brief impressions on El ángel exterminador
A perfectly executed absurdist premise; a visceral sense of depth and lived-space accomplished by artful yet understated cinematography; and an entrancing spectacle of mental, social, and metaphysical collapse masterly portrayed by an ensemble cast: clearly this film is a masterpiece of surrealism cinema. Bañuel produces a totalizing spectacle which artfully embodies the living dialectic at the heart of Latin American Magical Realism: the ridiculous, the banal, the horrific, and the soulful live together in the same room, the same bodies, if not harmoniously then at least enmeshed in cruel codependency and cyclical parasitism.
The open-air love affairs and ad hoc malfeasance of the bourgeoisie cast captures a certain ennui which at least one film critic has interpreted as being specific to the post-civil war victorious languor experienced by the political-economic elite in Franco's Spain. Perhaps he is correct, but surely the same can be found in the libidinal dynamics of many elites, a repeating shuffle of gestures, rivalries, and obsessions, if not an eternal essence. I would not, however, wish to over-generalize concerning the meaning and impact of this fatigue; what makes the premise so powerful is that it is rooted in the failure--not the external subversion--of the characters agency. One feels that they have simultaneously brought their imprisonment upon themselves and yet were utterly powerless to avoid it, just as their ultimate (or perhaps not so ultimate) liberation is accomplished by means of their actions, but not their own authorship, forced as they are to go through the motions and shallow rites of a class they now feel uneasy within, lacking (albeit only for a few weeks at most) their critical constituent relationship with the workers who gave their position meaning and substance. This is not a portrait of just any elite, but a very specifically situated historical subject: one who, rather than wielding their apparent power in order to act on history, has allowed power to deliver unto to them one historical situation among many, and who know find themselves as subservient to such unspoken logics as they were once its beneficiaries.
This brings me to one problem with the film, though I suspect it is more a failure on the part of myself then the art: namely, the problem of analyzing the narrative without falling into the sophomoric exercises of interpreting by way of analogy. This is not to say that the film cannot or even should not be read as analogy, just that a reduction to such a framework must necessarily come at the cost of a certain freewheeling organic quality of the surrealist nature of the work, an aesthetic logic predicated not on the one-to-one analysis of structures but the production of contextualized yet self-sufficient phenomena. Yet this present line of thought would forgo analogy only to replace it with abstract platitudinous un-descriptions, which may be as far from the film as an reductive catalog of symbols. Of that which one cannot speak, one must remain silent.
In conclusion, undeniable masterpiece of surrealist cinema. Jonathan, if you haven't yet, you have to watch this.
This review first appeared on my Letterboxd profile.