Arrebato

Plot synopsis:
José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) is a frustrated horror film director and heroin addict in a tumultuous relationship with Ana (Celicia Roth). The cousin of his ex-girlfriend Marta, Pedro (Will More), sends him a film, an audio cassette, and the key to his apartment despite the fact that the two have only met twice; once when José came with Marta to visit the family and Pedro asked for his help in controlling time in his films, and a second time when José returns with Ana to give Pedro a device for his camera that can help him in achieving this goal. Pedro describes his life after the gift on the cassette as José watches his film at the same time, explaining that one night after falling asleep he discovered that his camera turned on by itself and filmed him. After developing the film, he discovers a red frame in which the camera has lost the image of his sleeping. Curious, Pedro allows the camera to film him multiple times as he sleeps, only to discover that the red still frames are growing in number. Unsure of what the frames mean, he asks his cousin Marta to watch him as he sleeps. As she watches one of his films, the camera moves on its own to face Marta, who disappears. When he only has one more frame left before the entire film becomes red, Pedro sends the film, his audio instructions, and the key to José, instructing him to come to his apartment and develop the final film. José complies, finding the apartment empty, and discovers the film to be entirely red except for one frame of Pedro's face. The image begins to move, with Pedro gesturing towards the bed with a subtle smile, implying that José should also let the camera film him as he sleeps; the image becomes blurred and then changes into José's own face, which makes a similar gesture. The final scene of the film finds José getting into Pedro's bed to experience the same "rapture" as his friend.

Tags: cult, psychedelic, comic

Review:
Little known masterpiece.
Get hold of it if you can.
Best vampires movie ever without even showing any teeth...If you thing you are committed to your work, see the protagonist of this movie.The director had to adapt to stern constrains in number of characters and locales and still he came up with a modern classic, catching the spirit of the "movida madrileña" ( a musical an cultural boom in Madrid eighties) and providing a metaphor for the trail of wasted talent this outburst leave, because of drugs, diversion and basic human frailty.
In my personal top 5 Spanish movies of all time..
One of the greatest Spanish Movies.
Arrebato by Ivan Zulueta is a wonderful, strange movie.
The desire and the magic of cinema full the screen.
This extremely beautiful film describes clearly the darkness state of things, the joy and pain of living, taking drugs, being and loving the cinema.
A little big jewel to feel..
An extraordinary, oblique, and disturbing celluloid nightmare!.
Extraordinary, oblique, disturbing, and somewhat rare Spanish feature from 1979.
This stylish piece documents the gradual subversion, and inexorable collapse of a young, dope-addled, wholly jaded filmmaker's life.
A dark, surrealist nightmare about the apparently vampiric properties of a hypnotic, phantasmagorical super-8 film that once seen is not soon forgotten!
(including the viewer and main character alike!) 'Arrebato' is a strikingly lucid and fiercely imaginative work of pure cinema that includes some genuinely unsettling sequences; the narrative enigma grips right from the terse opening gambit, and swiftly immerses the giddy viewer in its unrelenting maelstrom of hallucinatory strangeness..
A cult-movie which is also an enormous film.
Arrebato is an unknown film also in Spain because it's very difficult to access to one copy of this inimitable film.
In fact I think that Arrebato had been seen by a minoritary group of all the people who loves deeply the good cinema.
It is a cult movie made with the same cast and professionals than Almodovar first films, but it isn't an Almodovar's film.
It is one of this films that change your impressions about the cinema and without any doubt, we can say that is the history which better reflects the vampiric relationship which we can see between the movies and those people who believes that the cinema is more important than live..
An enrapturing film.
Obviously, you will receive a surprise from this enrapturing film due to strange denounement and secondary characters.
Slowly in the begining, it justifies that scenes during the film while you get catch for the story unconciously.
Special mention to the work of Will More, a curious actor who didn´t work in cinema never more, only little appearances on TV series.
Correct performance of Eusebio Poncela but he is better actor now, the same to a young and inexpert Cecilia Roth.
Definitely you have to see this movie and think about it during hours before you beat the insomnia that the film could produce.
Very disturbing..
excellent.
no more words.
a guy is vamprized by a super-8 camera in the late seventies, in a thick atmosphere of drugs, alcohol and sex.
the film catches you from the first second and vampirizes you as well.
if you happen to have the chance to see it - i doubt it, don't lose it.
A major cult film from Spain.
From initial ridicule (despite the official recommendation as a quality feature) to flat-out praise, it took more than twenty years to realize the seminal influence of this film on Spanish production, from Almodovar onwards.
It draws many influences from the Warhol-esque New York underground scene but has tremendous scenes.Whoever wants to understand what Betty Boop was all about, must see Cecilia Roth dance scene, it is fabulous.Contains a lot of drug addiction references, which should be seen as an analogy to the addiction to capturing moving pictures and watching them.
The only way for a film director to get rid of the latter is to dissolve into the industry..
Love, drugs, vampires and film reels with a Bergman touch.
A very disturbing Spanish cult movie, involving drugs addiction, the dark side of love and the passion of filming.
For most of the critics is also a horror movie and a vampires story.
And every time you watch it you can find in it something new, indeed.Shooted in the years of the Spanish political and cultural dawn, but going away from the mainstream, and with a very low budget, it drives you from the beginning to the end in so a magnetic and weird plot that you can't stop watching.But Arrebato is also remarkable because of the astonishing performance of the main characters couple, Eusebio Poncela and Cecilia Roth.
Most in the claustrophobic atmosphere of their bedroom, it reminds some highlights of Ingmar Bergman films like 'Scener ur ett aktenskapps' o 'Saraband'.
Absorbing 70's bizarre.
Film maker José Sirgado (Poncela) gets to know amateur film director and freak Pedro though an acquaintance of both.
Pedro's bizarre movies and José's personal problems and drug addictions act as the glue that forges a master-pupil relationship, especially when José makes a technical improvement to Pedro's camera that allows interval shooting.
All this with some undefined gay twist to their relationship.After the relationship is put to sleep and José is back to his gloomy apartment in Madrid and his drug-driven love relationship with Cecilia Roth, he is surprised to receive a package from Pedro one day.
And inside the package, a film and a cassette tape seem to indicate that a vampire lives inside Pedro's Super-8 camera, a vampire that absorbs people and makes them disappear when they are filmed.Could it be true?
Or is it just a result of too much drug intake?
The story becomes then a vehicle for theorizing on the creative process in arts, the relationship between the artist and his product, and finally the fascination with cinema in our lives ("Arrebato" can be translated as "raptum" and refers to the impact of certain artistic clichés -- King Solomon's mines for Sirgado, Betty Boop for his girlfriend-- in our feelings)As a very thin backdrop to the story, Zulueta portraits an sfumatto of the Spain of the late 70's: a society that used drugs liberally, craved for freedom, and made the way of sexual liberation while challenging the statu quo of decades of dictatorships.