I mainly saw Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film,  “Exterminating Angels”, as a critique of the bourgeoisie (a theme Buñuel commonly discusses in his films). In the film, Edmundo and Lucía Nóbile invite a group of their wealthy friends to a dinner party at their mansion after an opera show. However, just before dinner is served, servants mysteriously begin to leave the house. After their meal, the group finds themselves unable to leave the drawing room. The first of Buñuel’s many critiques of the wealthy class is their inability to sense the danger the servants do. In the film, the dinner guests don’t even show panic as the servants around them are actively fleeing. This could be a comment on the wealthy class remaining oblivious and self-satisfied even as the world around them collapses. In a broader context, Buñuel is living in postwar Mexico (and heavily influenced by French occupation in Spain), and because of this, he saw the bourgeoisie as complicit in repression and moral stagnation. In addition, the film’s cyclical ending (the repetition of the same event in the church) suggests that history will repeat itself if religion and cultural problems remain unchecked.

There is also a dominating connection between religion and surrealism throughout the film. Firstly, the title of the film “Exterminating Angel” brings to mind Christian imagery, with the term maybe even hinting at “divine judgement”. I had analyzed the guests stuck in the room as a sort of purgatory, where their sins against society would be judged. In my opinion, the most poignant surrealist detail of the entire film was the reason for the group’s entrapment never being revealed. This detail works as a surrealist device that completely undermines Christian morals or ways of thinking. It pushes against the idea of Jesus and more into “divine absurdity. The film can also be described as a blasphemous inversion of the Last Supper in the Bible, one that ends with damnation instead of salvation.