I remember the first time I ever heard of Fernando Arrabal. I was vacationing with my wife and son in Nashville, and we had decided to hit up a couple antique markets near our hotel. There was a booth selling movies and records, and my attention was quickly drawn to two box-sets Cult Epics put out featuring a filmmaker I had never heard of before – Fernando Arrabal. When I saw the description on the back of the boxes comparing his films to those of Alejandro Jodorowsky, I was ready to make my blind purchase and give this mysterious director a chance. I had no clue what I was in for.
Arrabal is largely unknown in the U.S. and his films are criminally under-seen, but the man is a creative engine that has written over 100 plays, produced hundreds of artist books and chapbooks (sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Dali and Magritte), and has a host of novels, books of poetry, and other ephemera to his name.
The aforementioned comparison between Arrabal and Jodorowsky is for good reason – both tread similar ground and create surrealist films that shock and confuse audiences while simultaneously making the viewer feel like they’re bearing witness to some bizarre spiritual event. In 1962 Arrabal and Jodorowsky worked together with Roland Topor (a French illustrator) to create the Panik Movement, and Jodorowsky even adapted Arrabal’s play Fando Y Lis into the 1968 film of the same name. Three years later Arrabal started his own film career with Viva La Muerte.
I can’t in good conscience recommend Arrabal’s films to the casual movie viewer – in fact, I might as well drop some trigger warnings right now for Viva La Muerte, which include attempted suicide, and (unfortunately) real onscreen animal death in a slaughterhouse scene. Surrealist film fans who are just the right mix of daring and jaded, however, are in for a ride unlike any other. He’s an iconoclast who reveres the mystic and outcast, his films are equal parts political and spiritual, and he’s a provocateur who is very adept at incorporating plenty of feces and bodily fluids into his work. With Radiance Films set to release a new 4K restoration of Viva La Muerte on August 26, it felt like just the right time to revisit what some critics consider a surrealist masterpiece.
¡VIVA LA MUERTE! (Long Live Death!)
Viva La Muerte, most often categorized as a war/horror movie, is a trippy and largely autobiographical film about a 10(ish) year old boy named Fando (played by Mahdi Chaouch) whose life mirrors much of Arrabal’s own childhood. Arrabal was born in Melilla, Spain in 1932, just 4 years before nationalist insurrectionists within the Spanish military kickstarted the Spanish Civil War. His father was an officer in the Spanish Army who was imprisoned for remaining faithful to the Republic until his escape in 1942, after which he was never heard from again. Fando is in the same situation, and early on in the film we even witness his father being dragged away from the table as he’s arrested mid-dinner.
Its opening title sequence features a whimsical children’s song (Ekkolog) being played over grotesque Hieronymous Bosch-like drawings of a large number of people undergoing an array of tortures in a violent and debaucherous hellscape. These illustrations were provided by the aforementioned Roland Topor. This mix of playful children’s music and dark, bizarre images perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the film.
Next comes the opening scene in which an army jeep pulls up to Fando’s town blaring this message: “After capturing and disarming the Red Army today official troops reached their final objective. The war is over. Traitors will be relentlessly hunted down. If necessary we will kill half the country. Viva La Muerte!” This vicious declaration from the Nationalist army makes clear that this film is a deeply political movie. So political, in fact, that the film’s release in France was delayed for over a year due to its anti-Francoist sentiments.
At its heart, Viva La Muerte is a coming-of-age film about a boy using his imagination to try and process the violence and oppression around him. Fando and the other children in town are first hand witnesses to public executions, and go see Nationalist propaganda films at the local theater for entertainment. One popular game among Fando’s friends requires players to be whipped on the arm with a belt. And in several scenes we see Fando playing with what he calls his “theater” a diorama where he has wooden dolls of his family, including a prison cage for his father. Arrabal is adept at exploring harsh topics while keeping a childlike curiosity about this dark subject matter.
There are essentially two styles of cinematography used throughout. The scenes that take place in reality are filled with dull browns, grays, and greens, and are shot on film. These are contrasted by Fando’s bizarre daydream sequences, which are shot on video, are very high contrast, and use an array of color filters ranging from bright yellow and orange to blue and purple. These more trippy sequences serve to clearly differentiate fantasy from the real world, though at times reality and dream still manage to overlap a bit. His daydreams are actually more like nightmares, and often involve various tortures, humiliations (cue the aforementioned feces), and executions he fears his father may be undergoing. In one infamous fantasy sequence Fando’s father is buried to his neck in sand as a group of horses rush to trample him, one of which is being ridden by Fando’s own mother (played by Nuria Espert). From early on in the film hints are dropped that she was the one who turned her own husband in, so it makes sense that Fando would make his mother out to be the antagonist in these daydreams.
Espert’s performance as Fando’s mother is incredibly impressive, and it honestly blows my mind how she is able to expertly encapsulate all the different versions of the character shown throughout the film. The mother character is portrayed in some parts as loving and overbearing, in others as crazed and sensual, and even as a religious figure at times. Espert is able to expertly represent all of those traits and more, and she makes it all look effortless.
Aside from his father’s fate in prison, the other main topics on Fando’s mind are sex and religion. More specifically, a series of oedipal daydream sequences that Fando refers to as “prickings of the flesh.” In one scene after Fando daydreams about his mother naked, he runs to the other room to recite the Lord’s Prayer while wearing a cilice (basically a painful barbed-wire garter belt worn around the thigh as an act of penance). Self-punishment and religious guilt is a theme that comes up again and again in Viva La Muerte, and Fando’s desire to break free from this guilt becomes more pronounced as he becomes more rebellious throughout the film, both at home and at Catholic school.
I realize at this point in the review this all probably just sounds like a fucked-up bummer of a movie, but I swear Viva La Muerte does have plenty of charm. Despite the bleakness of the environment and situation in which he is growing up Fando remains resilient. He also has interactions with kindhearted characters who support him. His grandfather is a very likable character who clearly cares for Fando and wants him to have a good life, and one of his closest friends is a young girl who brings her goofy pet turkey everywhere with her. And I couldn’t help but actually laugh out loud during some of Fando’s more rebellious outbursts, including the one where he ends up literally pissing on the town below.
There’s a reason Paul Bartel and John Lennon championed Viva La Muerte during its 10-week run on the New York midnight movie circuit. It requires repeat viewings to fully dissect the messages throughout, includes imagery you’re not going to see anywhere else, and quite frankly is wholly unique and singular vision that only Arrabal could pull off. As I said earlier, I certainly can’t recommend this movie to just anybody. Hell, when I first watched it I wasn’t 100% sure it was for me, but I knew it was something special. Now after subsequent viewings I can safely say my appreciation for this unsettling piece of art has only grown, and I’m excited to see it get the 4k treatment it deserves.
