The suffocating charm of the bourgesie
Tragedy and shipwreck of civiization in The exterminating angel by Luis Bunuel
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/Eviternare.vi11.14194Keywords:
Confientment, script, masonery, mystery, horrorAbstract
In 1962 Luis Buñuel filmed in Mexico The Exterminating Angel, a plotline he had started working on in the 1940s. Starting from the comparative analysis between the technical script written and handled by Buñuel during the filming and the film, an analysis is proposed about the nuclear themes of this filme, specially those in which the author wanted to emphasize, his motives, his origin and the connections of the piece as a whole. In one of the most critical moments of the Cold War, Buñuel builded a crude portrait of bourgeois conventions, assumed as the norm that sustained the stabilized order and the cause of immobility and inaccion of a society determined on ignoring real problems that they must face. It portrays the bourgeoisie confined in a mysterious mansion, like castaways of a civilization that, after the tragedies lived during the II World War, chooses to repeat their mistakes and drown. This story goes through constant allusions to the book of the Apocalypse, both literal and suggested, a world scarred by the plagues (both moral and physical) that desolate this civilization. To feed this atmosphere, Buñuel wanted to use strategies and horror movie themes that he knew and that he himself had rehearsed in some previous scripts. Very tightly associated with the idea of the mystery, he introduced in the movie multiple masonry allusions to pay tribute through them to his friend Juan Vincens. Definitely, in structural and thematic terms, Buñuel tried to transmit his doubts about the advances of civilization, while he insisted on the mysterious and inscrutable condition of existence.
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