SLAC 13 (3) pp.

319–337 Intellect Limited 2016

Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

Volume 13 Number 3
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/slac.13.3.319_1

JAMES RAMEY
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa

Buñuel’s social close-up:

An entomological gaze on
El ángel exterminador/The
Exterminating Angel (1962)

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article proposes a new interpretation of Buñuel’s film-making strategies by Luis Buñuel
examining his training in entomology and his early theorization of the Griffithian Mikhail Bakhtin
close-up as a technique whereby edited film-making can be made to conceive in a Michel Serres
way that simple images or continuous shots cannot. This technique, I argue, implies entomology
the opposite of Auerbach´s unipersonal subjectivism in modernist literature, requir- posthumanism
ing a cinematic multipersonal subjectivism that is covalent with Bakhtinian dialo- El ángel exterminador
gism. In developing his multi-personal subjectivism into a rational tool for opening a
window on the irrational world of the unconscious, I believe Buñuel´s entomological
training led him to conceive and represent a dialogical parasitism, similar to the
posthumanist philosophy of Michel Serres decades later, as being inherent in all
human relationships, a view most clearly conveyed in El ángel exterminador/The
Exterminating Angel (1962).

Buñuel more than once lamented what he perceived as shortcomings in El

ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (Buñuel, 1962), including the fact

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James Ramey

1. Buñuel’s disciplinary that it was shot in Mexico City, and with local talent, saying in 1969, ‘To have
training in entomology
is sometimes
made the film as I would have liked I would have had to shoot it in London,
neglected; for for a start. I would have chosen elegant actors. But I am accustomed to resign-
example, in an article ing myself where secondary details are involved’ (Aranda [1969] 1975: 206).
entitled ‘Buñuel
Entomographer’, Tom In his 1982 autobiography, he also recalled material disappointments of
Conley mentions the production: ‘there was a certain tawdriness in many of its aspects. We
Buñuel’s ‘looking at the couldn’t get any really fine table napkins, for instance, and the only one I
world through the lens
of an entomologist’ could show on camera was borrowed from the makeup artist’ ([1982] 2003:
and also his ‘formative 238). Nevertheless, numerous scholars have considered the film an example
years, when he was
at the Residencia
of Buñuel’s art at its most refined. For example, Francisco Aranda writes, ‘In its
de Estudiantes in language Exterminating Angel still remains the most distinctly and completely
Madrid’ (2013: 189–90), surrealist film since L’Age d’or/The Golden Age (Buñuel, 1930) and, in the
but omits, perhaps
accidentally, the crucial ­writer’s opinion, is second only to that film in Buñuel’s whole ouevre’ ([1969]
datum that Buñuel 1975: 210). Subsequent positive critical assessments of El ángel exterminador
studied entomology have come from Raymond Durgnat (1977: 126), Gwynne Edwards (1991: 176),
there.
Ian Olney (2001: 71–82), Adam O’Brien (2013: 258–73) and Susan McCabe
(2013: 590–607). Gilles Deleuze cites the film as an example of ‘cyclical time’
in Buñuel’s work, in which ‘exact repetition […] marked the end of one cycle
and the possible beginning of another, in a cosmos which was still unique’
([1985] 1989: 102). And Robert Stam singles out El ángel exterminador as the
foremost example of Buñuel’s ‘demonstrable links both to the carnivalesque
spirit and to its latter-day heir, the theatrical avant-garde’ ([1985] 1989: 106).
Although Stam’s Bakhtinian reading is compelling, and arguably the film’s
most important interpretation to date, he overlooks a signal Bakhtinian aspect
of the film, one which the present investigation takes as its central thesis: El
ángel exterminador reveals the parasitic nature of dialogical human relations by
putting a group of aristocrats under glass like a displaced insect colony.
This reading of the film requires some contextualization. As scholars
including Aranda ([1969] 1975: 18–25), Edwards (1982: 13) and Paul Begin
(2007: 425–42) have observed, Buñuel had been fascinated with insects
from childhood and took formal training in entomology at the Museum of
Natural History in Madrid: ‘I worked there happily for a year under the guid-
ance of the great Ignacio Bolívar, at that time a world-famous orthopterist.
Even today, I can still identify many varieties of insects at a glance and give
you their Latin names’ (Buñuel [1982] 2003: 53). Alfonso Buñuel describes
this fascination, or obsession, as one of the constant themes in his brother’s
cinema: ‘Entomology and the study of animals in general attracted him. He
always had some live animal in his room: snakes, rats, giant lizards, owls and
so on’ (Aranda [1969] 1975: 18).1 The scientific study of insects remained a
constant interest for Buñuel during his film-making years as well, an obses-
sion that takes pride of place when Buñuel dedicates a chapter to listing

some of my passions and some of my bêtes noires. I loved, for example,

Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques, which I found infinitely superior to the
Bible when it comes to a passion for observation and a boundless love
of living things. […] this was the only book I’d take with me if I were
exiled to a desert island.
([1982] 2003: 217)

