Film Screening: Exterminating Angel (1961)

Film Screening: Exterminating Angel (1961)
Date
Wed May 6th 2015, 7:00pm
Location
Pigott Hall (Building 260), Room 113

Speakers): Samuel Gibson

The dinner guests arrive twice.  They ascend the stairs and walk through the wide doorway, and then they arrive again—the same guests, seen from a higher camera angle. This is a joke and soon we understand the punch line: The guests, having so thoroughly arrived, are incapable of leaving.  This macabrely-comic addition to the director's career-long dissection of bourgeois manners takes a group of acquaintances from Mexico's prosperous class and scrutinizes the growth of their disaccord as the tuxedos loosen and the invitees begin to turn on each other like rats in a biting study of over-population.  The Exterminating Angel is Buñuel’s take on Big Brother in the age of Surrealism.

This film are part of the DLCL Spring 2015 Film Series, "Bitter Laughter." Take a look at this series' complete list of films.