One of a string of films by Luis Buñuel sticking it to the bourgeoisie, the church, the authorities, the man, The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) looked wildly radical and political when it debuted in 1962. Now it looks like a metaphor in search of a story. Times change.
Even before things have descended into the purely allegorical, Buñuel is telling us that something is afoot. All is not well at the grand house preparing for an after-party for the swells who have just attended the opera. Everyone is uneasy. The servants are making excuses to get out of the building before their social superiors arrive. When this gaggle of top-hatted, fur-wearing toffs does arrive Buñuel does something strange – he runs their entrance into the building twice using the same footage (the editor Carlos Savage thought Buñuel had made a mistake here, but it’s deliberate).
Other little tells are preparing us for strangeness. A woman appears to have some turkey claws in her handbag. There is a bear in the kitchen and some sheep under a table. At one point a boom mic is clearly visible (the IMDb says this is a goof, but maybe not).
The party proceeds. Someone plays the piano. There is bright chat about topics such as whether the lower orders feel pain as much as the wealthy. Then the time eventually comes for everyone to call it a night. But no one goes home. They carry on chatting merrily, everyone strenuously avoiding the fact that no one is budging. Eventually people start to take positions on sofas and chairs and bed down.
The next day things carry on in the same vein. The guests don’t leave. Some try to but can’t manage it. Over the next days the assembled guests become more frantic. Food runs out. Accusations fly. Tempers fray. They start fighting among themselves. One of the party is mortally ill. Outside the police arrive but they can’t, or won’t, enter. A crowd of onlookers also gathers, but they can’t get into the building either, though there’s nothing stopping them.
This is a film about people who cannot do the obvious thing because of a set of irrational beliefs. False consciousness you would call it if subjecting this film to a Marxist interpretation, which seems to be the one that most fits the bill. The toffs are stuck, prisoners of their own ideology, and so is anyone else who signs up, like the butler Julio (Claudio Brook), whose class loyalties align upwards. And there he is, resourceful for sure but stuck with the other guests when all the other servants have fled.
It is all wildly metaphorical. Read straight as a story about people trapped inside a fancy house it yields very little. There are relationships to be examined but Buñuel doesn’t seem that interested in individuals so much as the power alliances people strike up as contrived wedge issues cause solidarity to break down.
On the other hand there is some very neat camerawork and Buñuel does get remarkable dramatic mileage out of a restricted space with nimble camera movements and varying angles. His DP, Gabriel Figeuroa – one of the greats, who also worked with John Huston and John Ford – ups the cinematographic ante as the movie goes on, compensating for the lack of dramatic development with big pools of light. It looks lovely, and this is probably also part of the “message” – don’t be taken in by surfaces.
Prestige directors were making variations on horror movies around this time. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (Les Yeux sans Visage), Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. And to an extent you could lump The Exterminating Angel in with all of those. Horror, of sorts, putting a fresh spin on the genre. A drily comic surrealist horror movie that’s almost pure form, no content. Arid might be another word.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