However, the way in which insects intersect with Buñuel’s cinema is of particu-
lar interest for the present investigation, because his thinking about insects,
evident in his early theoretical texts on film, underscores his unconventional

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 Buñuel’s social close-up

outlook on the human species. Although Buñuel’s cinema is humanist in 2. For example, see the
translation of ‘Del
many respects, his obsession with insects tends to decentre the human, as plano fotogénico’
well as the social and communicative systems generated by the human, in a (Buñuel 1927: 6) in An
cinematic articulation of what in recent years has been described as a posthu- Unspeakable Betrayal:
Selected Writings of
manist attitude towards the human. Luis Buñuel (Buñuel
I believe Buñuel’s insects can only be properly understood by examin- 2000: 125–30).
ing a theoretical essay Buñuel published in 1927. Although critics includ-
ing Begin (2006: 1113–32), Conley (2013: 188–201) and Sarah Cooper (2013:
141–55) have analysed Buñuel’s early theoretical essays, insufficient atten-
tion has been paid to the biological and entomological tenor of those writ-
ings, a tenor that situates Buñuel’s outlook in the kind of posthumanism
theorized by Cary Wolfe as, on the one hand, ‘the embodiment and embed-
dedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its techno-
logical world’, and, on the other hand, ‘the decentering of the human’,
especially in the sense pertinent to Jacques Derrida’s later work, which for
Wolfe constitutes a ‘mutational, viral, or parasitic form of thinking’ (2010:
xv–xix). Resonant with this, in ‘Del plano fotogénico’/‘The Cinematic Shot’,
Buñuel posits the advent of something he calls el gran plano (1927: 6, 2000:
125–30), a term in Spanish usually translated as ‘the close-up’.2 In theoriz-
ing el gran plano, Buñuel uses distinctly Darwinian language similar to that
of Boris Ejxenbaum’s essay of the same year, ‘Problems of cinema stylistics’.
Although the two authors lived in different countries and are not likely to
have read one another’s essays, each piece emphasizes significant, though
different, aspects of evolutionary theory in relation to the development
of cinema. Ejxenbaum’s essay, under the influence of Russian Formalism,
conceives ‘the evolution of art’ as something that ‘manifests itself in constant
oscillations between isolation (differentiation of the arts) and fusion’ (1981:
58). Buñuel, by contrast, describes artistic evolution as something that
depends on breakthrough advances that change the entire milieu of the art
form very quickly:

In the evolutionary process of the visual arts, and even of music, there
comes a moment of great importance […] an instant arrives when
the genius of a new era grants [an art form] a new and unimagined
vigor. Horizons multiply in succession like waves on the sand, and the
concept of art is forever fixed: a chrysalis reaching its moment of defini-
tive perfection.
(2000: 125)

Both of these notions, in different ways, metaphorically appropriate concepts

from contemporary evolutionary biology to describe the major mutations of art.
For Buñuel, the genius responsible for the (entomologically figured)
evolutionary leap he describes is Griffith: ‘What the names Cimabue, Giotto,
Bach, or Fidias are to other arts, D.W. Griffith is to cinema. […] The cine-
matic era begins in 1913, when Griffith, thanks to his use of the close-up,
elevated cinema to a fine art’ (2000: 125–26). Thus Buñuel’s concept of artistic
evolution pays attention to dramatic ‘moments’ in the evolutionary process,
while Ejxenbaum sees the process as an ‘oscillating’ continuum in which
‘differentiation’ is in a kind of dynamic equilibrium with ‘fusion’ or conver-
gence. Ejxenbaum’s formulation adapts Darwinian theory on an abstract
plane, conceiving of a relatively static, gradual evolutionary framework for
art similar to Darwin’s eon-spanning theory of speciation. By contrast, what

