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Abstract
El ángel exterminador (1962), Luis Buñuel's penultimate Mexican film, depicts the implausible imprisonment of a group of upper-class dinner guests who cannot leave the room they have retired to after their meal, while the servants have inexplicably abandoned their employers' mansion. Traditionally, the film has invited Marxist readings predicated on an inside/outside binary, whereby the bourgeoisie inside the mansion are trapped by their privilege and the home help waiting outside are excluded by the lack of theirs. This article moves beyond politically motivated readings of the film to consider its weight as a philosophical and aesthetic exploration of dwelling through the concept of the uncanny. The film's mansion bears all the hallmarks of Freudian uncanny, replete with symbolic imagery taken straight from Freud's renowned aesthetic exploration of what is at once familiar and unknown. However, I contend that, as the house crumbles around the imprisoned guests, the Freudian uncanny of the unheimlich home is supplanted by a more general, pervasive ‘not-being-at-home’, rooted in anxiety, that Martin Heidegger associates with the uncanny. This shift in focus frees the movie from auteur-centric psychoanalytical interpretation as the film text suggests an ethical and philosophical comment on what it means to be authentically ‘at-home’.
Notes
1 Paul Sandro, Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire (Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1987), 73.
2 Robert J. Miles, ‘Virgin on the Edge: Luis Buñuel’s Transnational Trope’, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 2:3 (2006), 169–88 (p. 179, n. 15).
3 Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, ed. & trans. David Robinson (New York: Da Capo, 1976), 211.
4 ‘Des personnages en déplacement qui semblent ne jamais vraiment réussir à habiter les lieux où ils se trouvent’ (Cécile Chaspoul, ‘Cinéma exilé, cinéma exilant’, Positif, 435 [1997], 113–18 [p. 115]; my translation).
5 I have written elsewhere about the growing significance of spatial paradigms in Buñuel scholarship. See Marc Ripley, ‘Panic at the Disco? The Liminal Position in Luis Buñuel's Simón del desierto’, Hispanic Research Journal, 16 (2015), 15–30 (pp. 15–17).
6 Carlos Rebolledo, Buñuel (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1964), 142–47.
7 Pietsie Feenstra, ‘Buñuel during the Mexican Period: Space and the Construction of Myths’, in Buñuel, siglo XXI, ed. Isabel Santaolalla et al. (Zaragoza: Institución ‘Fernando el Católico’/Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004), 123–27.
8 Feenstra, ‘Buñuel during the Mexican Period’, 126.
9 Marsha Kinder, ‘The Exterminating Angel: Exterminating Civilization’, Criterion Current, 9 February 2009, n.p.; available at <http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1012-the-exterminating-angel-exterminating-civilization> (accessed 30 January 2016).
10 Robert Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel: Authority, Desire, and the Absurd’, in Hitchcock's Rereleased Films: From ‘Rope’ to ‘Vertigo’, ed. Walter Raubicheck & Walter Srebnick (Detroit: Wayne State U. P., 1991), 116–46 (p. 142).
11 Peter W. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P./Clarendon Press, 1995), 81.
12 Víctor Fuentes, Los mundos de Buñuel (Madrid: Akal, 2000), 32.
13 See the website of the ICA for more information: <https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/cinema’s-architects-uncanny-walls-are-closing> (accessed 14 December 2015).
14 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock, with an intro. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), 132.
15 Andrew Warsop, ‘The Ill Body and Das Unheimliche’, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 36 (2011), 484–95 (p. 486; my italics).
16 Jo Collins & John Jervis, ‘Introduction’, in Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties, ed. Jo Collins & John Jervis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–9 (p. 1).
17 Daniel Boscaljon, ‘Dwelling Beyond Poetry: The Uncanny Houses of Hawthorne and Poe’, in Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts, ed. Daniel Boscaljon (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 47–59 (p. 50).
18 Bernardo Pérez Soler, ‘Heimlichkeit Destroyed: Freud's “The Uncanny” and The Exterminating Angel’, in Buñuel, siglo XXI, ed. Santaolalla et al., 405–11 (p. 408).
