Ágata

A band of young musicians will do the impossible to boycott a song they didn't like at all, and that's supposed to represent Spain in a famous musical contest. An unusual film by the odd Zulueta in which, after the success of Spanish singer Massiel in Eurovision contest, this kind of contests are parodied with an insane story shot without a script and with the performance of several top music bands of that time.

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 beautiful girl has an intense trip during which she transforms.

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.

Filmed before Arrebato, Zulueta’s Frank Stein is a very 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 intimate monster evolves at an unusual rate. —Impakt.nl

Riot police act against protesters.

With the thirty-three minute A MAL GAM A he made in 1976, 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.

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”. —Senses of Cinema

A short film by Iván Zulueta