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“Sexuality and Religiosity and Violence and War and Love and Everything”: The Cinema of Fernando Arrabal
“This film came to our attention, and I
said, we’ve got to show this, because it’s surreal, it’s astonishing. It’s
sexuality and religiosity and violence and war and love and everything...In the
first ten minutes (of the screening) half the audience was gone...Then another
bunch would go...Then you would go another fifteen minutes, and then it would
reach the next level they couldn’t handle...BOOM! Another fifty are gone...The
way they left the theater, women were going up the aisle hitting their husbands,
because they had to strike at something. There were men clutching the walls,
because their brains had been fried.”
--Harlan Ellison, describing a Writer’s Guild screening of
Fernando Arrabal’s VIVA LA MUERTE
The above could only refer to a film by the inimitable Fernando Arrabal, one of
the great unrestrained, taboo-bashing visionaries of the cinema. If you’re
unfamiliar with Arrabal’s films you’re not alone, as they’ve never attained the
popularity of those of Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Jodorowski or David Lynch. The
reasons aren’t difficult to fathom: Arrabal’s cinema is dark in every
sense of the word, exploring untold depths of torture and corruption born out of
his own war-torn upbringing. Even in comparatively lighthearted works like the
absurdist J’IRAI COMME UN CHEVAL FOU and the children’s film THE ODYSSEY OF THE
PACIFIC, a vivid core of pain and anger is apparent. Furthermore, Arrabal
remains a supreme master of shock. Whereas Luis Bunuel in his later years
settled into refined surreal comedies like THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOUISE
and THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, Arrabal’s films are very much in the mode of
Bunuel’s seminal UN CHIEN ANDALOU, which, you’ll recall, opened with a close up
of an eyeball being slashed and continued in that vein, outraging, scandalizing
and shocking cineastes the world over.
Like Jodorowski, a longtime colleague who co-founded
the infamous Panic Movement of the sixties together with Arrabal and fellow
provocateur Roland Topor, Fernando Arrabal is a multi-talented genius conversant
in several mediums. While best known as a playwright, with dramas like THE
AUTOMOBILE GRAVEYARD and THE ARCHITECT AND THE EMPEROR OF ASSYRIA, Arrabal is
also an artist, poet and author of many classic works of fiction, in particular
THE BURIAL OF THE SARDINE, THE TOWER STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and
THE COMPASS STONE.
Alas, his career as a filmmaker has proven deeply erratic; again like Jodorowski,
Arrabal the moviemaker thrived in the early seventies, with VIVA LA MUERTE and
J’IRAI COMME UN CHEVAL FOU, bonafide masterworks of surrealism, but his
cinematic output tapered off over the next decade, stymied, perhaps, by the
harsh realities of an increasingly restrictive industry.
VIVA LA MUERTE was Arrabal’s debut feature, and remains his most fully realized masterpiece, a confounding blast of cinemadness that burst upon the world in 1971 (alongside equally mind-rattling masterworks like THE DEVILS, PERFORMANCE, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and EL TOPO). It was adapted from his 1959 novel BAAL BABYLON, which in lieu of a conventional narrative contained a series of incidents recalled by an unnamed narrator about his Civil War-set childhood, in the form of notes to his mother. She was an ignorant and self-righteous woman forever trying to justify the fact that she turned her husband in to fascist authorities years earlier; the boy (named Fando in the film) nevertheless harbors incestuous longings for her. He takes to obsessively smoking a pipe that once belonged to his father, a “Doctor Plumb” pipe. He’s also molested by his perverted Aunt Clara, who likes to have him beat her with a strap, and manhandled by his grandmother, who labors under the misapprehension that he’s a girl, because, as he recalls, “I put it on the right when I should have put it on the left, the way all men do.”
The autobiographical elements in the book and film are undeniable: Arrabal
was born in Span in 1932 and raised during the Spanish Civil War. His father
was a Spanish officer branded a traitor and imprisoned by the military; he
escaped in 1942 and was never heard from again. Arrabal relocated to Paris in
1955, a voluntary exile from his homeland because, “In Spain, everyone
suffocates. I do not like to play the part of victim.”
