Viva la muerte!

“¡Viva la muerte!” – General Millán-Astray’s cry, hurled at Miguel de Unamuno in 1936, became one of the most brutal slogans of the Spanish Civil War: an affirmation of violence as the foundation of power.

Fernando Arrabal was four years old when his father, a Republican officer, was arrested by Franco’s forces and disappeared without a trace. Years later, now in exile, the director transforms this story into a cinematic ritual of mourning and revenge.

Filmed in Tunisia in 1971, Viva la muerte! was made beyond the reach of Franco’s censorship, yet entirely in the shadow of his dictatorship. It is a film in which autobiography cannot be separated from hallucination: the boy Fando witnesses the collapse of a world in which his mother hands his father over to his tormentors, and the body becomes a site of political and religious violence.

Images of real animal slaughter, grotesque rituals, neon colors, and the aesthetics of panic form a language that Arrabal co-creates with Roland Topor and Alejandro Jodorowsky as part of the Mouvement Panique [Panic Movement] – an avant-garde artistic group that turned ritual, violence, and absurdity into tools for a post-surrealist break with Breton’s “orthodoxy.”

The film is both a personal elegy and an anti-fascist manifesto inscribed in the fabric of the image. Violence here is not a metaphor – it becomes the very structure of perception. Banned in Spain until 1977, it remains one of the most radical accounts of the experience of dictatorship, in which surrealism does not so much describe trauma as attempt to transform it into language.

Content warning: violence and violence against animals