19 Pérez Soler, ‘Heimlichkeit Destroyed’, 406. Although Pérez Soler's contention holds true to a certain extent, in more recent years El ángel exterminador has been the focus of further scholarship and fresh theoretical paradigms. See, for example, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 88–116; and, most recently, Susan McCabe, ‘Luis Buñuel's Angel and Maya Deren's Meshes: Trance and the Cultural Imaginary’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Rob Stone & Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 590–607.
20 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 5.
21 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Jolas, 62.
22 Pedro Poyato, El sistema estético de Luis Buñuel (Bilbao: Editorial Univ. del País Vasco, 2011), 154.
23 Luis Buñuel, ‘El ángel exterminador/Luis Buñuel’ (1962) Filmoteca Española, Madrid, Archivo Buñuel 527 (AB 527), 66.
24 Michel Estève, for instance, believes that bourgeois man becomes a wolf-man in this film. See Michel Estève, ‘The Exterminating Angel: No Escape from the Human Condition’, trans. Sallie Iannotti, in The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism, ed. Joan Mellen (New York: Oxford U. P., 1978), 244–54 (p. 248). Gutiérrez-Albilla reads the film as an exercise in desublimation, whereby the ‘bodies of the bourgeois dinner guests can no longer be seen as human, for they have fallen from the state of “grace” into the condition of the animal’ (Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel, 111).
25 Ado Kyrou, writing at the time of the film's release, commends the cinematography in particular, arguing that Buñuel ‘devient le cinéaste du mouvement et c’est un miracle technique [ … ] de situer à chaque mouvement chaque personnage’ (‘[Buñuel] becomes the director of the movement and it is a technical miracle [ … ] pairing each movement with each character’). See Ado Kyrou, ‘Bunuel [sic] et l’Ange Exterminateur’, Positif, 50–52 (1963), 15–22 (p. 22; my translation).
26 Luis Buñuel, ‘El ángel exterminador/Luis Buñuel’, Archivo Buñuel (AB 527), 61.
27 Pérez Soler, ‘Heimlichkeit Destroyed’, 409.
28 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 233.
29 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2001), 35.
30 Warsop, ‘The Ill Body and Das Unheimliche’, 486.
31 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson, 232, 233.
32 Fredrik Svenaeus, ‘Das Unheimliche—Towards a Phenomenology of Illness’, Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 3 (2000), 3–16 (p. 8).
33 Robert Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming: The Leitmotif in the Later Writings (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2008), 57.
34 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson, 234; italics in the original.
35 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson, 230–31; italics in the original.
36 Warsop, ‘The Ill Body and Das Unheimliche’, 494, n. 1.
37 In interview Pinal says: ‘¿Qué es El ángel exterminador? Pues un reality show de gentes que no pueden salir’ (‘Interview with Silvia Pinal’, El ángel exterminador, dir. Luis Buñuel [Criterion, 2008] [on DVD], disc 2).
38 Svenaeus, ‘Das Unheimliche—Towards a Phenomenology of Illness’, 8.
39 Mugerauer, Heidegger and Homecoming, 58–59.
40 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson, 233–34.
41 Curtis Bowman, ‘Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur's Horror Films’, in Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror, ed. Steven Jay Schneider & Daniel Shaw (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 2003), 65–83 (p. 72).
42 Miles, ‘Virgin on the Edge’, 180.
43 Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel, 93.
44 Svenaeus, ‘Das Unheimliche—Towards a Phenomenology of Illness’, 8.
45 Tomás Pérez Turrent & José de la Colina, Buñuel por Buñuel (Madrid: Plot, 1993), 127.
46 Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn, ‘Re-presenting the Place Pastiche’, in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, ed. Stuart C. Aitken & Leo E. Zonn (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 3–25 (p. 5).
47 Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image, 32.
48 Bowman, ‘Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur's Horror Films’, 73.
49 Strother Purdy, ‘Existential Surrealism: The Neglected Example of Bunuel's [sic] The Exterminating Angel’, Film Heritage, 3:4 (1968), 28–34 (p. 34).
50 Stam, ‘Hitchcock and Buñuel: Authority, Desire, and the Absurd’, 140.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.