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James Ramey

3. As Begin puts it, ‘Buñuel Buñuel postulates resembles the biological theory of ‘punctuated equilib-
writes that before a
film is ever made its
rium’, discussed originally by Darwin and current in Buñuel’s day, but more
découpage should recently made prominent by Stephen Jay Gould in modern evolutionary biol-
already exist’, (2006: ogy. The theory posits that species tend to remain stable over very long peri-
1127). Timothy Barnard
has recently published ods of time, but then evolve extremely rapidly over relatively short periods
a brilliant clarification of time because of environmental changes or advantageous mutations (see
of this denotation of Gould 2002: 745–1024). Buñuel’s theory, in the vein of punctuated equilib-
découpage in 1920’s
and 1930’s France, rium, focuses on identifying the most successful, or adaptive, ‘mutation’ in
showing that it referred the history of cinema, among all the lesser ones, and holds up what he calls
to the planning or
pre-production phase
Griffith’s ‘close-up’. This specific identification is typical of a taxonomical or
of filming rather than entomological approach to evolution; one thinks of the famous example of the
the post-production British peppered moth that had provided the late nineteenth century with a
or editing phase;
he points out that clear illustration of Darwinian selection at work by favoring a darker variation
prestigious English- that blended with the soot from London’s factories.
language translations Begin (2007: 1125) dedicates only a brief paragraph to this particular essay
and textbooks over
the years have often by Buñuel, seeming simply to equate the Griffithian gran plano with the concept
precisely reversed the of découpage that Buñuel theorized in his later essay, ‘Découpage o segment-
proper denotation,
translating découpage
ación cinematográfica’/‘Découpage, or cinematic segmentation’ (1928: 1, 2000:
as ‘editing’, to 131–35). Although there is some overlap between the terms, each has its own
disastrous effect (2009: denotation and connotations in context, so Buñuel’s theorization of Griffith’s
261–81).
gran plan’ should not be simply subsumed by his later theorization of décou-
4. Buñuel credited Edwin page. For one thing, découpage requires the film-maker to know the editing
Porter’s The Great
Train Robbery (1903) plan in advance of shooting,3 but Buñuel makes no mention of prior plan-
with introducing ning in his formulation of the Griffithian gran plano. Nor should gran plano
this technique ‘by be confused with other, more familiar definitions of the term translatable as
chance’, but he thought
Griffith had exploited ‘close-up’. As Carola Moresche points out, terms for ‘close-up’ in various
its possibilities and languages have different connotations: ‘The close-up, in its literal meaning
made Porter’s ‘motion
picture’ technique truly
in English, refers to distance/proximity while in French, gros plan refers to
‘cinematic’ (2000: 127). size, and in Soviet Cinema it means “larger-than-life” rather than close-
ness’ (2011: 198). Buñuel’s term gran plano, though indeed best translated
into English as ‘close-up’, posits a conceptualization of the term that has
more to do with concept than proximity or size, but it also implies both of the
latter in a way that découpage does not. The Griffithian ‘gran plano’ is some-
thing therefore quite different from découpage, but also from what ‘close-up’
denotes in English, as well as from its counterparts in other languages:

We call ‘close-up’ [gran plano] – for lack of a better term – anything

that results from the projection of a series of images that comment on
or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a
person. The film-maker conceives by means of images distributed into
shots. His idea, once realized, is made up of disparate elements that
have to be fitted, mixed, and woven together. In other words, the film-
maker is obliged to compose, to inject rhythm, and only then does
cinema become art.
(2000: 126)4

With this broader semantic sweep for gran plano as a specifically Griffithian-
inflected close-up, Buñuel distinguishes between the mere cinematógrafo/
motion picture (1928: 1, 2000: 126) which might simply record a man running,
and La Fotogénica/cinematic film (1928: 1, 2000: 126) which would capture the
concept of a race in the sense that ‘everything around it disappears and we
see only fast-moving feet, then the dizzying landscape and the anguished

322   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Buñuel’s social close-up

face of the runner’ (2000: 126). The point, for Buñuel, is that the Griffithian 5. Begin explores this
similarity in depth,
close-up intuitively breaks down a concept into specific components, using but elides crucial
an edited series of related shots, and thus presents a spatiotemporal repre- differences between
sentational mode that is radically different, on the level of both concept and gran plano, découpage,
and what he styles
emotion, from a single-shot motion picture: ‘Through successive shots the Eisenstein’s ‘montage
lens presents, in abstracted form, the main elements of the race and the feel- of attractions’ (2006:
ings created by it; thus we achieve the objective of a cinematic film/el objeto de 1128); he also neglects
to comment on the
la fotogenia’ (2000: 126, 1928: 1). This cinematic conceptualizing through shots key influence of
edited to convey a ‘concept writ large’, which is to say, a concept charged with biological thinking on
Buñuel’s evolutionary
the grandeur of emotion, is what Buñuel means by the gran plano or ‘close-up’ perspective on the
invented by Griffith. development of film as
This distribution of shots to convey a concept (rather than an image or a a new art form.
fact) and provoke a concomitant emotional reaction is reminiscent of Sergei
Eisenstein’s contemporaneous writings on montage5; e.g., ‘Murder onstage
has a purely physiological effect. Perceived in a single montage sequence it
acts like an item of information, a title. It only begins to work emotionally when
it is presented in montage fragments’ (1988: 178, original emphasis). It is
worth noting that Buñuel much later included Bronenosets Potemkin/Battleship
Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) in a short list of films he admired ([1982] 2003:
224), and that he makes evocative mention of a link he perceives between
Spanish and Russian culture: ‘There seems to be a mysterious rapport between
Spain and Russia which simply leaps over the countries in between, and
which meant that when I first arrived in Paris, I knew the Russians far better
than I knew Gide or Breton’ ([1982] 2003: 226). In any event, there appears
to be an affinity between Buñuel and Eisenstein as film-maker-theorists, and
this, in addition to the interest in artistic evolution shared with Ejxenbaum,
would seem to support Buñuel’s perception of a ‘mysterious rapport’ between
the two countries.
Buñuel, however, takes his theory of the emotional power of the Griffithian
close-up one step further by pointing out its evolutionary ‘advantage’ over
theatre in representing not only a subject but also what we might call an
emotional subject-position:

