Archivi Mario Franco – Cinema Assoluto o Astratto 8° INCONTRO

April 24th 2019
STARTING PROJECTIONS at 6:00 p.m.
Mario Franco Archives c/o Casa Morra Archives of Contemporary Art
Salita San Raffaele 20/C, Naples

8° MEETING – Luis Buñuel

The Exterminating Angel
Original title El angel exterminador
A film by Luis Buñuel
With Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico.
b/w duration 95 min
Mexico 1962

A group of middle-class people are invited after the Opera to have dinner at a friend’s house. At the end of the evening, when it’s time to go home, the people fail to cross an imaginary line beyond the living room they are in. Days pass, and everyone loses first their manners, then their personalities, then their dignity. A Freudian nightmare, mixed with an ironic social criticism, although Buñuel, warned critics against investigating esoteric hidden meanings. In the film there is the theme, repeatedly proposed by the Spanish director, the vices of the bourgeoisie, hypocrisy through which they try to exorcise the fear of life and death. Luxury and culture are fictitious elements, ostentation of false values. The work, based on a play by José Bergamin entitled Los Naufragos, has a strong contemporary feel due to both the winning idea (a sort of dramatic Big Brother in a bourgeois living room) and the surreal, distressing narrative. Buñuel has always been an experimenter who has made an original contribution to the culture of the twentieth century.

Luis Buñuel
Active from the 1920s to 1977, Buñuel, from his surrealist beginnings in France, revolutionized the language of film, imposing himself as a relentless scourge of human hypocrisies, which he addressed with a lucid, fiercely ironic and never conventional. Reviewing and rethinking his films means going through the entire culture of the 20th century: literature and figurative arts, modernism and avant-garde, psychoanalysis and surrealism, critical thought and protests.