Prelude 4

Letal Morbier

A team of academics fly to South America in search of ancient ruins only to find disaster.

Portrait of Costa da Morte (coast region in Galicia, Spain) from an ethnographic and landscape level, exploring also the collective imagination associated with the area. A region marked by strong oceanic feeling dominated by the historical conception of world's end and with tragic shipwrecks. Fragmentary film that approaches to the anthropological from its protagonists: sailors, shellfish, loggers, farmers ... A selection of characters representative of the traditional work carried out in the countryside in the region, allowing us to reflect on the influence of the environment on people.

Nulepsy: the pathological need to be nude. An elderly man recounts his life story characterised by the rare, exceptional and inconvenient disease he suffers from.

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

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.

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)

An old hunter finds the lost rosary of a mysterious Saracenic princess, which keeps an old secret power.

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

Bastian, a young religious guy decides to embrace his sexuality and goes on a hook up with a stranger. Soon, he regrets it and does not know how to cope with it. Once his best friend Peter finds him at home crying, he has to go out with the truth. However, Bastian is more than surprised by Peter's reaction.

Working men and women leave through the main gate of the Lumière factory in Lyon, France. Filmed on 22 March 1895, it is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made, although Louis Le Prince's 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years. Three separate versions of this film exist, which differ from one another in numerous ways. The first version features a carriage drawn by one horse, while in the second version the carriage is drawn by two horses, and there is no carriage at all in the third version. The clothing style is also different between the three versions, demonstrating the different seasons in which each was filmed. This film was made in the 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.

In a lifeless urban landscape where time itself has stopped its crawl, a mad ballet is commencing and a newly hatched butterfly is about to die.

A short film which has its emphasis on back street walls with peeling posters and the constant pedestrian traffic in the foreground. It has a static camera positioned in front of the walls; experimental editing techniques, no dialogue-just background music, and quick edits of blackness throughout.

A film woven around the idea that between early cinema and avant-garde film exists a connection.

Shows a market where puppies are bought and sold. Several puppies are placed in a cloth bag, and they struggle to break free. One bites through the bag, pokes his head, and is observed in his triumph and then confusion.

Off a lonely Texas highway, a group of hustlers prey on the desperados who have come for sex, drugs and Mommas special milk. When a murderous cowboy rolls into town, a young trans boy quickly sees an opportunity to feed the physical and emotional hunger that has long been ignored by the neglectful Momma. As the boys begin to fall one by one, Penny is caught between the Cowboys lustful rage, and the greed and corruption that Momma represents.

Two roomates become acquainted during a game of chess.

The director of the film subjected herself to hypnosis with the assistance of a famous Hungarian doctor. The event was recorded by a fixed camera, placed earlier by the director. (BBS Catalog 1961-91)

Middle-class parents face difficult decisions if they want their sons to go to the “right” school.