The Exterminating Angel (1962)
April 10, 2024 10:05 AM - Subscribe
The guests at an upper-class dinner party find themselves unable to leave.
Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) invites friends over for an opulent dinner party. While the guests enjoy their food, the servants disappear one by one. Afterward, the visitors retire to the salon for an evening of music and conversation -- but in the morning, they are mysteriously incapable of leaving the room. As days go by and they run out of food and water, panic and madness set in. The army and the police arrive, but fail in their attempts to enter the house as conditions inside deteriorate.
Penelope Gilliatt: Nothing is trapping them but their own collective hysteria, but all the same the chains of conformity are real enough. When the guests are finally giving thanks for their release at Mass, three twittering priests are glued to the ground in the vestry in exactly the same way, not quite liking to make a move before everyone else.
Like all metaphors, "The Exterminating Angel" is not meant to be extended and explained; it is about panic and suggestibility, about the unconscious, about the reassurance that people feel in the traps of class and superstition. Like all of Buñuel's, it is thrillingly made, written with iron humour, and as universal as dreaming.
Mattie Lucas: A social faux-pas becomes the total unravelling of civilization in Luis Buñuel's devastating upper-class satire, The Exterminating Angel. The bourgeoisie was a favorite target of Buñuel's, and they were never more savagely lampooned than they were here, trapped in a room after a dinner party, unable to leave because of a simple breach of etiquette that causes them all to lose their grip on reality.
Buñuel confines them in a social trap of their own devising, caught in a web of absurd social mores from which they cannot escape, bound by baseless niceties and classist prejudice created by a senseless social order. And it is only when they turn to equally baseless superstition in which they have absolute faith that they are able to escape (if only temporarily). That they immediately get stuck once again, this time in a church, is no coincidence. Not only is Buñuel satirizing the upper class here, he's also turning a withering eye upon the church, and the blind faith in an institution that ultimately traps its faithful in a confining social and spiritual construct.
Marsha Kinder: Buñuel and his brilliant cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, spatialize the trap in The Exterminating Angel. Cutting between the interiorially trapped guests and those surrounding the mansion, who are equally incapable of acting, the film also spatializes the sharp class division between insiders and outsiders. Draped with black curtains, the doorway between the living room and the darkened space beyond draws our attention like a proscenium arch. The camera is frequently positioned at the far end of the empty salon, exaggerating the lonely distance to the crowded room, where the guests mill about like souls in limbo. As the camera pans along a row of guests lined up across the arch as if determined to walk through but who then become distracted, it emphasizes the power of the invisible barrier. Yet trash can be thrown into the adjoining empty space, transforming the rest of the house into an uninhabitable territory. This vast wasteland is left to the lumbering bear, which swings from the elegant chandelier, and to the sheep, which are lured into the living room, where they become sacrificial lambs. To perform their own animal functions—sex, excretion, and death—the guests retreat into small closets, enclosures that function as an underworld. These closets are so dark that we can see little of their interiors; like the guests, the camera is confined primarily to the living room.
When the thin veneer of civilization disintegrates, Buñuel’s bourgeois guests descend into brutal savagery, breaking down walls to get at water pipes; committing suicide and demanding the sacrificial death of the host; and turning to magic, dreams, and narrative for consolation and release. Their mysterious inability to leave the room is experienced as a failure of will—perhaps no more mysterious than the one that prevents citizens from changing the totally corrupt economic, social, and political systems on which their own privileges (and the miseries of the servants and other have-nots) are based.
Trailer
Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal) invites friends over for an opulent dinner party. While the guests enjoy their food, the servants disappear one by one. Afterward, the visitors retire to the salon for an evening of music and conversation -- but in the morning, they are mysteriously incapable of leaving the room. As days go by and they run out of food and water, panic and madness set in. The army and the police arrive, but fail in their attempts to enter the house as conditions inside deteriorate.
