News

Fernando Arrabal’s Viva la Muerte is a mostly autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s youth during the Spanish Civil War that intermingles with disturbingly surreal dreams and fantasies. This alienation effect is rendered all the more unsettling since Arrabal opts to shoot the imaginal sequences on heavily color-filtered video, aligning them with Nam June Paik’s avant-garde video art. Another sort of alienation may stem from some unsimulated violence against animals, in particular a jaw-dropping scene in a slaughterhouse that combines the in-your-face verité of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts with the dynamic writhing of Isadora Duncan.

Viva la Muerte opens at the end of the war, with a jeep full of fascist soldiers declaring the titular phrase and vowing to kill half of Spain’s population if that’s what it takes to cleanse the nation from the pernicious influence of atheism and communism. Young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) looks on,...

Yet another European art film director tries his hand at cerebral Sci-fi. Alain Resnais' openly experimental movie uses a generic time travel framework to, what else, explore the phenomenon of memory. Suicidal melancholic Claude Rich is projected back exactly one year, for exactly one minute. What could go wrong? Je t'aime, je t'aime Blu-ray Kino Classics 1968 / Color /1:66 widescreen / 94 min. / Street Date November 10, 2015 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95 Starring Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac. Cinematography Jean Boffety Film Editors Albert Jurgenson, Colette Leloup Original Music Krzysztof Penderecki Written by Jacques Sternberg, Alain Resnais Produced by Mag Bodard Directed by Alain Resnais

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

My very first UCLA film class in the Fall of 1970 dispatched us to the Vagabond Theater to see a double bill of two 'art' movies that play fast and loose with narrative conventions: Luis Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen and Alain Resnais' Je t'aime,...