Iván Zulueta’s "Arrebato": a journey towards ecstasy

• Sergi Rivero-Navarro ^[1]
  1. [1] University of North Carolina, Wilmington
• Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 48, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Perspectives on Spanish, Latin American and Latinx television and cinema)
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • This article analyzes the Spanish film Arrebato [Rapture], directed by the Basque filmmaker Iván Zulueta. I argue that this film is a reflection about the ecstatic dimension of human beings, and about cinema as a way of having access to it. While other academic works address this subject peripherally and focus their attention on other issues such as vampirism, addictions, Peter Pan syndrome, and self-destructive impulses, I examine two important notions that appear multiple times during the film: the rapture, and the pause. Both concepts are related to an ecstatic state that the three main characters are constantly trying to achieve. Not surprisingly, provoking ecstasy through cinema will require accessing to the pause, to the atemporal instant, with the precise frequency of the obturator.