Every shot in a film is the knot – necessary and sufficient – through

which the trembling threads of emotion pass. Eliminating the contin-
gent and secondary, it presents in an isolated and intact state all that
is necessary and essential. This is one of the great virtues of cinema,
one of the true advantages it has over theater. […] Let us recall a scene
from The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925) in which three men gath-
ered in a theater box all desire the same woman, who is dancing across
the stage with graceful spins. Suddenly she stops. According to how
she is perceived by each one of the men, the woman is deconstructed
into three images: feet, belly, and eyes. Three psychologies are instantly
revealed by the lens: a refined sadist, a sexual primitive, and a pure
lover. Three psychologies and three motives. The rest of the film is a
commentary on these three attitudes. There are as many examples as
there are shots.
(2000: 128–29)

Although Buñuel’s theorization of the Griffithian close-up here can be read as

a pseudo-Freudian analysis of Erich von Stroheim’s film, it also corresponds to
the larger discursive formation of modernism that emphasized the possibility

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James Ramey

6. In describing of perceptual relativism and the representation of multiple perspectives. As

the influence of
entomology on
Erich Auerbach puts it in his discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
Buñuel’s cinema, (which also appeared in 1927):
Begin’s highly original
article uses the figure
of an ‘entomological The design of a close approach to objective reality by means of numer-
lens’ (2007: 426), one ous subjective impressions received by various individuals (and at
later employed, albeit various times) is important in the modern technique […] It basically
without attribution,
by Conley (2013: differentiates it from the unipersonal subjectivism which allows only a
189), as mentioned single and generally very unusual person to make himself heard and
in Note 1; however,
I prefer ‘gaze’ to
admits only that one person’s way of looking at reality.
‘lens’, in keeping with ([1946] 1953: 536)
Foucault’s ‘empirical
gaze’ introduced in
The Birth of the Clinic Auerbach’s description here of a ‘close approach to objective reality by means
([1963] 1973: xiii), in of numerous subjective impressions’ is similar to Buñuel’s description of a
which the knower is Griffithian close-up that presents ‘a woman deconstructed into three images
just as constructed
and historically […] Three psychologies and three motives’. Let us extrapolate from Auerbach
contingent as the then to give a term to the variegation of psychological perspectives Buñuel
objects of knowledge,
something particularly
has described in The Merry Widow: instead of the ‘unipersonal subjectivism’
pertinent to Buñuel’s theorized by Auerbach, we have in these three cinematic shots the notion of
entomological a multipersonal subjectivism theorized by Buñuel. This technique will appear in
disciplinary formation.
many guises in Buñuel’s cinema, and it can be understood as a purely visual
7. Begin (2007: 432) notes instantiation of Bakhtinian dialogism, defined broadly as ‘the necessary rela-
that the voice-over for
the stock footage uses tion of any utterance to other utterances’ (Stam 1989: 11). But for the moment,
nearly exact quotations let us observe the development of Buñuel’s multipersonal subjectivism in rela-
from Jean Henri Fabre’s tion to his human-decentring deployments of insects.
The Life of the Scorpion
(1923:8). The social My aim in focusing on the posthumanist tendency of Buñuel’s cinema is
aspects of entomology to provide a basis for exploring Buñuel’s development of the Griffithian close-
are the chief focus of
Fabre’s work, and a
up into what I will term Buñuel’s entomological gaze on social systems,6 or,
central aspect of its to use a more concise term, his characteristic use of a ‘social close-up’. This
appeal to Buñuel. technique appears in L’Age d’or, reaches a major new stage in Los olvidados
(Buñuel, 1950), and achieves full maturity in El ángel exterminador and many
of Buñuel’s later films. In each instance, Buñuel uses an entomological gaze to
represent social systems and, I will argue, to explore and reveal the parasitic
nature of dialogical human relations.
Although the ant colony and death’s head moth that appear in Un chien
andalou (1929) are important ur-examples of Buñuel´s entomological gaze, the
close-ups of scorpions in L’Age d’or are a progressive step closer to Buñuel’s
later technique. The analogy between the entomological ‘conception’ of the
Griffithian close-up and the social conception are here perfectly articulated.
The film begins with a title: ‘The scorpion belongs to a class of arachnids
found widely in the hot regions of the Western world’.7 The scenes that follow
are in the deadpan register of a scientific documentary about scorpions, and
indeed were lifted by Buñuel from stock scientific footage and recombined for
his artistic purposes. More than twenty close-up shots of scorpions are shown
with descriptive inter-titles, including extreme close-ups of their ‘prismatic
joints’, their ‘claws […] organs of battle and information’, and: ‘The tail ends
in a sixth bladder-like joint, which holds poison. A curved and pointed sting
injects poisonous fluid into a bite’. We see close-ups of scorpions battling each
other, then an extreme iris close-up of the bladder joint and stinger, then more
scenes of scorpions battling each other, fighting over a lair, etc. The penul-
timate inter-title in this sequence departs slightly from the straight-faced
detachment of scientific discourse by using an exclamation: ‘What lightning

