Event

The Exterminating Angel

A group of high-society friends are invited to a mansion for dinner and inexplicably find themselves unable to leave in Luis Buñuels daring masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador). Made just one year after his international sensation Viridiana, this film, full of eerie, comic absurdity, furthers Buñuels wicked takedown of the rituals and dependencies of the frivolous upper classes. - Janus Films

"Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel" (1962) is a macabre comedy, a mordant view of human nature that suggests we harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets. Take a group of prosperous dinner guests and pen them up long enough, he suggests, and they'll turn on one another like rats in an overpopulation study." - Roger Ebert

"Luis Buñuels ferociously brilliant The Exterminating Angel (1962) is one of his most provocative and unforgettable works. In it, we watch a trivial breach of etiquette transform into the destruction of civilization. Not only does this story undermine our confidence in our social institutions but it challenges our powers of cognition and perception, which are shown to be easily distorted by unreliable narratives. Perhaps most threatening, despite the emotional distance from the characters that Buñuels satiric vision grants us, is what we are ultimately forced to see: that we in the audience are also objects of his attack." - Marsha Kinder