Luis Buñuel

His Films, Politics, and Controversies from 1929-1962

Luis Buñuel was originally from Spain, and it was there that he directed his first movie – a notorious surrealist short film in collaboration with Salvador Dalí called Un chien andalou (1929) that shocked, and continues to shock, its viewers, because of its disturbing imagery. Audience reaction was so extreme that Buñuel has talked about being verbally and sometimes even physically harassed on the streets for it. While this led to Buñuel needing to take preemptive measures when he was outside, he would continue to encourage this kind of behaviour for over forty years with the films he made. Buñuel worked in various countries throughout this time, which was not uncommon during the politically tumultuous 20^th century, but he was one of the few of his prominence to have worked back and forth in as many as he did. All told, Buñuel made 33 films in, chronologically, Spain, France, then Spain again, Mexico, France, Mexico, until finally, he ended his career in France. He also did multiple transnational films and, following his debut in France with a movie called L’Âge d’or in 1930 and during his first return to Spain in the early-to-mid 30s, Buñuel worked for Hollywood in Paris and Madrid’s Paramount and Warner Brothers studios respectively in their Spanish dubbing departments. Of this relocation in the 30s, Julie Jones writes in her chapter titled “Luis Buñuel and the Politics of Self-Preservation” from the book A Companion to Luis Buñuel, that “when it came to facing up to the indignation [L’Âge d’or] was sure to incite: he took to his heels” (81). She continues to address the roles that publicity and his tendency for controversy played in his frequent movement. During his first stay in Mexico, Buñuel was pressured to foray into commercial filmmaking. After that failed, he returned to brazen political filmmaking which culminated with Viridiana (1961), a Mexican-Spanish joint production shot in Spain (his first since 1929, breaking his exile). Viridiana was significant, because it created a massive stir. As an attack upon the Francoist dictatorship and the institution of the Church, it was, among other things, banned in Spain, threatened with eradication when its prints were hunted down, and openly condemned by the Vatican. After all this chaos, Buñuel returned to film The Exterminating Angel in Mexico. Jones noted earlier in her piece that Buñuel had disclaimed his previous communist affiliations after the end of the Spanish Civil War and “would spend the rest of his life denying that he had ever joined the Party” (83), opting to weave his political views into his later films through “ambiguity” (87). This is supported in Buñuel’s statements regarding Viridiana’s controversy – he argued that the film was not subversive in the least and had nothing to do with Franco’s government – and in the statement that precedes The Exterminating Angel where Buñuel informs viewers that “there is no explanation” for the film they are about to see (there is a double dose of ambiguity here as it is unclear whether he referring to the film’s internal logistics or to its politics). Interestingly, the famous American film critic Roger Ebert found anti-Francoist qualities in The Exterminating Angel as well. In 1997, he reviewed the film and declared: “Obviously, the dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends. They're trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac.”

The Exterminating Angel's Style and Themes

In another chapter from the same companion book, Susan McCabe, referring to Viridiana and a couple of other movies Buñuel made just before it, remarks that “by 1962, his anti-clerical and anti-institutional stance reached a new peak […], […] [b]ut [The Exterminating Angel] marks a return to and reinvention of surrealist tactics” (591) – in other words, Buñuel’s career was coming full-circle again, first with his Spanish homecoming and then with him fully reprising his surrealist roots. The surrealism, McCabe argues, is interlinked with the epidemic in The Exterminating Angel. To her, Buñuel is citing Freud. She writes: “Buñuel’s underscoring of the spectator’s own hypnogogic position, pushing him or her outside a familiar psychic habitat. In fact, the audience […] vitally becomes a group in a constellation described by Freud in Group Psychology as a ‘fascination’ or hypnosis – in which the self is mesmerized, paralyzed, given to ‘contagion’” (593). The strange disorder that will sweep through the servants in The Exterminating Angel is introduced within the opening moments of the film. A servant, who we later know as Lucas, is caught walking through the gates of the mansion when he is supposed to be preparing for a dinner party. This condition is psychological. It is more of a powerful premonition which affects the physical body and overrides critical thinking – Lucas acts bewildered when he is reminded of the party. When the other servants are informed that Lucas has left, they are confused, but as the guests arrive and the party goes on, the servants each begin to leave in the same sudden and hurried manner that Lucas did. The condition is thus transmissible and epidemic-like, but as the audience is about to witness, there is a much more dangerous but similarly hypnotic and contagious virus which will spread through the mansion. And if this first ailment inspired flight, then its successor is more akin to what Freud, as summarized by McCabe, described in that it involves paralysis. While Buñuel’s title is a reference to the Book of 2 Samuel verse 24:16 which states: “And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD repented him of the evil and said to the angel that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thine hand. And the angel of the LORD was by the threshingplace of Araunah the Jebusite,” and implies that the bourgeoise’s collective entrapment in the mansion following the dinner party is inflicted on them as punishment, the film suggests a different idea. If other epidemic movies use their diseases as a vehicle to showcase the ugly self-centeredness of human nature – in William Wyler’s 1938 movie Jezebel, when yellow fever breaks out in the third act, its victims are virtually all left to die, either because they have been dumped on a quarantine island, or because they have been shot and killed for trying to escape, in an effort to contain the spread – then The Exterminating Angel indicts human nature, specifically that of the bourgeoisie, as the disease.