His Spanish upbringing looms large in Arrabal’s work,
though nowhere larger than in BAAL BABYLON and VIVA LA MUERTE (Arrabal’s early
one-act melodrama THE TWO EXECUTIONERS is also worth mentioning, being the stark
account of a woman who has her husband thrown in jail and then desperately tries
to justify her actions to her two sons, disappearing offstage at one point to
rub salt into her tortured beau’s wounds). The two make for a fascinating
comparison, being literally two sides of the same coin. VIVA LA MUERTE was
adapted from BAAL BABYLON, but tonally the former is diametrically opposed to
the latter, a spare, muted account that relies on suggestion and repetition to
achieve its effects. The film, on the other hand, is an assaultive affair that
revels in violence and perversion. One could argue Arrabal was cheapening his
work with gratuitous exploitation if not for that fact that his art in general
was moving in that direction (contrast his 1958 play THE AUTOMOBILE GRAVEYARD,
considered shocking in its day because it contained offstage beatings and
urination, with his 1973 drama AND THEY PUT HANDCUFFS ON THE FLOWERS, which
featured onstage fellatio and defecation). I believe that in BAAL
BABYLON Arrabal was testing the waters he would fully immerse himself in with
VIVA LA MUERTE.
It may have been Arrabal’s first feature, but VIVA LA
MUERTE demonstrates an assurance that belies its creator’s amateur status.
Arrabal isn’t afraid to challenge long held cinematic conventions in the flood
of hallucinations that engulf the film at the rate of one every few minutes,
conveying its central character’s disturbed inner state via incestuous
sadomasochistic fantasies featuring his mother torturing his incarcerated father
in some grotesque manner (gouging his eyeballs, defecating on his head, etc.).
Said fantasies were shot on video and then transferred to film after being
processed through various colored filters, a revolutionary process back in
1971. Equally innovative is the soundtrack, a blare of Spanish folk tunes,
commercial jingles and, most effectively, a Dutch children’s song played over
the opening credits (which also feature macabre drawings by fellow Panic
Movement founder Roland Topor) that assumes truly horrific stature when
contrasted with the film’s depiction of the death--or murder--of childhood
innocence.
Like any great filmmaker, Arrabal manages to bring out
the best in his collaborators on VIVA LA MUERTE. Cinematographer Jean-Marc
Ripert (who also photographed Claude Faraldo’s infamous THEMROC) creates
unforgettable sun baked imagery, conjuring forbidding subconscious mindscapes
out of rocks, cliffs and deserted battlements. The acting is uniformly
exceptional, particularly that of Mahdi Chaouch as Fando, certainly one of the
most impressive child performances I’ve encountered in any film, and the
statuesque Nuria Espert as his mother, who conveys a disturbing aura of menace
and seduction.
Unsurprisingly, this mind roaster encountered
censorship problems in its native France, where it was withheld from
distribution for over a year. Also unsurprising was the furor that occurred
during its initial release, particularly in America (see the above Harlan
Ellison quote), where it played the New York
midnight movie circuit for ten
weeks straight.
Arrabal followed VIVA LA MUERTE with the equally
subversive J’IRAI COMME UN CHEVAL FOU. The title is a phrase that recurs
throughout Arrabal’s work, and can be translated several ways: “I will go
like a runaway horse” or, as it appears in the English text of Arrabal’s
play AND THEY PUT HANDCUFFS ON THE FLOWERS, “I’ll go like a rogue stallion.”
The Cult Epics DVD translates it as I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE (it’s
available as part of a set that includes MUERTE and THE GUERNICA TREE, and
which, needless to add, I strongly advise you to pick up).
J’IRAI..., in direct contrast to the previous film, is
a raucous and satirical affair, though every bit as political. Its targets
include industrialization, organized religion, institutionalized violence, meat
eating and gender roles (complete with a “woman” who makes a shocking reveal in
a scene nearly identical to the one that would cement THE CRYING GAME’S fame
twenty years later)--in short, the entire Western world. With J’IRAI...,
Arrabal was seeking to strip the façade of “civilized” behavior and reveal the
primitive urges and brute force lurking underneath.
