Film Culture (Winter 1963-64)

Such “mystery” as Muriel contains is imposed on it, it is not what is inherent in it. Thus it becomes an imposition. Did you know that Luis Bufiuel wanted to do Golding’s Lord of the Flies? El Angel Exterminador, however seemingly formidable a film to encompass at first encounter, is actually no difficult “mystery” film or symbolic work at all, it turns out, but essentially a comic film. “Though with a very strong corrosive interior,” writes Juan Bufiuel in a letter I received from the director’s son. “It’s just a repetition of themes he’s used in all his films before, obsessions would be the correct word. . .. The problem of why these people are caught in this room is of no importance ... The doors are wide open, there’s no reason why they can’t leave, or why the people outside cannot go in. We never know if they can’t leave because they can’t or because they don’t want to. It’s not important. The fact is: they are there. Once this is established, the film can go on in its development. It’s as if they are shipwrecked. Without food and water they react as you'd expect which allows for satirical barbs at human beings and their social structure... . As to the repetitions, we repeat ourselves every day, doing more or less the same things, often saying the same things ... As to the ending, well, the Exterminating Angel is like a plague; first it starts with a small group of people, then with a church full, then on to the rest of society... We’ve gotten ourselves into a mess and are staying in it either because we want to or think we can’t help ourselves....As for the sheep at the end entering the church, what’s more logical than to have some 30 sheep enter the church because there are a greater number of people to feed than were in the house: three sheep for 20 persons, thirty sheep for 300 persons?” In short, Bufiuel is half-kidding, half in earnest (like Stroheim) in this film. He kids details of his basic idea (the Old Testament God of Wrath, vide the parable of the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah) but he’s in earnest about his basic idea. There is a quick shot of the terrible visage of the Exterminating Angel (in a nightmarish montage sequence) which every sonofabitch who ever lived surely saw (and will continue to see) at that last “moment of truth” before he draws his last miserable breath. You’d better see this film; Bufuel still makes most other directors currently working look very little indeed. The more I think about Hallelujah the Hills, 60 FILM CULTURE the more I like it. I now use it as my own current “acid test” or litmus paper to determine for myself the perceptive from the non-perceptive. After some score or more of films seen during the recent First New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and now that. the euphoria of the festival is calmed down, I find myself having liked three without any reservations: El Angel Exterminador, Hallelujah the Hills and of course Lola Montes. (Runners up: I Fidanzata by Olmi and The Terrace by Torre Nilsson, the former full of sensibility and truth sans a single concession to the box office (its exquisite ending won’t add a dime to its box office potential, I’m afraid, being such an ordinary shot that only a true poet could have thought of it), and the latter hav-ing a sinister edge stronger than anything I have thus far found in Nilsson’s work. I liked Electra atEpidourus, too, for Anna Synodinou’s performance in the title role. Monsieur Verdoux, which I saw again recently, is still the most emotionally exhausting film since the sound-film that I have seen. And Wuthering Heights still has its old witchery, too, to move one. Where are the counterparts of such films today?’ At the most we are enthralled, dazzled even, but. never moved. Is this part of film-making really over s.3? Added reflection on El Angel Exterminador: It is a comic work in the sense that Joyce’s Ulysses: is a comic work; it is cinematically kidding but thematically serious. With Stroheim it was almost the reverse; cinematically he was always serious. but thematically he was half serious, half kidding. (Except Greed, of course; he wasn’t kidding then.) Two cinematic dreams of Gretchen: (a) a fea-ture starring Roger Vadim, Tony Richardson, John Huston, Francois Truffaut, Laurent Terzieff, Roman Polanski, Michel Auclair and Monica Vitti, photographed by Ava Gardner and directed’ by Pascale Petit; (b) another feature adapted from Oscar Wilde’s Salome starring Henri Langlois as. Herod, Mary Meerson as Herodias, Brigitte Bardot as Salome, Anthony Perkins as Iokanaan (alterna-tive: Jonas Mekas as Iokanaan), Michel Auclairas Narraboth, Kenneth Anger as the young guard,. Guy Glover as Tigellinus, directed by Orson Welles. In Memoriam: that Harlequin, Ariel and eter-nal spring of the arts — Jean Cocteau.