El ángel exterminador

The Exterminating Angel

  • A man eating while two woman cleaning themselves
  • Man with his hand through a brick wall
  • Sheep under the dinner table
  • Two woman sleeping in the couch
  • Dinner table full of adults in expensive clothes

“Aberrantly entertaining”
Artforum

“Wicked, almost unclassifiable…”
Slant Magazine

“..like a documentary about society”
—Alice Rohrwacher

The Exterminating Angel is a brilliantly open-ended allegory, set in an unnamed European capital where the guests at an elegant dinner party mysteriously find themselves unable to leave the living room. Social relations break down quickly as the servants disappear, the food supply runs out and basic human needs become impossible to fulfill. As tempting as it is to reduce the film to a metaphor for upper class decadence, Buñuel shakes off simple political interpretations by introducing a stream of undecipherable, dreamlike images while time itself seems to hiccup, as situations recycle and, at the climax, the film resets for a new beginning.

Remembering Silvia Pinal (1931-2024): An Icon of Mexican Cinema.

Part of On the edge of Reality: A Liminal Cinema Series.

Runtime
1h 35m
Year
1962
Director
Luis Buñuel
Format
DCP
Country
Mexico
Language
Spanish with English subtitles
First Showing
December 28, 2024