Murder and Apocalypse in Pop Art 1960s Mash-up ‘Fata Morgana’

PopMatters recently reviewed a box set of Spain’s gothic horror movies of the early 1970s. In that set, a director named Jaime Chávarri, who stated that one of his favorite themes is “the victim becomes the executioner,” observes that Barcelona’s artists “made political films that were difficult to understand, which was very common at the time.” Exhibit A of this delightfully baffling Barcelona School is Vicente Aranda’s Fata Morgana (1965), now on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

A fata morgana is a type of reflective mirage seen on the horizon; in 1971, Werner Herzog made a film of the same title about that phenomenon. By contrast, Aranda’s film is a wild, disorienting, surreal mash-up of Pop Art, science fiction, thriller, and horror. It functions mainly as an enigmatic, satirical statement, albeit one sufficiently disguised that nobody could understand it. In a bonus interview, star Teresa Gimpel asserts that she still doesn’t get it except to say it was about a woman who couldn’t love anyone.

Gimpel is an iconic figure in Spain. A strikingly beautiful woman with a blonde bowl of hair, she became a famous model in ads and television, leading to film work. Her evolution parallels what happened to an American contemporary she resembles, Tippi Hedren. However, Gimpel had a more prolific career she directed without an agent and founded her own agency.

See the Fata Morgana trailer on Vimeo here.

Fata Morgana is her film debut, written for her by Gonzalo Suárez, an important writer and filmmaker of the Barcelona School. Her character is called Gim, a short version of her real name, and the character is a famous model. Before the film shows her in the flesh, we see her huge winking face on a billboard. The image is cut out by a group of five “Chicos” who recur throughout the events, serving as a kind of silent chorus of cut-ups.

As Gim walks through virtually deserted streets of Barcelona, she is followed or accosted by various men in ways sometimes sinister, sometimes comical. She ignores everyone, and we get the notion that this eternal observation is her life, a part of the hazards of being a star and a beautiful young woman.

Why is Barcelona deserted? A title card informs us that Fata Morgana occurs “after the event in London”. That event is presumably catastrophic, and now the populace is being instructed through megaphones mounted on tanks and helicopters to leave the city. One woman photographer makes the most explicit political reference when she says she’s not leaving, as she refused to leave during various fraught moments in the 1930s and ’40s. She makes Gim hold up some inane product while reciting what she remembers of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. Finally, Gim says, “I don’t want to die,” and the photographer says that’s good, say that while smiling. She snaps the picture.

At the home of an artist called Alvaro (Alberto Dalbés, known for many Jess Franco films), we meet a beautiful, enigmatic, faintly hostile brunette named Miriam (Marianne Benet), who escaped London and left behind her husband or lover Jerry. She can’t report what she saw but has a flashback where everything seems covered in ash. Her traumatic amnesia hints at Spain’s official amnesia over the civil war won by General Franco’s Fascists.

Miriam is drawn to a piece of art created by Alvaro: a silver fish with a retractable switchblade, introduced like Chekhov’s gun. You don’t necessarily want that around the house unless you’re making a film like this. Among other things, it foreshadows a sequence filmed at Barcelona’s aquarium. Although that sequence doesn’t use distortion effects, I’ll swear in court that Aranda is referring to the aquarium scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and my supporting evidence is that the poster for Aranda’s later film Intruso or Intruder (1993) is an open copy of iconic imagery from Welles’ film.

The most sinister trickster figure in Fata Morgana is the Professor (Antonio Ferrandis), who masquerades in various disguises and shows up here and there in the disconnected, intuitive plotline. At one point, he makes the Chicos cease their cacophony of modern appliances and jukebox music by painting “SILENCIO” in red on the wall. Modern youth must be silent. He’s some kind of authority figure and intellectual, introduced while shaving as his wife leaves with her suitcases. Is she leaving the marriage or only the city?

The Professor delivers a lecture whose thesis is that victims attract their murders, and he shows slides of lovely, frightened women, including Gim and Marilyn Monroe. He even generalizes from this that cities invite their own destruction, thus silently evoking Guernica, London, Dresden, Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Indeed, “Blaming the victim” takes on international political dimensions Fata Morgana. The Professor announces that Gim is the next natural victim, and he compares her to an unsolved murder that happened a few years ago in 1965, thus placing Fata Morgana in the near future. He shows photos of that murder taken through a window.

Those still frames recall Fata Morgana‘s opening scene of comic strip panels about a man accepting an assignment. We later see glimpses of the man running frantically in his suit through various areas, and finally he shows up in an empty stadium to get information from the Professor, disguised in bandages and black visor as the Invisible Man. This running agent or reporter is J.J. (Marcos Marti), and he’ll expend a lot of kinetic energy on the thriller portion of the plot without being much help.

The comic strip signals the invocation of Pop Art, an element happening in other hip movies. Jean-Luc Godard made gestures toward comics and iconic imagery, especially in his science fiction/detective mash-up Alphaville, released the very same year. Aranda and Suárez are plugged into cinematic trends, and they channel self-conscious ideas of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, in addition to the ’60s vogue in movies inspired by comics.

One of the bizarre qualities of “Fata Morgana” is how it anticipates films yet unmade. The emphasis on photography and murder foreshadows Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), the thrillers of Dario Argento, and movies about fashion models such as William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Magoo (1966) and Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970). The stadium scene anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969), for which Gimpel auditioned; talk about Hedren parallels! The last moments of Fata Morgana bear resemblance to Michael Cacoyannis’ quietly apocalyptic The Day the Fish Came Out (1967). There was something in the water all right.

Firstly, lastly and mostly, Fata Morgana is about Gim and Gimpel in reality and alter ego, as she parades through a series of playful scenes that put her on display and show her self-consciously reciting drivel from advertising. Although suspense is generated by announcing her as a future victim and making us wait to see if it happens, the story is on her side as the various male figures prove useless. There must be something about her image that defeats all. Her mere presence at the home of a wealthy older couple, when she needs to use a phone, seems to cause the husband to collapse; is this a Franco reference?

When titles announce that “the same thing that happened in London” has happened to Barcelona, it’s an ambiguous statement. Is it really a catastrophe, or is it a sign that the modern world is breaking through at Barcelona, the weakest link in Spain’s fascism? That would be a disaster from one point of view, but perhaps the filmmakers see a hopeful mirage on the horizon. Is “the event” something about youth movements, mini-skirts and modern jazz, like the soundtrack by Antonio Pérez Olea? Certainly the world of Fata Morgana is as mod as all get-out, thanks to Aurelio G. Larraya’s photography, Pablo Gago’s design, Elena Oltra’s costumes and Emilio Rodríguez’s editing.

Mondo Macabro’s 2K scan from the negative of Fata Morgana looks gorgeous, the colors and compositions a continual pleasure. A commentary by Edinburgh critic Rachael Nisbet places it within the web of Spanish and Italian films, especially those of Aranda and Suárez. Angel Sala, director of the Sitges Film Festival, places their careers within the framework of Spanish fantasy. Gimpel recalls that the two artists had a big fight and parted ways during production. She worked with them individually later. All of this tells us that there’s a lot more to their careers and to Spanish fantasy than we’ve had available yet, and we look forward to more.