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 Buñuel’s social close-up

speed and what virtuosity in the attack! In spite of its fury, even the rat falls 8. Although Begin
correlates the
to its strike’. The next shot is a dramatic combat between a rat and a scorpion, scorpions with the
which have obviously been placed in a kind of gladiatorial arena by the scien- bandits (2006: 1128), this
tific film-makers. The scorpion stings the rat, which immediately starts claw- does not explain why
the bandit seems to
ing frantically at its own snout. The rat attacks the scorpion by picking it up, be severely weakened
but then drops it again, defeated by the poison, and ‘falls to its strike’. upon hearing the music
The final inter-title is reminiscent of those in Un chien andalou: ‘Some chanted by the bishops.
The poison of religion
hours afterwards …’. Then we cut incongruously to a scene of an armed, would have been an
ragged bandit observing what could well be a hallucination: a group of four appealing notion to
the Surrealists, and
archbishops sitting in ornate regalia on the dry rocks of a barren coastline. The the visual continuities
armour-like texture of their religious costumes and the rocky landscape upon between rat/bandit and
which they sit use a Surrealist metonymic visual flow to associate the arch- scorpions/archbishops
seem relatively clear.
bishops’ thickly embroidered vestments with the incrustations of the scorpi-
ons’ exoskeletons, and the bedraggled bandit with the mottled rat.8 And then
we hear the swell of organ music and the chanting of the archbishops: they
sing the ‘Dies Irae’, a stern hymn about the ‘day of wrath’ or Judgement Day.
We watch as the bandit becomes enfeebled before the chanting churchmen.
In a long sequence, the bandit makes his way down from the rocky precipice,
clearly weakened and suffering as if poisoned by the chanting, which persists
on the soundtrack (this was one of the earliest sound films made in France).
Then we get a final shot of the priests reading from their hymnals, chant-
ing loudly. The bandit struggles on, without the music now, but the concept
has been conveyed. The scorpion-sting of the church still runs in the bandit’s
veins. Once again, Buñuel’s use of the Griffithian close-up has been used to
express a major social concept – the poisonous nature of Catholicism – and
has employed an explicitly entomological gaze to present a social close-up,
that is, an analogy about social relations that is presented in visual, emotional,
intuitive terms by film.
But as I have said, the films of Buñuel’s early Surrealist period were just
the beginning of his development of this technique. With Los olvidados, after
an absence of almost two decades, Buñuel returned triumphantly to the art
film scene in Europe, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
André Bazin was quick to detect in the winning film a linear development that
bridged Buñuel’s long disappearance:

the miracle took place: eighteen years later and 5,000 kilometers away,
it is the same, the inimitable Buñuel, a message which remains faithful
to L’Age d’Or and Las Hurdes/Land without Bread [Buñuel, 1933] a film
which lashes the mind like a red hot iron and leaves one’s conscience
no opportunity for rest.
([1975] 1982: 52)

With Los olvidados, Buñuel adopts a more conventional narrative format than
those used in his European films, but applies anew his interpretive use of
the Griffithian close-up. Indeed, the entire film can be viewed as the expres-
sion of a single unifying idea, a social close-up of the slums of Mexico City.
I think Bazin was right to say that with Los olvidados ‘the artist aims […] at
a truth which transcends morality and sociology, at a metaphysical reality –
the cruelty of the human condition’ ([1975] 1982: 54). No one who sees Los
olvidados, ironically enough, can ever ‘forget’ the representation of ubiqui-
tous human baseness as a social fact on the gritty streets of Mexico City. No
one is exempted: children, mothers, the disabled, indigenous people, social

