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Viva la muerte (Blu-ray)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Radiance Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th October 2024). |
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The Film
 With the Spanish Civil War all but over – the army promising to "kill half the country if necessary" to root out any traitors – young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) and his devoutly Catholic mother (Núria Espert) live on the fringes of society in Spanish-controlled Melilla in North Africa with other wives and children of men of the Red Army ostracized and bullied while the Church turns a blind eye. Fando knows nothing of what became of his father Tosan (Ivan Henriques) until he receives a present from prison: an airplane-shaped birdcage with the inscription "Prison: Remember Your Father." His mother discourages his curiosity about his father, telling him only that he was a member of the Red Army and an atheist. When Fando aspires to be be like his father when he grew up, she tells him that atheists killed Jesus and the Red Army burned down the churches. Rifling through his mother's hidden letters, he discovers one written to an uncle in which she claims her husband has compromised his family's future with his dangerous progressive ideas and she plans to turn him into the authorities. The Spanish Civil War through the eyes of a child is a concept that has been well-explored in genre cinema from arthouse entries like The Spirit of the Beehive to the more overtly horrific and fantastical The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, and even In a Glass Cage in which Spain in the aftermath provided a comfortable hiding place for an ex-Nazi sadist, his bourgeois wife, and their innocent daughter in which it turns out he was able to cast aside the artifice of science and inflict torture and death on young boys. Viva la muerte, taking its name from the slogan of the Legionarios, falls somewhere between the aforementioned works of Victor Erice and Guillermo del Toro with director Fernando Arrabal – co-founder of the "Panic Movement" with Alejandro Jodorowsky and French cartoonist/writer/filmmaker Roland Topor – in adapting his 1959 novel "Baal Babylone" also uses the setup of a coming of age story in a violent historical period to play with the parallesl between state and Biblical tortures, execution and martyrdom, and women as agents of repression (and oppression) in Catholicism including sadomasochism inherent in its rituals as his devout aunt (This Man Must Die's Anouk Ferjac) demands he flagellate her and subsequently squeezes his genitals lest he derive any enjoyment out of the act. Within the limitations of his impoverished Catholic upbringing, Fando imagines his father as a Christian martyr undergoing various medieval tortures and varieties of execution – perhaps being ignorant of or only half-conscious of the state's methods – while his mother if she is not incorruptible like the Madonna then she is a scheming, malicious whore seen in Fando's visions carousing with the officers and jailers not for them to show favoritism towards her husband but to hasten his demise. In waking life, we see this sexual dichotomy through the family as his mother babies him – only subjecting him to physical pain by "helping" him tighten a cilice on his thigh until it bleeds after he is aroused by sight of his aunt's thighs – and his grandmother (Suzanne Comte) physically punishes and psychologically emasculates him (like the Legionarios' treatment of a poet not explicity identified as Federico García Lorca at the firing squad, she associates leftist leanings with homosexuality). His silent grandfather (Jean-Louis Chassigneux), on the other hand, raises the red flag on Fando's diorama (or "theatre" as it is called in the dialogue) depicting his father's imprisonment and torture. The school seems to be the only place where he can show defiance, deliberately provoking the nuns whose power seems more impotent. Arrabal's free form narrative seems presents a static reality while any progression in the story takes the form of Fando's fantasies after his father confirmed dead and his grandfather dies shortly after as children replace the Red Army as rebels, castrating a priest and charging the Legionarios after they have gunned down Fando who becomes a martyr. The line becomes blurred in waking life, with Fando contracting tuberculosis (his health compromised by smoking his father's pipe and cigarettes in open defiance) and being exiled to a ship with other patients – his aunt and mother burning his diorama ostensibly because it "contaminated" – and his mother seeing him off to the hospital when he needs surgery that he might not survive. Arrabal's subsequent film I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse would also deal with Oedipal issues and murder with an adult protagonist while he would return to the Spanish Civil War with The Guernica Tree. Footage from Viva la muerte along with the end credits song – the film's opening credits sequence featuring the song and illustrations by Topor has been moved to the end in the recent Arrabal-approved 4K restoration – turned up in Arrabal's later TV project Farewell, Babylon!. 
Video
Despite its subject matter – or because of it given the attitudes of the Franco government and those of the centrist right and left about the Spanish Civil War more than two decades after – Viva la muerte was a French production shot in Tunisia rather than Melilla; as such, the film was shot in French and post-dubbed while the Spanish dub was created for release in other Spanish-speaking territories (apart from the Cannes showing, the film was most widely seen in other territories including the United States as a midnight movie and actually did not play theatrically in France until 1981). The film was released theatrically in the United States in 1971 and in Canada in 1972 but not in the United Kingdom until now. Cult Epics released the film on DVD in 2007 – separately and in the first volume of The Fernando Arrabal Collection – and the PAL-converted anamorphic master offered a decent enough image at the time while the defects of the conversion was enough that Arrabal's use of seventies video switcher effects on Fando's fantasies blended in a little more with the surrounding film materials. Radiance's U.S. and U.K. Blu-ray editions come from a "new 4K restoration of the original 35mm negative by the Cinémathèque Toulouse in collaboration with Fernando Arrabal" which was also presumably used on the 2023 French Blu-ray from Éditions Montparnasse. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen image boasts some wonderful detail in the textures of the Tunisian exteriors and interiors of places on the fringe along with more "sensual" details of skin, hair, and clothing while the video sequences stand out more in the application of various filters, solarizing tints, and even the borders of the frame straying into the image. 
