SPAIN 1971
DIRECTOR: FERNANDO ARRABAL
(90 mins.)
"An astounding first film by the avant-garde playwright Fernando Arrabal, VIVA LA MUERTE brought his "theatre of cruelty" spectacle to the screen. Shot in Tunis in 1971, it is part allegory, part autobiography about Spain, uniting Freudian and political themes in the story of a boy whose mother betrays his father to the Fascists during the Civil War. "It is the realm of [the boy] Fando’s imagination that stuns the spectator, with its visions of...tortures, violence and death. A primitive, sadistic flow of episodes become expressions of the boy’s subconscious fears and desires, and one discerns behind these almost dementedly Goyasque images, the unspeakable mysteries of adulthood, the temptations of sex and its Catholic associations with sin, and the implacable terrors of a hostile government. Fando’s hallucinations backgrounded by the lilts of a children’s song, become blasphemous metaphors of innocence tarnished by corruption."—Albert Johnson, Pacific Film Archive.