A group of bourgeois cosmopolitans are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave, in Luis Buñuel’s daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this is a furthering of Buñuel’s wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes, full of eerie and hilarious absurdity. —The Criterion Collection
Sent off for a Jesuit education by his prosperous Spanish parents, Luis Buñuel went on to attend the University of Madrid, where he first became interested in the burgeoning European film industry. Upon graduating from Paris’ Academie du Cinema, his first movie job was as an assistant to French-based directors Jean Epstein and Mario Nalpas. In partnership with an old friend, Spanish painter/sculptor Salvador Dali, Buñuel put together the three-reel surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1928), the film that features dead donkeys on a piano, a razor slashing an eyeball, and other deliberately shocking images that cineastes have either praised or damned for the past seven decades.
Buñuel’s first feature film, L’Age d’Or, was banned from public exhibition almost immediately from the moment of its 1930 premiere; its principal opponents were high-ranking members of the Catholic church, who condemned the film as savagely sacrilegious. After 1932’s Land Without Bread, an uncompromising… read more
Permitir que las escenas sean perturbadoras simplemente es un logro que Buñuel en su más exquisita expresión, quería (liricamente al parecer) degradar algo, que ya estaba degradado, y humanamente es infalible. Un nuevo respiro para verla de nuevo.
An absurdist premise taken to its ferociously nasty, yet logical, conclusion. Bunuel distances us from the bourgeois characters and asks us to both laugh at their plight and suffer along with them. Of course, it's all precipitated by an exodus of the servants. When the servants refuse to serve their masters the social order will crumble, and the bourgeoisie will be revealed for the helpless leeches they are.
In our annual poll, we pair our favorite new films of 2011 with older films seen in the same year to create fantastic double features.
Two couples, one apartment in Brooklyn, an 18 year-old single malt Scotch and Roman Polanski.
"The desire for a critical framework capable of both political acumen and esthetic incisiveness is at the heart of Cineaste's project
Thanks to Natalia Caballero for introducing me to the work of Luis Garcia Berlanga. The Executioner. It doesn't sound much like the title
DR. LIVINGSKELETON, I PRESUME? The Living Skeleton is a lot of fun, or at least, that was my experience, or I think it was
HOW TO FORGET The erosion of a reputation— The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935) is an unusual film, but we'll come to that. It affected
A beautiful question mark of a film, it examines the mores and conventions of what it is that sets humankind apart from the animal kingdom, and simultaneously shows that we are not removed from it… read review
Observar El ángel exterminador (1962) de Luis Buñuel es confrontar a la burguesía con su presente, entorno, costumbres y desenvolvimiento hacia las demás personas.
Intento para una crítica de “El Angel Exterminador”.
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Vi la pelicula una noche de domingo. Y esto no es un dato menor, sino mas bien todo la contrario. Los domingos por lo general uno… read review
Bunuel is the great equalizer. His work has had a way of putting people and institutions in their place as if to proclaim they aren’t above anyone or thing. And Exterminating Angel only exemplifies… read review