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James Ramey

workers, etc. The city is a jungle of dark impulses. The film as a whole might
be described as the representation of an ecosystem dominated by just two
competing drives: cruelty and desire. And through it all, the gaze of the film-
maker remains unshakably neutral to the human beings that appear. It is an
empirical gaze that judges the hardscrabble denizens of Mexico City no more
than the overture of L’Age d’or judges its scorpions and rats. If anything, the
film-maker’s entomological gaze seems to revel in its own cruel impulses in
putting these characters in the gladiatorial ring in front of the camera. When
El Jaibo takes his rival Julian by surprise, dealing him a fatal blow, all that
is lacking is the inter-title: ‘What lightning speed and what virtuosity in the
attack!’.
Without dwelling on further particulars of Los olvidados, let us return to
my claim that the relations between the characters in the film seem to be
governed by varying combinations of cruelty and desire. Since this combina-
tion of instinctive impulses characterizes parasitic relations in nature, in which
the parasite must do harm to the creature it desires and depends on, I want
to suggest that Buñuel’s social close-up, increasingly throughout his career,
often represents a kind of parasitic dynamic or underpinning for dialogical
human relations in general. This pattern in Buñuel expresses a view of society
similar to the main point of the 1980 magnum opus of philosopher Michel
Serres, The Parasite, which argues, ‘The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It
is the atomic form of our relations’ ([1980] 2007: 8). Wolfe suggests that this
mode of thought is affiliated with both deconstruction and systems theory,
and is therefore posthumanist, especially when it posits ‘parasitic relations’
as the ‘ur-dynamic of social and cultural relations’ (Wolfe [1980] 2007: xv).
However, even more than Los olvidados, the film I believe best exemplifies this
preoccupation with intersubjective or dialogical parasitism is El ángel extermi-
nador, in which the implicit entomological gaze that made Los olvidados possi-
ble is more self-consciously deployed. El ángel exterminador can be understood
as a companion piece to Los olvidados, since the latter explores in a natural-
istic way the untrammeled impulses of cruelty and desire at the very bottom
of Mexico City’s social structure, while the former sets up an artificial ‘social
experiment’ that reveals those impulses to be just as dominant in the city’s
upper classes. As Serres puts it, ‘There is no system without parasites’ ([1980]
2007: 12). In both cases, the underlying reality of universal parasitism is laid
bare by Buñuel’s social close-up.
For Stam, certain writers and film-makers are more suitable for Bakhtinian
exegesis than others, an approach supported by Bakhtin’s own work, which
focused on Rabelais, Dostoyevsky and a select few other exemplars of his
notions of the carnivalesque and polyphony. Though Stam mentions other
film-makers in his various film-theoretical writings on Bakhtin, Buñuel
stands out as a Bakhtinian paragon; ‘In the cinema, the religious travesties so
frequent in the films of Luis Buñuel, for example, forge a direct link between
the avant-garde and the parodia sacra of which Bakhtin speaks’ (Stam and
Miller 2000: 262). In regard to El ángel exterminador, Stam suggests the film
can be read, in the first instance, as a

comic deconstruction of the primary speech genre called ‘polite dinner

conversation’. The film’s plot, revolving on the inexplicable entrapment
of a pride of socialites at an elegant dinner, provides the point of depar-
ture for the critical dissection of the elaborate discursive rituals of the
haute bourgeoisie.
(1989: 67)

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 Buñuel’s social close-up

Stam discusses specific instances of the film’s carnivalesque disruption of a

variety of additional speech genres (1989: 67), and goes on to relate the film
to the theatrical avant-garde’s deployment of the carnivalesque, pointing out
that the film offers ‘a more politicized version’ of the obsessions of the thea-
tre of the absurd, such as ‘entrapment […] paralysis […] proliferating chaos
[…] and the comic devaluation of language’ (1989: 106). Most importantly,
Stam recognizes that El ángel exterminador deploys the ‘carnivalesque theme
of social inversion’, and that by mocking the helplessness of spoiled patri-
cians when they cannot rely on their servants, Buñuel offers an upside-down
version of Los olvidados: ‘The same aristocrats who spilled food as an amus-
ing “theatrical” device are now ravaged by hunger and on the verge, it is
suggested, of ritual murder and even cannibalism’ (1989: 106–07). With these
and other observations, Stam would seem to imply that El ángel exterminador
is one of Buñuel’s – and by extension, film history’s – most carnivalesque films
in the Bakhtinian sense.
I think, however, that Stam’s analysis can be taken further by examining
certain similarities between Bakhtin’s novel theory and Buñuel’s film theory.
For example, as Stam observes, ‘For Bakhtin no writing is complete without
the readers/interlocutors who fill in meaning from their particular position
in space and time’ (1989: 17). In his 1958 essay, ‘Cinema as an instrument
of poetry’, Buñuel criticizes the neorealist film’s conception of a wineglass,
which is that: ‘a glass is a glass and nothing more’. This view is too shallow
for Buñuel, ignorant of the mind-expanding reciprocal potential of art. In a
Nietzchean vein, he says:

This same glass, observed by different human beings, can be a thousand

different things, because each person pours a dose of subjective feeling
into what he sees, and no one sees it as it really is but as his desires and
his state of mind make him see it. I advocate the kind of cinema that
will make me see those kinds of glasses, for that cinema will give me a
whole view of reality, expand my knowledge of things and people, and
open the marvelous world of the unknown, of all that I can’t find in the
daily press or come across on the street.
(2000: 140)