The film features another castrating--an adjective
presented in extremely literal fashion--mother figure, who the
protagonist Aden, a straight-laced businessman haunted by memories of his
abusive childhood, kills in the opening minutes. This precipitates a desperate
flight into the desert where he meets Marvel, a sand eating dwarf who
communicates with animals and can change day to night with a snap of a finger.
The two quickly become inseparable (we know they’ve got a special bond because
they have a back-to-back shit in the sand), and Aden takes Marvel back to
civilization for an odyssey of alienation and disillusionment. Marvel briefly
joins a circus, in the process loosing a lion upon a cheering crowd, while Aden
goes back to his mother’s mansion, dresses in her lingerie and gives birth to a
human skull.
The surreal intercuts of VIVA LA MUERTE are back, with
a plethora of unforgettably grotesque images, including skeletons hanging from
streetlights, a tongue nailed to a board, a gas mask wearing couple having sex,
a kid menaced by a giant spider, the heroes trapped in a large transparent ball
rolled around by outraged churchgoers, etc. There’s also a multi-layered
soundtrack similar to that of the earlier film, complete with another portion of
the children’s song that graced MUERTE. American actor George Shannon acquits
himself well as Aden, while the diminutive, bushy bearded Hashimi Marhcuk makes
for an unforgettable sight as Marvel (Arrabal claims Marchuk was cast because “he
was my double on Earth”).
Like its predecessor, J’IRAI... was quite
controversial. It was banned for over a year by the French government and went
unreleased in the US until the appearance of the Cult Epics DVD.
Arrabal’s next film was the French-Italian
co-production L’ARBRE DE GUERNICA in 1975. After his previous forays into the
medium it seemed Arrabal could do no wrong as a filmmaker--GUERNICA, however,
was a big step down. It attempts to depict the Spanish Civil War that figured
in VIVA LA MEURTE in a more panoramic fashion, via the fictional Spanish village
of Villa Romero, whose citizens find themselves under siege when they elect to
oppose Generalissimo Franco’s regime. While it has its strong points, GUERNICA
ultimately falls into the Interesting Failure category, being a scattershot
affair that attempts to fit the surreal grotesquerie of the earlier films into a
more audience friendly narrative. The combination is an uneasy one, with
bizarre images (a naked child seated atop a mound of skulls, a matador impaling
an immobilized dwarf) alternating with commercial sentimentality so shameless it
wouldn’t feel out of place in a
Bollywood movie.
Not that the film’s problems end there, as it has many
flaws common to expensive European movies of the seventies: the battle scenes
are draggy and overlong (in an apparent attempt at justifying all the money
spent on them), the accents and acting styles are always clashing, the
characters tend to speak in political slogans rather than actual dialogue, and
furthermore there are just too many of them. The last point is a particularly
sore one, as there are at least half a dozen central characters who all-but
crowd out the star-crossed love story at the film’s center, and nor does it help
matters that the lovers, a witch woman (played by Italian starlet Mariangela
Melato, best known for her role in the original SWEPT AWAY) and a surrealist
artist, only get together twice in the entire film.
GUERNICA, despite its expensive pedigree, received even
less commercial exposure than J’IRAI..., and all-but vanished from circulation
until the 2005 DVD release. Arrabal didn’t make another film until 1981, that
film being the French-Canadian production THE ODYSSEY OF THE PACIFIC (a.k.a. THE
EMPEROR OF PERU), surely one of his oddest concoctions. It’s a children’s film,
after all, with all the trimmings: cloying cutesiness, underage mugging, music
numbers and Mickey Rooney. It is nonetheless an intriguing work with at least
one stand-out scene.
One of the three child protagonists of THE ODYSSEY OF
THE PACIFIC is a Cambodian refugee suffering horrific memories of his exiled
father, who was apprehended by authorities and shipped off to a prison camp.
