Dennis Lim: Mexican-Era Bunuel

(Bunuel's Exterminating Angel was the first subtitled film that I watched. When I was a junior, a college roommate talked me into watching it. When it ended, I was excited by the unique narrative structure. I started it again and watched it a second time, trying to pick up on what I missed the first time. I talked about it to everyone I could... no one else had seen it. I researched the director and world cinema in general. It set me off on a journey ...)

Mexican-era Luis Buñuel: After the Spanish Civil War, the director spent many years in the New World. Criterion issues two gems: 'The Exterminating Angel' and 'Simon of the Desert.'
By Dennis Lim
LA Times



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A literal drawing-room comedy with apocalyptic overtones, "Exterminating Angel" is, as Buñuel himself noted, a disaster movie of sorts, albeit one concerned less with the struggle for survival than with the descent into barbarism.

Buñuel was reluctant to ascribe literal meanings to his movies. In his autobiography, "My Last Sigh," he noted that "The Exterminating Angel" was, like many of his films, about a specific kind of quandary: "the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire." The paralysis of the guests could be interpreted politically or existentially, but the larger point -- that they are prisoners of their own making -- takes on cosmic dimensions by the end of the movie.

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