This exhibit is centered around a Mexican film titled The Exterminating Angel (1962), directed by Luis Buñuel, which is concerned with a fictional and psychological illness. It is unrelated to the diseases present at the time, but the way Buñuel portrays the upper-class' presence as a blight that taints those around them is reflective of Buñuel’s own communist ideologies and additionally resembles a virus. In our time, the film becomes particularly relevant as one of the few epidemic movies to focus entirely on quarantine. For the rich characters in The Exterminating Angel, the sickness that has infected them is quarantine itself, but even then, this film, like typical epidemic movies, exposes how rapidly morals decay during precarious situations. I would like to address how Buñuel transforms audiences’ understanding of disease, and how the intersection and overlap of class and disease that Buñuel explores in The Exterminating Angel has become appropriate to us today.
Credits
Agnes Hu