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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CUADECUC VAMPIR (1971)

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DIRECTED BY: Pere Portabella

FEATURING: , Herbert Lom,

PLOT: B-roll footage from Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) repurposed into an avant-garde presentation of the story.

Still from Cuadecuc Vampire (1971)

COMMENTS: Pere Portabella’s oeuvre refuses to be easily intelligible. It embraces the fragmentary nature of surrealism, suggesting the idea of a narrative without delivering a cohesive story. Portabella is especially known for his clandestine period: a series of films made illegally during the Franco regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, employing guerrilla tactics in the vein of the Third Cinema.

Cuadecuc Vampir is perhaps his most famous work from that period, an abstracted take on the vampiric myth camouflaged as a making-of documentary for the European co-production Count Dracula by Jesús Franco, directed a year before. Franco’s movie was a typically mediocre B-movie affair following the tradition of Hammer Films, even using Christopher Lee as Dracula.

Portabella worked like a documentary filmmaker for this project. During Franco’s movie, his own crew filmed the improvisations and behind-the-scenes footage without directing anything himself. Due to purposeful continuity errors and grainy black-and-white high-contrast photography, he made something whose effect closely resembles the unearthing and manipulation of long-lost media: that is, a found-footage movie.

As in a found-footage movie, Portabella uses editing to set the mood he has in mind. An oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere emerges through segments depicting the spread of vampirism from an old patriarch. The results hints at possible political undertones, but those are not always clear.

What remains undeniable, though, is the anachronistic aesthetic—a result of the stylistic choices mentioned above—that engages in a dialogue with the cinematic tradition of gothic horror and the vampire myth, and explicitly refers to productions the silent era. Nearly all diegetic sounds are muted, replaced by an experimental soundscape composed by concert pianist Carles Santos, including thunderstorms, tapping sounds, and glitchy effects alongside the melodies, deconstructing any sense of cinematic illusion. From the beginning, the creative process unmasks itself: practical effects are shown during their construction, actors take off their makeup, cinematic crews appear onscreen or in mirrors.

Cuadecuc could be interesting as a glimpse into the backstage production for fans of Franco’s original movie, but only if they are open to an experimental format without voiceover and with no informative intent. But the film stands alone as a puzzling and challenging cinematic experience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The effect is gorgeously dreamlike, as the actors, who are captured alternately in character and as themselves, appear as automatons, moved by some shadowy unseen force… a radical, avant-garde mood piece that is among the most mysterious artefacts in cinema.”–Tom Grieve, The Skinny

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Vampir-Cuadecuc + Umbracle (Double Feature) [Blu-ray]

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    AMANECE, QUE NO ES POCO [DAWN BREAKS, WHICH IS NO SMALL THING] (1989)

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    DIRECTED BY: José Luis Cuerda

    FEATURING: Antonio Resines, José Sazatornil, Cassen, Luis Ciges

    PLOT: An engineering professor returns to Spain to visit his father;  they take a trip to a remote village crowded with eccentric inhabitants where incongruous situations are the norm.

    Still from AMANECE, QUE NO ES POCO (1989)

     

    COMMENTS: José Luis Cuerda’s Amanece, Que No Es Poco (translated as Dawn Breaks, Which Is No Small Thing) is part of a group of Spanish films that professor and scriptwriter Jaime Bauzá identifies as “surruralismo,” a blending of surrealism and ruralism. In essence, all of these movies are absurdist comedies, which isn’t surprising considering small rural communities are often associated with traditional mindsets and tight-knit circles, and are thought to harbor suspicion of outsiders. Conversely, surrealism involves an intrusion of the weird into the ordinary, creating images that have no direct counterpart in reality. The surreal seeping into the rural therefore produces a unique dissonance.

    Amanece, Que No Es Poco thrives on such incongruity. The film rejects traditional storytelling and linear narrative in favor of a sequence of vignettes featuring the inhabitants of a small village in Albacete, a Castilian province in central Spain. While there is a significant lack of plot, the motley crew of villagers and the bizarre situations they find themselves in make up for it. As Bauzá points out, there is no real protagonist in surruralismo; instead, viewers are presented with a parade of primary characters sharing a similar amount of screen time, each with their own funny circumstances. In Amanece, Que No Es Poco, some of these include men growing out of soil like plants, the village drunkard literally splitting into two personas, and a village school teacher singing and performing a lesson on different types of groins and their significance.

