Exterminating Angel (1963)

After a lavish dinner party in a stately mansion, the guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the room. As the days pass the elaborate pretences and facades that they've built up by virtue of their position in society collapse completely as they become reduced to living like animals to survive. Product Description

The First Disaster Movie

This is a masterpiece dealing with the role of rules and manners as vestments of identity and superiority and what happens when they disintegrate. Like William Golding's Lord of the Flies, it deals with how human beings behave in the face of the breakdown of order, but it does so to the powerful.

The subjects are the mid 20th century European bourgeoisie and the situation - a grand dinner, the perfect arena for the display of rules and manners adopted by the ruling classes. The guests here are not children stranded on a desert island with no adults to tell them what to do - but they might as well be, as the fact of their inability to leave the dining room starts to eat away at their carefully crafted rules of behaviour.

Like a disaster movie - even comic parodies of disaster movies - different characters react in different ways, and different people break down in different ways, as their 'civilisation' is stripped away from them. There are no singing nuns, but there is a cheery encourager, a hysterical male who loses it and a moody reflective who almost enjoys accepting her terrible fate.

Bunuel's favourite targets were the bourgeoisie and organised religion in the form of the Catholic Church. He gleefully lifts the curtain on their pomposity and superiority to reveal the venal human beings behind the facade. Exterminating Angel is an excellent example of this 'Emperor's New Clothes' treatment and is my personal favourite.

The surreal device of the inability to leave the table is amusing, but its real job is to illustrate, at a point where the panoply of bourgeois manners come together - at the dinner table - what happens when they are slowly stripped away.

Times may change and the relevance of those particular targets may come and go, but you can swap in any powerful institution or group in any society and this treatment would still apply. That is what makes these films still relevant and appealing and this universality makes Bunuel one of history's great illustrators of the human soul.
August 14, 2008

Terrific director, Terrific film...however....

Anyone familiar with Bunuel knows this is one of his best. The image & sound are acceptable; this is the best Region 1 or 2 version I know of available. However, throughout the film Bunuel intentionally repeated some actions, conversations, etc. , and though many of those duplications are here, I noticed 1 in particular that wasn't. When the guests enter the mansion the scene should be repeated from a slightly different angle a second time, but for some reason that scene is missing from this version. I can only hope Critetion releases this someday. February 26, 2008

"Let's Party Till Death Do Us Apart "

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

No one could throw a party on the screen like Don Luis Bunuel did - in his films people just can't get enough of the parties - they either can't get started ("The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie") or they are so sumptuous that the guests would never leave - in a perfect companion piece to the Discreet Charm.., "The Exterminating Angel" (1962), very funny comedy with very dark (as usual for Bunuel) humor. The funniest part is that nobody forces the guests to stay, nobody holds a gun to their heads or blackmails them. They just don't have a willpower to open the door and go outside where the police, family members, and press are waiting...not be able to make few steps to the party house and open the door from outside....

Once again Bunuel proves that he is one of just a few artists who could tell the same joke over and over again and get away with it creating the film as perplexing, absurdist, bizarre and in the same time irresistibly funny and clever as "The Exterminating Angel". Simply perfect. January 30, 2007

And for desert - the terror of history

Luis Bunuel is a filmmaker whose work, although it is of such magnitude and weight that I among many believe it will never go out of style as long as the media exists, has, since his death, somewhat languished. He had the misfortune of dying at the wrong time. Fascism was on the rise worldwide. Reagan had ascended to the American presidency. `Liberal' had become a `dirty' word. The complexion of the general film going public had changed and drifted considerably to the mindless right. Art houses no longer catered to themes of the radical left - and what, with rock-stars voting Republican, material girls and retro in, even the underground seemed drifting, however mindfully, somewhat right. Good ol' in your face Marxism - staple of Bunuel's themes - was out of fashion.

All that now has changed. The `cat-house' atmosphere of the 80's and 90's has vanished in the realization of the many who never got a taste, or got but a taste, of the promised trickle, or that elusive dot.com success, that we are living in a corporate/fascist police state ruled by a brutal, insensitive, fattened bourgeois elite and fueled by insane theocratic/fundamentalist paranoia and blind greed. The root of which is brilliantly articulated and displayed in Bunuel's many diverse and visionary works. That point tells: for me, ironically, what makes these films as great as they are, is that in his literal pounding out of these themes, utilizing the graphic capacity of film as few have ever have, Bunuel enters into a mystical realm, in which he speaks of things so basic to the human predicament or situation, that beyond the humor or the horror, we feel them, and must admit our participation in them.

I don't know which is Bunuel's greatest - maybe Viridiana - maybe The Exterminating Angel. The films he made with Sylvia Pinal are extraordinary, but those he made with Deneuve and Moreau aren't too shoddy either. And let us not forget the masterworks of his twilight years, The Obscure Object of Desire and The Phantom of Liberty. Or earlier works, like Simon of the Desert . . . That plaudit I cannot give to one, as a number of the reviewers here do. But I cannot object - The Exterminating Angel is one of the masterpieces of cinema, drama, what have you - and although imitated and emulated, never quite equaled.

I hope that the generation coming of age now, in Bush's America and around the world, especially in the Mid-East don't forget to take in a Bunuel flick or two, and one can do no better than his one horror film, The Exterminating Angel. Contrasted with today's high- budget blood and gore horror extravaganzas, there are no special effects, the pace, characteristically, is crawlingly slow, deliberate (which may account for the negative reactions on this page). Fear not, you will not forget it. The problem analyzed here is similar to but runs much deeper than what's being discussed in a comparable classic, Todd Browning's `Freaks'. What's being discussed is the force inherent in convention which stands as the basis of community. Are we willingly members of a community, or are we impelled by certain enforced necessity? The phony affectations which we assume as permanent masks - the way we habitually, and then traditionally, hide our true feelings and intentions from the public gaze - these Bunuel sees neuroses symptomatic of an essential dishonesty which pervades our social relations. The guests want to leave this party (which is at the least a bore, and at the worst, uncomfortable) but as they try to exit, at first gracefully, and then desperately, they are met at the door by a mysterious force field which will not let them leave. They must return and face their destinies. The rest is, beyond all the lies, history, in all its real terror.
October 16, 2006

More reviews at Amazon.com ...