But in addition to the Nietzchean perspectivism, there is something profoundly

dialogical in this conception of the relation between film discourse as a mode
of representation and the viewers who ‘pour’ their subjective feelings into
what is represented. In one sense, this is another way of formulating what we
have been discussing as multipersonal subjectivism, a fundamental aspect of
Buñuel’s representational strategy in what I have called his technique of the
social close-up, and to which we will return below. But it also bears mention-
ing here that this dialogical perspectivism foregrounds the multiform relations
between the represented world (the glass on the screen) and the thousands of
subjective worlds of those thousands of viewers in the audience who perceive
thousands of glasses (the glasses in the minds), in thousands of different
ways, and is thus covalent with major aspects of Bakhtinian theory.
Foremost, Buñuel evidences a consciousness of the massively intersubjec-
tive nature of art that corresponds closely to a strikingly ‘ecological’ aspect of
Bakhtin’s thought:

[…] uninterrupted exchange goes on between [the real and the repre-
sented worlds], similar to the uninterrupted exchange of matter between

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James Ramey

living organisms and the environment that surrounds them. […] The
work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it,
and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process
of creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renew-
ing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers.
(1981: 254)

But this also, in turn, recalls Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘deep generating series’
of literature; Stam calls this ‘the complex and multidimensional dialogism,
rooted in social life and history, comprising both primary (oral) and second-
ary (literate) genres, which engendered literature as a cultural phenomenon’
(2000: 203). I therefore wish to suggest a basic congruence between Bakhtin’s
concepts of the art-producing rootedness of dialogism in social life and
Buñuel’s use of multipersonal subjectivism to effect his social close-ups as a
dialogical approach to film-making.
But can our appreciation of this congruence illuminate our reading of
El ángel exterminador? First, as we have seen, Buñuel’s own theory of the
Griffithian close-up enabled him to develop a kind of entomological gaze in
other films, including L’Age d’or and Los olvidados. As I have shown, those
films reveal the development of the Griffithian close-up as a means of express-
ing an abstract idea writ large in cinematic shots, culminating through multi-
personal subjectivism in Buñuel’s social close-up. And this observation leads
to the realization that in a film like El ángel exterminador, the ‘critical dissec-
tion of the elaborate discursive rituals of the haute bourgeoisie’ that Stam aptly
describes is best understood in relation to the scenes of scorpions and rats
in L’Age d’or. But to what extent is El ángel exterminador discursively ‘rooted
in social life and history’? My answer would be: through parasitism. But to
demonstrate this it will be necessary to examine briefly the innovative narra-
tive structure of the film.
The film begins with a piquant disclaimer on the screen:

if the film you are about to see seems puzzling or even disturbing, it
is so because frequently so is life itself. The author declares he did not
wish to present any symbols, at least not consciously. As in life, this
film has some repetitions and is open to different interpretations. And,
just as we relive and recreate sequences of life, sequences in our story
re-appear. The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint
of pure reason, there is no explanation [sic].
(Buñuel, 1962)

In a 1976 interview, fourteen years after the film was made, Buñuel claimed that
El ángel exterminador was the first to use the concept of repetition as a ‘theme’
(de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1986: 146). Indeed, there are a dozen or more
examples of this device woven into the film, the first of which dramatically defa-
miliarizes what we see and primes us to detect further examples in the film. As
the two maids are attempting to escape from the house (Figure 1, Left), they see
the dinner guests arriving and they scurry behind a door to hide. We see the
guests cross a beautiful marble floor in all their finery (Figure 1, Right), and the
host comes into the foreground ‘Lucas! … How strange. Lucas isn’t here. (He
addresses the guests closest to him.) They will take our coats upstairs’. He and
the party continue up a magnificent staircase. In the next shot, the maids exit
their hiding place but see something and immediately fall back again.

328    Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Buñuel’s social close-up

Figure 1: Left: Maids attempting to escape; Right: Arrival of guests on chessboard

floor (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

From a slightly higher camera angle, we see the guests enter the parlour
again – from the same door they had entered before (Figure 2, left). Nobile,
the host, pauses again and repeats the same words: ‘Lucas!… How strange.
Lucas isn’t here. (He addresses the guests closest to him.) They will take our
coats upstairs’. Without reacting in any way to register (and thereby rupture)
that repetition, the maids now succeed in exiting the mansion behind the
backs of the guests who continue up the staircase (Figure 2, Right). There
is an ironic reversal here: while Nobile notes that it is ‘strange’ that Lucas is
not there to receive the guests, much stranger is that the scene is inexplicably
repeated. The fact that the two maids see this ‘strange’ occurrence but do not
comment or react in any way functions to defamiliarize it further. Thus do we
become aware that we are engaged in a game with the film’s ‘author’. As we
will see, it is no accident that the marble floor upon which the guests enter is
an ornate grey and white chessboard design, for this is the moment when a
chess-like game begins.
But the larger point is that this scene demonstrates that the director is
in full command of his film’s Griffithian close-up ‘concept’, which can be
understood as the theme of repetition figured as a phenomenon of discourse:
the deadening automatism of social routine in a particular historical setting.
As Buñuel observed of the film, ‘Everyone has the right to interpret it as he
wishes. There are some who give it an interpretation that is solely erotico-
sexual, others political. I would give it a rather historico-social interpretation’
(Aranda [1969] 1975: 212). Supporting this, most of the repetitions resemble

