DVDFile

Weird, loopy and almost painfully intelligent, the movies included on this Fernando Arrabal Collection 2 DVD box set are odd beasts indeed, movies that stand as striking mileposts on the artist's long road of unabashed, unreserved creativity. The guy is a jack of all trades when it comes to all things aesthetic - not just a filmmaker, he's a poet, a playwright, a novelist - and if this edition of five of his films proves anything, it's that his movies aren't purely "cinematic": Like British button-pushed Peter Greenaway, Arrabal's films bleed into the lands of literature and stage drama in ways most pictures - even strikingly avant-garde ones - rarely attempt.

Take Car Cemetery (1983), the first inclusion here - like a powermad Pasolini, with eyes on muckraking and provocation, Arrabal retells the Christ story with gangsters, drug addicts and pimps, using the histrionic urbanity of his characters' lives to offer up a new (and bizarre as Hell) take on the tale. And then there's The Emperor of Peru (1982), a hallucinogenic children's fantasy film starring Mickey Rooney, a movie about a cranky railroad conductor and some kids who befriend him that teeters on the brink of not making narrative sense in any way, shape, or form, but has a visual style to it that somehow tethers the film to a hazy kind of artistic logic.

The final disc on the Fernando Arrabal Collect 2 set cements the director's esoteric reputation with one fiction film and two documentaries that are brainy, odd and revealing. Farewell, Babylon! (1993), based on Arrabal's own novel, showcases a pair of uniquely nuanced performances from Lelia Fischer and Spike Lee (!), but it's the two docs here that provide this DVD box set's most engaging moments. Borges: A Life in Poetry (1998) is a fascinating homage to the Brazilian writer Arrabal so plainly admires, and Arrabal, Panik Cineast (2007) is an in-depth look at the filmmaker and his history of rubble-rousing artistic creation.