Thus the kid is something of a cousin to VIVA LA MUERTE’S Fando, and indeed THE
ODYSSEY OF THE PACIFIC as a whole can be viewed as a G-rated redo of the earlier
film. Once again the narrative is frequently interrupted by surreal reveries,
although not on the same level as those of MUERTE. The torture and defecation
of the earlier film have given way to sanitized wish fulfillment fantasies in
which a boy drives a race car, conducts a symphony and performs in a circus.
Mickey Rooney plays a nut who identifies himself as The
Emperor of Peru, and inspires the three tykes to fix up an old locomotive and
use to it transport the refugee back to Cambodia so he can marry his mother (the
hints at incest are, I’m guessing, not entirely unintentional). This leads to
an exhilarating finale that’s easily the highlight of the film, in which the
kids succeed in charging up the locomotive and chug off into the sunset.
Arrabal’s next cinematic foray was LE CIMITIERE DES
VOITURES (THE AUTOMOBILE CEMETARY), based on his famous 1958 play. The film is
a colorful lark set in a post-apocalyptic world where various people eek out a
living in an automobile graveyard, bickering, screwing and, this being an
Arrabal production, getting constantly harassed by corrupt authority figures.
Among the patrons of the automobile cemetery is none other than Jesus Christ,
here incarnated as a rock guitarist wanted by the authorities.
The Christ figure was a jazz musician in the play, and
that’s certainly not the only change Arrabal wreaked upon it. As he did in
adapting BAAL BABYLON, Arrabal broadened the material considerably, from a
modest two act drama into a veritable epic, with the surreal-grotesque quotient
multiplied exponentially. Whereas the play had a total of seven characters, the
film contains at least a dozen, not to mention countless extras milling about in
the background of each scene, among them angels, flagellants, tightrope walkers,
mermaids and punk rockers in what I assume was intended as a cross section of
early eighties society.
Unfortunately, unlike in VIVA LA MUERTE, the broadening
process hasn’t improved the material much--in fact, I’d say it’s lessened it
considerably. A large part of the play’s charm was the tension between what
occurred onstage and what we couldn’t see, which included urinating and screwing
inside cars, people being tortured in the wings, etc. Here everything is made
visible to us, which, combined with the unvarying one-note tone and relentlessly
episodic narrative, quickly grows dull. The hopelessly outdated fashions and
music are further liabilities. This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have its
moments--it does, particularly in the sight of the Christ figure in a
pool race, walking atop the water in which his competitors swim--just that it
falls far short of its potential.
Arrabal would make two more films, bringing the total
to seven. (Arrabal: “I am like God...after the seventh film, I rested.”)
ADIEU, BABYLONE! (1992) was based on Arrabal’s novel of the same name and
co-starred Spike Lee(!), while JORGE LUIS BORGES: UNA VITA DE POESIA (1998)
consisted of biographical musings on the legendary Argentine
fantasist/poet/critic Jorge Luis Borges, whose influence upon Arrabal’s work is
incontestable (Borges’ anthologies A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY and A BOOK OF
IMAGINARY BEINGS are must reading for Arrabal buffs). I’d dearly love to be
able to provide more detailed synopses of those films, but both seem to have
fallen off the face of the Earth.
Thus, discounting Arrabal’s acting roles in films like
Jacques Baratier’s PIEGE (1968), William Klein’s WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGOO?
(1966) and Peter Fleischmann’s THE HAMBURG SYNDROME (1979), and his many plays
adapted for European television (all currently unavailable for screening), we’re
finished with Fernando Arrabal’s cinematic output. However, there are two more
films that should be covered, as both were adapted from Arrabal’s work by other
directors.
First in this category is LE GRAND CEREMONIAL (1967),
from the French counterculture filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jolivet. It’s a noisy,
raucous affair, adapted from what has been called “Arrabal’s weirdest play yet.”