    Such incongruous situations are not the only humorous element in the movie, but they reinforce the discordant dialogues between the colorful characters. The randomness of the lines in several scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, with changes in tone coming out of nowhere in a great display of absurdity. Cuerda makes fun of stereotypes about small towns and thwarts viewers’ expectations every few minutes. For instance, the film challenges the common perception of villagers as yokels by having them reference world literature—Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, or Góngora are mentioned, among others—and philosophy—allusions to Stoicism and dialectical materialism appear out of the blue. It’s unlikely that these references add any intellectual depth to the story itself, but their mention amidst the coarser language found throughout the movie is hilarious.

    Such intellectual references give the movie a universal feel that causes yet another dissonance with its very specific rural Spanish setting. As a result, the humor of Amanece, Que No Es Poco may fall flat, especially for viewers who are not familiar with Spanish village culture. There is a sociological idea of “deep Spain” (“España profunda”) referring to areas of the country that are profoundly conservative and staunchly uphold tradition. Cuerda mocks such narrow-minded attitude and introduces signs of progress within the structures of the village, such as the acceptance of foreigners rather than the embrace of isolationism. The importance of these signs risks becoming downplayed by the overall absurdity, however.

    The cast does a great job portraying the quirky villagers, and one is always agog at the next bizarre scene. Sometimes characters reappear, but then new ones are introduced, and their storylines not necessarily concluded. Special effects are also notable for the time, and earned the film two nominations for the Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars), alongside a nomination for the zanily original script.

    Amanece, Que No Es Poco is a paradigmatic example of surruralismo and a by-the-book absurdist comedy. Looking for logic or deep meanings in such a movie may lead to frustration, so it’s preferable to go with the flow and be bombarded with the same nonsensical situations that the characters experience. As Wim Tigges put it in his doctoral dissertation, quoted by Neil Cornell in The Absurd in Literature (2006): “Nonsense is indeed one possible reflection of life in that it is at once both and neither meaningful and meaningless.” Nonsense in art is illogical on the surface, but at the same time follows its own logical system, requiring our innate knowledge of grammar, rhythm and tone for it to function, for us to try to recognize something hidden yet meaningful therein—otherwise, it would just be gibberish and noise, at best. In the paradoxical nature of nonsense we find an interpretation of human life in all its shades. Cuerda’s humorous and absurdist take not only reflects his thoughts on village culture, but also on the chaos of existence.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “One-of-a-kind Spanish surreal comedy that is so dense with gags, eccentricities, sketches, characters, fantastical absurdities and punchlines, that it is almost impossible to describe.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

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    Amanece, que no es poco

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      APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DECORADO (2025)

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      DIRECTED BY: Alberto Vázquez

      FEATURING: Voices of Asier Hormaza, Aintzane Gamiz, Kandido Uranga (original Spanish); David Goldstein, Marissa Parness, Peter Giles (English dub)

      PLOT: Arnold, a mouse, feels like he’s trapped in an artificial reality.

      Still from Decorado (2025)

      WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Decorado combines two seemingly out of place aesthetics—cute cartoons and psychodrama—but also uses an Orwellian dystopia as camouflage to discuss themes that are far more existential in nature.

      COMMENTS:  Alberto Vázquez’s animations distinctly combine the cartoonish with a heavy dose of pessimism and existentialist dread. His latest feature effort, expanded from his eponymous short film, is no different. What is new is the ambiguous nature of the surrounding environment, a perfect metaphor for the confusion and angst of these anthropomorphic animals. But let’s start from the beginning.

      The story revolves around mouse Arnold and his wife Maria. They live in a town structured like a miniature capitalist system, where a major corporation named ALMA governs everything. Both mice are social outcasts. Arnold remains unemployed for years, while Maria struggles to build a career as a graphic designer. Feeling exhausted by this way of life, Arnold wants to believe there is something more, a figurative and/or literal way of escape. A dark forest surrounds his hometown, and he can’t stop wondering about what might exist beyond that. Perhaps somewhere beyond lies the ideal world of absolute freedom and truth that he desperately desires.

