Cecilia Roth: Material for Rapture

Recovered Zulueta short.

José Sirgado is a low-budget filmmaker whose heroin addiction distorts his perspective of the real world. Although he is a depressed and unstable individual, his mood improves when he receives the mysterious films of Pedro, with whom he shares his passion for cinema.

Párpados (the literal translation, “Eyelids”, misses the homophonic “par pa’ dos,” or “a couple for two”) is a 1989 television episode with an intricate script involving a delirious array of doubles, mirrors and word-play revolving around the central theme of amorous obsession.

Elena, a shy and unmarried girl, belonging to the upper middle class and somewhat marginalized from the general environment, embarks on a trip to the family farmhouse one morning, and when she returns to the city that same day, at night, she is forced to take a strange woman in her car.

A portrait of the film director Iván Zulueta and his film Arrebato. It features contributions from friends and people who worked with him such as José Luis Borau, Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio Gasset and Julio Médem.

A pop-art video of The Beatles’ “Something” made especially for Spain’s TV shot Último Grito in 1968. Iván Zulueta’s first attempts to get his colourful ideas on film and a clear nod to what would become his first feature film, “Un, dos, tres… al escondite inglés.”

A band of young musicians will do the impossible to boycott a song they didn't like that's supposed to represent Spain in a famous musical contest.

The abusive professional relationship between Luis, an intransigent painter, and Ágata, his traumatized model, takes an unexpected turn when she finds a mysterious self-portrait of him…

Filmed before his feature-length Arrebato, Zulueta’s Frank Stein is a personal reading of horror cult classic Frankenstein (1931), filmed directly from its television broadcast and reducing Whale’s original to only three packed and dizzying minutes, during which the film's sensitive monster evolves at an unusual rate.

Kinkón (1971), a silent adaptation of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic, King Kong. Zulueta re-filmed a television broadcast of the original, and through creative subtraction and manipulation of camera speed, condensed the original’s feature length to an intensified seven minutes. The cathode-ray flicker and flattening that results from the re-filming defamiliarises the original, but its classical continuity mode of address continues to operate on the viewer, and the increase in velocity makes mesmerisingly urgent the dramatic plot of the original. —Senses of Cinema

The 1975 Super-8 short Aquarium is Zulueta’s first available incursion into the psychodrama—in which the filmmaker dramatises a disturbed state of consciousness—in which appear lyrical passages of the kind that will be made by the fictional experimental filmmaker played by Will More in Zulueta’s 1980 feature Arrebato. (Senses of Cinema)

Will More arrives by boat to a "genuine Mediterranean island" and is welcome by "thousands of Chinese girls" who take him to their place and tell him a story about his "ego", which he must immediately look for. Thus he gets to a "wonderful palace", where he meets a hermaphrodite odalisque who materializes the image of his other self and offers him a new and even more fantastic story.

Iván and Ginebra meet in a purely casual way and soon discover that there is a powerful attraction between them; but the constant presence of Ivan's roommate, Toby, a strange boxer who is afraid to step into the ring, forces them to redefine their relationship.

Since her earliest childhood, Blancanieves has lived with seven men who have cared for and protected her, but this has never been enough for her, because she wants to be a movie star, a dream that disturbs her guardians.

Recovered Zulueta short.

Recovered Zulueta short.