Edmundo and Lucia have invited 20 guests to their large mansion in Mexico City. The host and hostess offer their guests a late night meal, after the opera that they have attended -- the opera may be called The Virgin Brde of Lammermoor and the orchestra conductor and one of the singers, called the Valkyrie are in attendance at the post-performance soiree. Edmundo and Lucia's servants are very anxious to depart for the night and, after quarreling with the master, all of them save one man (designated to serve the guests) flee the mansion. Weather is windy and cold outside and the mansion sits next to a cheerless boulevard that stretches to a featureless horizon. At the dinner party, people make rude or weirdly abrasive comments. The servant falls on his face carrying a tray of some kind awful hors d' ouevres made with liver and almonds. Debris from the man's fall sprays the guests. The hostess is planning some kind of practical joke involving three sheep and a bear -- the animals are in a room upstairs where the bear growls at the lambs; ultimately, the hostess decides to defer the joke because it's late and people seem to be a bit peckish. After the dinner party, the guests adjourn to a room where the bust of Moor adorns an elaborate side-table and where there are couches and easy chairs backed by a series of doors bearing garish-looking religious images. Edmundo and Lucia are a bit alarmed because the 20 guests show no inclination to leave. We see that it is three a.m. and, then, four a.m. and people comment that they have appointments scheduled for only four hours in the future but don't want to go out in the bad weather. (The film is strangely exact about time: the dinner party begins around 11:40 pm). An adulterous couple is anxious to escape the gathering so that they can make love, but they don't leave either. The men take off their tuxedo coats and sprawl on the chairs. The women who are dressed in evening gowns, recline on couches. People keep saying that they are going to leave but no one actually attempts to exit the room. In the morning, a servant is told to serve leftovers (cold cuts) from the meal the night before. He brings in the food and everyone eats and oddly no one tries to leave. Gradually, we become aware that the guests are unable to leave the room where they have gathered -- indeed, they can't even enter the salon adjacent to the room where they are crowded together some kind of enchantment binds them to this place.
Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealist, made this film The Exterminating Angel in Mexico City at the Aztec-Churubusco Studios in 1962. Gabriel Figueroa, the great Mexican cameraman shot the picture, although it is intentionally drab, poorly lit, and mundane in appearance. The camerawork is invisible -- except for a couple of inexpressive dream sequences using strange sound-cues and superimposition, there is nothing about the way that the film is made that draws attention to its editing or image-composition or style. Bunuel has designed the movie be flat and affectless, like a picture by Howard Hawks but without the glittering dialogue. The people in the film speak in banal cliches and nothing intelligent is expressed. I have seen the movie several times and, until recently, the picture was typically shown in a print so disfigured as to be almost illegible. Criterion has restored the movie so that it can be seen but as a work of film art, the movie is bland and no great shakes at all. The movie's willful drabness contrasts, of course, with its outrageous subject matter -- the dinner guests are trapped in a room and can't leave and gradually succumb, it seems, to madness with random outbursts of rage and hysteria characterizing their condition. A crowd gathers outside the mansion but can't get inside -- in fact, some invisible power keeps the people from passing through the gates into the plaza in front of the elaborate mansion. The plight of the dinner guests trapped in the chalet and the people outside is Kafkaesque -- it isn't clear whether there is some kind of physical barrier barring escape or whether the victims are simply disinclined to make the effort; the latter option seems the most probable -- nothing restrains the people except lack of will. The film is far more harrowing than I recalled -- the trapped people in the house suffer from thirst and hunger; they are like the victims of a shipwreck. For awhile, they eat paper, said to be quite tasty, to stave off hunger pains but lack of water weakens them and makes the women delirious. Finally, the men smash through a wall to reach a water-pipe and break it open so that they can drink. The sheep wandering through the mansion enter the room where the people are trapped and they are slaughtered for food. An old man suffers a stroke and dies. There's a great bit of Bunuelian dialogue. Someone says: "In a couple of hours, he'll be completely bald." An interlocutor says: "what do you mean?" "That he'll be dead, of course," the other speaker says. When the man dies, he is shoved into a closet. One side of the room is lined with about six or eight doors, each opening into a small alcove. The doors are decorated with paintings of saints and angels. Behind one door, we observe many large, expensive-looking vases -- later, we see people slipping discretely in and out of the closets and recognize that the vases are being used as latrines. The corpse rots behind his elaborately decorated door and the men labor to seal off that space since the stench is said to be "unbearable." One woman is filmed tearing out her hair. Edmundo has a jewelry box full of cocaine and morphine and some of the men get high. The young couple makes love in the noisome closet and commit suicide together there' blood seeps under the door to this closet. At the dinner party, one woman was shown examining chicken claws in her purse. These turn out to be magical talismans but without efficacy to assist them in making an escape. The bear trudges wearily around the mansion. Outside the police and army troops have mostly abandoned the mansion but some street vendors sell balloons and food to children. A little boy, not aware of the invisible barrier, blithely walks into the plaza in front of the mansion but he is called back to his school group and led away by the priest in charge of the kids. In the enchanted and now filthy room, the guests have nightmares. A woman imagines a severed hand crawling from one of the closets and pursuing her. She crushes the hand with a knickknack representing the Buddha but the hand, like a cockroach, can't be so readily killed. A man tells a woman she smells like a "hyena" -- this precipitates a fight. Finally, one of the women realizes that the people have, by chance, come into the same positions that they occupied before they became entranced. One of the women plays the song on the piano that they heard before they became trapped and they are able to leave the room. Later, there is a solemn mass to celebrate their deliverance. When the mass is concluded the priests start to leave the sanctuary but they decide to wait "for the faithful to file out," pausing at the threshold. Of course, the faithful tarry, talking to one another, and someone remarks that no one seems inclined to leave the church. Outside the church, we hear screams and machine-gun fire. An uprising is underway. Armed cops machine-gun the crowd and mounted police cut down the rioters with swords in their hands. The film ends with a shot of the Church facade.
So what are we to make of The Exterminating Angel? Since the film is surrealist in nature, probably it is traduced by attempting an interpretation -- the film means what it shows us, no more and no less, and it is certainly not an allegory. However, the scenes in the Church in which we witness the Mass filmed from a great direction provide some clues as to how we might think about this movie. The Mass is a ritualized reoccurrence, a perpetual happening of the same. Bourgeois society is based upon ceremonies that imprison and paralyze. The conventions and institutions of culture require repetition and everyone is trapped within the confines of social meanings and traditions that we have made but that we feel powerless to change. "What is the cause of our inaction?" someone asks. Another man says: "Murderous violence and filth are now our inseparable companions." The movie asks us to consider what keeps us prisoners of our own habits. The forces that restrain us are not benevolent but murderous -- this seems to be the import of the scenes of the uprising brutally quashed at the end of the film. Bunuel observes this all clinically and dispassionately, without any outrage or emotion -- this is simply the structure of reality. Our disembodied hands, with which we should act to free ourselves, haunt our sleep and become our mortal enemies. When the famous conductor, the leader of a world-renowned opera orchestra dies, someone asks: "What's one less conductor?" The film looks murky and hard to see -- whatever it's showing us remains invisible despite all efforts at film conservation and restoration.
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