Audio
The sole audio option is the French track in uncompressed 24-bit LPCM 2.0 mono. The dialogue was post-dubbed so is without any issues of clarity while the sound design of the waking scenes is supportive but understated and even sparse given the settings. Apart from some diegetic music and some North African instrumentation, most of the film's scoring is reserved for the fantasy sequences with the "real" portions dependent on ambient sound (sound effects are more exaggerated during the fantasy sequences). Optional English subtitles are free of errors. 
Extras
Extras start off with the a secondary audio track that is not a commentary but The Projection Booth Podcast episode #471 (10/06/20) with film historians Mike White, Heather Drain, and Jess Byard that plays over the first 64:50 of the film before reverting to the French soundtrack. They discuss the Panic Movement and the influences of Arrabal associates Jodorowsky – who adapted Arrabal's play "Fando y Lis" into a film – and Topor, as well as the use of a child's point-of-view of historical events and the surreal "filling in" of detail (as well as the question of if it is more horrific as an adult to understand the role of regular people in atrocities). They also discuss the biographical aspects including the Oedipal aspects of the mother-son relationship in the film, as well as the different kinds of "spirituality" in the works of Arrabal and Jodorowsky, particularly in their attitudes to religion. The disc also includes a new interview with scholar and Spanish cinema expect David Archibald (20:58) who sheds more light not only on Arrabal and the Panic Movement but also provides a nice primer on the Spanish Civil War in North Africa. He also discusses the parallels between surrealism and Arrabal's attempt to communicate the "unrepresentable" in a realist mode through cinema. More importantly, he also notes the revolutionary coup that started in North Africa that was overshadowed by the Spanish Civil War as the real subject of Arrabal's works as he experienced it as a child (while also noting the film's compression of time and skipping, bringing in later events that took place in Spain to Melilla). He also contrasts the shrinking but still distinct division between fantasy and reality in Viva la muerte with Arrabal's subsequent film The Guernica Tree, and his use of animal violence and other tactics to engage the audience with shock (describing the entire film as a "rupture" in Spain's "pact of forgetting" on both centrist sides of the political spectrum).  "Sur les traces de Baal" (19:25) is a 1970 documentary by Abdellatif Ben Ammar on the Tunisian shoot narrated by Arrabal with readings from the novel by young Mahdi Chaouch (whose casting Arrabal expresses as "giving birth to the messiah"). The camera provides a look at several bits of the fantasy sequences without the video treatment, looking very much like a "happening" as Arrabal defends his use of gratuitous and pornographic sex and violence. Thoroughly absorbing is the 2011 television documentary "VIDARRABAL" (99:36) by Xavier Pasturel Barron featuring interviews with Arrabal, his wife and muse Luce – the "Lis" to his "Fando" – and a handful of associates including actors and directors of his more recent stage plays and restagings of his earlier works. Commentary from writer Frédéric Aranzueque-Arrieta, author of French-language works on Arrabal and the Panic Movement, shapes the discussion along with Arrabal's visits to his home and the prison where his father was held in Melilla as the search for his father is paralleled in both the discussion of his works and retracing the steps of his physical search as he muses on the torture of uncertainty and how his feelings about his mother evolved from hatred to pity (but not forgiveness) as he reasons that her "denouncement" of him was the betrayal of his beliefs by trying to change him since he had already exposed himself by refusing to side with the fascists when they gave him the opportunity. Also covered is his childhood in North Africa and move to war-ravaged Ciudad Rodrigo in Spain where his mother worked as a secretary for the Ministry of Aviation and discusison of his family, noting that unlike the novel he had three siblings, one of his aunt's was the inspiration for his religious masochist aunt in the film while another had mental issues and was locked up by the family, as well as the compassion showed to him at school by nun Mother Mercedes. He also discusses his enrollment in an elite school by his mother who intended him to join the military, skipping classes and discovering cinema and theater, getting a scholarship to study in Paris where he met his wife and started writing plays while in the hospital recovering from a lung operation after he contracted tuberculosis. Woven through the narrative is an account of his meeting and disillusionment with André Breton whose surrealist club was too "authoritarian" and "Vaticanist" – which also put off Jodorowsky and Topor when he invited them – and his stays in New York (his "New Babylon") and San Francisco where he was inspired by the Beat Movement and Allen Ginsberg before writing the manifesto for the Panic Movement. The remainder of the documentary covers his writings, films, and plays, his banning and arrest in Spain and the ensuing petitions by artistic colleagues, his evolving views of women from religious oppressors to holy prostitutes to redeemers, as well as his most recent "Faustbal". The disc also includes the film's theatrical trailer (1:15) and a still gallery. 
Packaging
The limited edition of three-thousand copies is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings and comes with a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork, and a booklet featuring new writing by Sabina Stent and archival interview with Fernando Arrabal. Stent discusses the ways in which Arrabal's surrealism has more in common with that of Artaud than Breton – Artaud having been rejected from Breton's club – and the film's reception. In the interview, he discusses the use of film and video, the confusion by audiences over Fando's "platonic" love for his mother and his "evil" love for his aunt – even Mike White on the aforementioned podcast wondered if they were played by the same actress – and how the film covers the events of his youth and were not intended to parallel with life in modern Spain from which he is completely cut off having made his adult life in France.
Overall
Fernando Arrabal's Viva la muerte is not only a semi-autobiographical of his childhood in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War but also a "scream from my guts."
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