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.

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.

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.

A pop-art video of The Beatles’ “Get Back” made especially for Spain’s TV shot Último Grito in 1969. 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.”

With 'A MAL GAM A' Zulueta brings the lyrical film into the territory of mystico-psychedelia. The cinema as drug, as vehicle for rapture—as will later be seen in Arrebato—is a theme of this most autobiographical of Zulueta’s experimental films (which could also be seen as a documentary of an agoraphobic mode of artistic production), the protagonist is played by the filmmaker himself (“Jim Self” is the trans-linguistic homophone that appears in the credits) and shot mostly in the family villa in San Sebastián.

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)

Roma-Brescia-Cannes, made in 1974, could be called a lyrical home movie. P. Adams Sitney defines the lyrical film as one that “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision”.

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

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.