      The parabolic tone of this plot is clear. Arnold lives in an Orwellian nightmare where extensive surveillance is the norm, everyone takes medicines to stay calm and happy, and class differences are tremendous. As Arnold rebels, he finds companionship in an eclectic variety of characters, but at the same time he pays a price, by discovering the true nature of his cage.

      This is not a social parable, even if it starts like one. It existentialist—almost nihilistic—in nature. Later revelations recall The Truman Show (1998), as the line between what is real and what is a facade starts to blur. That film, however, had a clear ending and catharsis, offering a concrete explanation for its world. Here, no easy answers are given. As the owl-guardian of the forest says, in this case “the (whole) World is a stage” and, perhaps, there is nothing beyond that other than the vastness of a cosmic void.

      From a philosophical standpoint, Decorado has some parallelisms with Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain (1973): both movies deconstruct ideas regarding salvation and a ultimate truth by constantly reminding us, in a Brechtian way, that everything is  artificial, props and cardboard cutouts on a theatrical stage. Decorado is undoubtedly darker in tone, however, and not so explicitly didactic.

      Decorado‘s narrative also works as a portrait of psychopathology. Vázquez’s works are always interested  in exploring the world of the mentally ill. In Birdboy (2015) a teenage boy shows symptoms of schizophrenia; Unicorn Wars (2022) studies the mindset of a sociopath. Here, Arnold’s wife struggles with depression—in the form of a Tinker Bell-like fairy that follows her around—while he is diagnosed with derealization disorder. Clinically defined, derealization (also known as depersonalization or dissociation) is a sense of detachment from reality—a gut feeling that something is off about the world. Decorado can therefore also be interpreted, through a strictly psychological prism, as an externalization of Arnold’s disorder. A work of art can be read in many ways, after all.

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “This paranoid and dystopian vision of life under capitalism is grim but funny—surreally cartoonish yet filled with sarcastic adult ennui, like Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space punctuated by a dose of Happy Tree Friends‘ goofy gore, eventually approaching something fearful and self-referential enough to evoke the existential absurdity of Charlie Kaufman.”–Jacob Oller, AV Club (contemporaneous)

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      Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000)

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      We all think we know Faust. The guy who sold his soul to the devil, right? But before there was Christopher Marlowe’s dramatization of the tale of Faust, or Goethe’s two-volume epic Faust, or Rembrandt’s etching of Faust, or Liszt or Berlioz or even Randy Newman’s Faust, there was the actual guy. The historical record finds a Johan Georg Faust born in the last 13th century who went on to become a respected alchemist and astrologer, but who may also have been an outrageous con artist, claiming the ability to reproduce the miracles of Jesus Christ. Rumors suggest that he died in an explosion, a fate which his contemporaries attested to his ties with the devil. Before the century was out, tales of his extraordinary misdeeds had begun to proliferate; one such copy fell into the hands of Marlowe, and the legend of the man who made an unwise bargain with the devil began to spread.

      The price of immortality is steep. “Faustian bargain” has become common parlance, and on this very site, two different interpretations of the Faust myth are currently under consideration for eventual induction into the Apocrypha, including a Jan Svankmajer-directed surreal mix and a version of more recent vintage from Russia. Today, let’s dive into a couple more such interpretations, one attempting to faithfully deliver the classic tale with what were then newfangled tools of cinema, while the other takes what it wants from the myth to reach its own, not-especially-lofty ends.

      FAUST (1926)

       

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      DIRECTED BY: F. W. Murnau

      FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, , Camilla Horn,

      PLOT: Heaven and hell make a wager over the fate of Faust, a pious man who sells his soul to the devil to save his city from the plague. 

      COMMENTS: The short directorial career of F. W. Murnau is so loaded with classics — Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise, Tabu — that a remarkable achievement like Faust could easily get lost in the shuffle. The film more than earns its place in this august company, though, with style to burn. Though the tale is familiar and the visual gimmicks are naturally dated, there’s a freshness to this telling that sidesteps a lot of the expected reservations.

      Murnau is particularly proud of his in-camera effects, and he deploys these techniques with Zemeckisian fervor. An early scene in which the devil looms over a small medieval town like the most imposing mountain would have justified recalling the film a hundred years hence, but Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000) →