time as a treasure discovered in the middle of nowhere. There is always, waiting for its next victim.”
In this way the actress evokes – who rolled Rapture With just 22 years, two after arriving in Spain – the survival of this cult film in collective memory. How is it ended in the first position of this list? The masterpiece may not be the most perfect, but the one that manages to say more things as possible. Something like that comes to say Jaime Chávarri, sitting in the gloom of his floor in Malasaña. The filmmaker, who appears on this list of his own merits as director of The disenchantmenthe also left his mark in outburst. Intimate of Zulueta, whom he met at the Official Cinema School, borrowed the bush of the Pirón, his family home in Segovia, to shoot there part of Rapture.
“My mother put a condition: that they stayed at most. In the end four stayed. The house became the scenario of this story of abstruse appearance, composed of a succession of Flashbacksin which a series B filmmaker is torn between his celluloid addiction and heroin.
It would be the first and last. “A prophetic work and, at the same time, testamentary,” says Chávarri. Then, as is well known, Zulueta did not roll any feature film again. He retired to his mother’s house in San Sebastián, wrapped in a thick and protective ivy, where he died discreetly in 2009. “What would he do after Rapturebeing such an exceptional film in every way? It became an unconscious brake. It is one of the great tragedies of Spanish cinema, ”says Chávarri.
For the director, despite his triumph in this list, Rapture It will never be a consensus work. “The general public does not like. Only moves those who are able to really passionate about something, whatever, understand what it means to be taken away.” More than a film to use, it is a film trance made of pieces and gusts, in which the artistic avant -garde of pop art, the young inheritance of the Nouvelle vague And the new Hollywood – make less perfect, but more alive movies – something from the first of Palma and perhaps a flash of the future David Lynch, whom Zulueta admired. Rapture It can be seen in Flixolé and, since this weekend, also in Filmin.
“Every time I see the movie, he adheres to me as one more organ. When he enters, he does it forever,” says Cecilia Roth
The cinema was his whole life. To the director of Rapture He liked to take metadona not only to avoid withdrawal syndrome, but by mitomania: the drugs of the drug with his name reminded those who took the amphetamine dancers of All that jazz. His drug addiction influenced the long creative block that marked his later life, just like his hermit when working (not to live): he liked to do it alone, but not so much as a team. “It cost him more,” says Chávarri. Arrebato builds a luminous metaphor between cinema and heroin, two centripetal forces that end up consuming the characters. “Just as they destroyed him,” concludes Chávarri, which these days roll a movie about Rapture As an actor and screenwriter, under the direction of Marta Medina (we will insist to know more, but will not give any other detail).
Marta Fernández Muro was another of the young performers recruited by Zulueta in a Madrid who, as he remembers, “was still a town”, at the dawn of the move. The filming was precarious, weighed by the shortage of funds – the actress remembers that no one charged, except when months later they won an award – and stirred by a strike of the technicians, little accustomed to the languid rhythm of that lovely crazy. “But it was not an improvised or chaotic movie, that has been exaggerated,” he clarifies. “Ivan knew very well what he was doing.” Pedro Almodóvar was seen by the set, which wandered between scenes and ended up folding a brief dialogue of a character: the histrionic falsete that is heard in the mouth of the daughter of Fernando Fernán Gómez, Helena.
For Fernández Muro, Rapture It is not a work about drugs. “He talks about addiction, but not only to heroine: also cinema, art, desire, life.” There is an almost religious reading: the protagonist, alter ego Obviously Zulueta pursues continuous ecstasy. “He speaks of living to the limit and the risk that that entails; what to do when everyday reality is not enough and you need to resort to other things to find more happiness. It is said to be a difficult film, but I do not believe it.” Pursue transcendence, stop time, return to childhood: there it is, at the beginning of the footage, that poster of Bambi On the facade of a Gran Vía cinema. After that first unparalleled experience, clumsy but intense as the first dust, he could not continue. “He stuck,” says Fernández Muro. “When those around you make movies without weight and you have directed one that will continue to be talking for decades but that goes unnoticed, what do you do?”
Zulueta liked to be compared to a salmon that, despite his courage when tracing the river course, yerra in a jump and ends in a dead area that he can never leave. The more brutal the jump is, the more terrible the end will be. That was the director’s destiny. “How long could you look at this chrome? Years, centuries, a whole morning,” says the most remembered dialogue. A moment that lasts decades, if the right drug is chosen. A rush that justifies the hangover of the next day. A peak of ecstasy that inevitably culminates with a bad trip.