Penelope Gilliatt: Nothing is trapping them but their own collective hysteria, but all the same the chains of conformity are real enough. When the guests are finally giving thanks for their release at Mass, three twittering priests are glued to the ground in the vestry in exactly the same way, not quite liking to make a move before everyone else.
Like all metaphors, "The Exterminating Angel" is not meant to be extended and explained; it is about panic and suggestibility, about the unconscious, about the reassurance that people feel in the traps of class and superstition. Like all of Buñuel's, it is thrillingly made, written with iron humour, and as universal as dreaming.
Mattie Lucas: A social faux-pas becomes the total unravelling of civilization in Luis Buñuel's devastating upper-class satire, The Exterminating Angel. The bourgeoisie was a favorite target of Buñuel's, and they were never more savagely lampooned than they were here, trapped in a room after a dinner party, unable to leave because of a simple breach of etiquette that causes them all to lose their grip on reality.
Buñuel confines them in a social trap of their own devising, caught in a web of absurd social mores from which they cannot escape, bound by baseless niceties and classist prejudice created by a senseless social order. And it is only when they turn to equally baseless superstition in which they have absolute faith that they are able to escape (if only temporarily). That they immediately get stuck once again, this time in a church, is no coincidence. Not only is Buñuel satirizing the upper class here, he's also turning a withering eye upon the church, and the blind faith in an institution that ultimately traps its faithful in a confining social and spiritual construct.
Marsha Kinder: Buñuel and his brilliant cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, spatialize the trap in The Exterminating Angel. Cutting between the interiorially trapped guests and those surrounding the mansion, who are equally incapable of acting, the film also spatializes the sharp class division between insiders and outsiders. Draped with black curtains, the doorway between the living room and the darkened space beyond draws our attention like a proscenium arch. The camera is frequently positioned at the far end of the empty salon, exaggerating the lonely distance to the crowded room, where the guests mill about like souls in limbo. As the camera pans along a row of guests lined up across the arch as if determined to walk through but who then become distracted, it emphasizes the power of the invisible barrier. Yet trash can be thrown into the adjoining empty space, transforming the rest of the house into an uninhabitable territory. This vast wasteland is left to the lumbering bear, which swings from the elegant chandelier, and to the sheep, which are lured into the living room, where they become sacrificial lambs. To perform their own animal functions—sex, excretion, and death—the guests retreat into small closets, enclosures that function as an underworld. These closets are so dark that we can see little of their interiors; like the guests, the camera is confined primarily to the living room.
When the thin veneer of civilization disintegrates, Buñuel’s bourgeois guests descend into brutal savagery, breaking down walls to get at water pipes; committing suicide and demanding the sacrificial death of the host; and turning to magic, dreams, and narrative for consolation and release. Their mysterious inability to leave the room is experienced as a failure of will—perhaps no more mysterious than the one that prevents citizens from changing the totally corrupt economic, social, and political systems on which their own privileges (and the miseries of the servants and other have-nots) are based.
Trailer
I didn't really buy Ebert's argument that it was a Francoist parable - but I actually was okay not having things explained. It hit my X-Files episode sweet spot of "just supernatural enough".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:15 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:15 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]
This is one of my favourite movies, and I've watched it multiple times as I've introduced new people to it. I guess I never really thought too deeply about "what it all means". I just find the whole movie wonderful and darkly comic. In particular I love the notion of people knowing exactly what they should do, even if it's something basic like leaving a mansion, and not out fear or some overt supernatural power, just being unable to do so.
I also saw the The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which I guess covers similar thematic ground, but somehow I didn't connect with that film as much - too surrealist and disjointed for my tastes, at least at the time. I'd be curious to hear what others think though.
posted by Alex404 at 1:07 AM on April 11
I also saw the The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which I guess covers similar thematic ground, but somehow I didn't connect with that film as much - too surrealist and disjointed for my tastes, at least at the time. I'd be curious to hear what others think though.
posted by Alex404 at 1:07 AM on April 11
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Very interesting film, excited to check out Discrete Charm next.
posted by Carillon at 10:09 AM on April 10