That, my friends, is no small claim! I’ve read the play and am honestly
not quite sure what to make of it. It might be a complex allegorical portrait
of male-female relations or possibly just a sustained bad joke--or maybe it’s
simply complete nonsense. What I can say with certainty is that the PC crowd
would doubtless be up in arms over its decidedly non-feminist portrayal of the
fairer sex (“Let me lie here at your feet like a dog”, a woman begs her
lover at one point), and the less-than-respectful manner in which the male
protagonist treats his beloved (in one of his more romantic moments he tells
her: “Your back is lily-white for me to scourge, your voice is full of sorrow
for your death”).
Jolivet adapts LE GRAND CEREMONIAL with all the pomp he can muster, including a bombastic music score played at full volume throughout and insanely kitschy art direction that makes the infamous late sixties décor of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE look restrained. The central character is Cavanosa, a young man emotionally crippled by his overbearing mother. Unable to relate to flesh and blood women, he lavishes affection on mannequins...but when the living, breathing Sil, an unrepentant masochist, enters the picture, Cavanosa finds a willing receptacle for his pent-up frustrations. It quickly becomes apparent that Sil is his ideal woman: she begs him to whip her, and nor does she mind when he places a crown of thorns on her head and tries to strangle her to death. This is all pleasing enough for Arrabal fanatics like myself, but Jolivet’s love-conquers-all ending is a sore spot, ignoring as it does the ironic finale of the play, in which Cavanosa is approached by another masochistic woman who adds a dimension totally absent from this crazed yet fatally conservative film.
Alejandro Jodorowski’s black and white FANDO Y LIS (1968) is far wilder. It was adapted from Arrabal’s modest play of the same name (which Arrabal calls “a total mystery to me”), but in extremely loose fashion: filming in Mexico on a decidedly limited budget, Jodorowski worked entirely from a one-page script. It centers on Fando, a blonde young man, and Lis, his crippled girlfriend, who Fando wheels in a stroller over a rocky, mountainous landscape in search of the fabled city of Tar. Fando and Lis never reach their destination, waylaid as they are by assorted weirdoes of every imaginable variety; eventually Fando, in a fit of frustration, kicks Lis to death.
Jodorowski, whose first film this was, definitely made the material his own, tossing in all manner of symbolic insanity of a type familiar to viewers of his later films EL TOPO and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. Let’s see: a man drinks blood onscreen, another plays a burning piano, piglets erupt from a woman’s vagina, men break eggs over the head of a little girl, the hero is pelted with bowling balls, an orgy is performed in a mud pit, a tarantula is burned alive, etc. FANDO Y LIS is certainly not without interest, but it’s so undisciplined and excessive that the central characters are frequently overshadowed, and the whole thing ultimately grows tiresome.
The film apparently caused a mini-riot during its premiere screening at the
1968 Acapulco Film Festival and was banned in Mexico shortly thereafter. It’s
said to have “changed the face of Mexican cinema” forever, and if nothing else
marked the introduction of a number of future talents, as Arrabal, Jodorowski,
producer Juan Lopez Moctezuma and cinematographer Raphael Corkidi all went on to
auspicious directorial careers.
LE GRAND CEREMONIAL and FANDO Y LIS are first and
foremost products of their time, as, it could be argued, are all Arrabal’s
films. Could VIVA LA MUERTE or J’IRAI COMME UN CHEVAL FOU be made today,
anywhere in the world? Highly doubtful in both cases, as both were part and
parcel of an era when similarly freewheeling talents like Jodorowski, Jolivet,
Carmelo Bene, Donald Cammell,
Andrzej Zulawski, William Klein and Peter Watkins
flourished, creating bold and unfettered cinematic landmarks that remain
unsurpassed. How many of those men, delirious geniuses all, are still making
movies today? Answer: none.
However, there is a bright note. Arrabal and his contemporaries may no longer be making films, but their influence is evident in the work of modern talents like Clive Barker (a longtime champion of VIVA LA MUERTE), Takashi Miike, Guy Maddin, Shinya Tsukamoto, Gaspar Noe, Jan Kounen, Alex Cox, Crispin Glover, Marc Caro and Quentin Tarantino. True genius, it seems, never truly dies, and neither, I’m certain, will Fernando Arrabal’s cinematic legacy.
--4/7/06