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The Exterminating Angel (1962)

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From Time Out Film Guide

In the best surrealist tradition, Buñuel claimed that his brilliant, disconcertingly funny joke - after an upper class dinner party, the guests find some mysterious compulsion making it impossible for them to leave the premises - has no rational explanation. True enough, but there are meanings aplenty in his powerful central image of decay as the vast, magnificently appointed bourgeois salon is gradually reduced to a sordid rubbish-heap where the once elegant guests squat and gnaw at bones. Significantly, the whole thing takes place under the sign of the church, but what still delights about the film is the way it refuses to be pigeonholed. Devastatingly funny, illuminated by unexpected shafts of generosity and tenderness, it remains one of Bunuel's very best.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide

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Technoguy said...

Posted on Apr 11 2008 18:52 This film was done after his belated and brief return to Spain to film his masterpiece'Viridiana'.This follow up made in Mexico shows how he dispensed with logic,removed explanation to create a strange world of
compulsion,fed by irrationality and blind ritual.He satirises the upper classes and the bourgoisie whose lives of empty formality cut them off from reality.This film rides on the premis: if the servants depart without reason what are the bourgoisie to do.The allegory of their hopeless dependency(unacknowledged) on the proletariat is made concrete by them being unable as if by some invisible forcefield to leave a salon room in their host's grand house.There are rumblings of weirdness with sheep and a bear roaming around.Some of the guests resort to masonic rituals,others to witchcraft,some die,others commit suicide.They are dying of thirst and start axing through the wall to get to a water pipe.They act as if they are on
a sinking ship,"Ladies first!".They also turn on each other.The force that keeps them there also keeps the army, the police and the public out.This film is an allegory of the Spanish Civil War showing Spain as a decaying mansion and the victory of the Nationalists as
the survival of the mediocre and unreason.This film has many lashings of dark humour that make it a delight
to watch,unforgettable and bizarre.

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