Figure 2: Left: Guest arrival shot from higher angle; Right: Maids escape from the
house (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

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James Ramey

Figure 3: Left: The Doctor who ‘likes to play Sherlock Holmes’; Right: Nobile, the
host (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

the first and poke fun at bourgeois courtliness and automatic gestures (a
formal toast, formal introductions, etc.). As such, they chiefly occur in the early
stages of the film, when decorum is still being maintained, while in the later
stages, when the prisoners begin to become more savage and more parasitic
upon one another, the repetitions fade away. As things become increasingly
unpleasant for the insects in the entomologist’s laboratory, their repetitive
rituals of politesse and superficial habit begin to fall by the wayside.
Once the characters realize they are unaccountably unable to leave the
parlour – not unlike an ant colony transferred to a glass casement for ento-
mological observation – the film provokes a desire in the viewer to ‘solve’ the
mystery. It is similar to Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) in this regard, and even
takes on a film noir flavour, albeit one subverted by Surrealism. The Doctor
(Figure 3, Left), the film’s primary figure of rationality, ‘likes to play Sherlock
Holmes’ and implicitly invites us to do the same.
Although the Doctor denounces as preposterous the idea that they
are trapped in ‘the enchanted castle of a wizard’, the possibility teases the
viewer throughout the magical confinement, invoking the discourse of epic
romances parodied by Cervantes’ Quijote ([1605–15] 1998) such as Amadís
de Gaula (Rodríguez de Montalvo, [1508] 1959–69) and Orlando Furioso (L.
Ariosto, [1516] 1949). We are led to believe that one of the characters may
even be the wizard: perhaps their host, Nobile, played by Spanish actor
Enrique Rambal, whose broad, bearded face looks both innocent yet some-
how devilish (Figure 3, Right). The possibility that he is the one to blame is
suggested early on, but is at first discarded since Nobile is right there suffer-
ing with the rest of them.
As the characters grow more desperate to find a solution that will break
the spell, their fine etiquette begins give way to expressions of the dark,
occult side of dialogical human relations. Discourses of black magic and
secret societies, which had been subtly evidenced before the ‘experiment’
began, now surge into the open. As what Bakhtin describes as the unitary,
centripetal socio-linguistic tendency of language begins to lose its repres-
sive control over the utterances of the characters, the subversive forces of
heteroglossia begin to body forth. In full view of the other aristocrats, a witch
performs a Satanic ritual with the fetishistic ‘keys’ of chicken feet and feath-
ers (Figure 4, Left), and the pair of Freemasons call out their order’s secret
distress signal, the letters of ‘the Unpronounceable Word’ (Figure 4, Right).
But these forbidden discourses are as impotent as anything else against the
diabolical internment.

330   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Buñuel’s social close-up

Figure 4: Left: Satanic ritual with chicken feathers; Right: Calling the
‘Unpronounceable Word’ (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

As the situation continues to spiral downward, with the characters truly

starving, three sheep and a bear mysteriously enter the cloistered chamber,
and several of the guests swiftly descend upon the sheep to slaughter them
(Figure 5, Left and Right).
This underscores once again what Serres has to say about the human
condition:

History hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything
and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are
always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking,
never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor
when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his
kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well.
And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry. […] The louse is a man
for the wolf.
([1980] 2007: 24–25)

Soon after the sheep are devoured, however, many of the characters decide
that their host, Nobile, is after all the one to blame, and that the only hope
for survival is for his guests to make a human sacrifice of him. Tellingly, this
suggestion is made with an entomological metaphor: one of the characters
says, ‘When the spider dies, the web unravels’. A brawl ensues, with one
character saying, ‘We don’t care if it’s not rational. We want to get out of
here!’. Nobile had played the host to these guests, commensal parasites in the

Figure 5: Left: Sheep enter the chamber; Right: The guests descend on the sheep
(The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

www.intellectbooks.com   331
James Ramey

Figure 6: Left: Nobile figured with Sheep and the Valkyrie; Right: Guests battle
over whether to sacrifice Nobile (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

classical sense of the term, but now the parasites have turned fully upon their
host and become parasitoids, parasites that destroy their host (Figure 6, Left
and Right). All of these aristocrats, the host spider and his greedy parasites,
had customarily become fat on the lower classes that fed and pampered them,
but once the film’s entomological experiment removes that source of suste-
nance, they turn their parasitic drives upon each other.
The spell remains unbroken until ‘the Valkyrie’, played by Silvia Pinal, has
a seeming epiphany, declaring that they are all merely pieces on a chessboard,
toys in a game played by unknown forces:

How long have we been here? I don’t know: I’ve lost track. But imagine
the way we’ve changed during […] during this horrible eternity. Think
of the thousands of arrangements of chess-pieces we’ve been. Even
the furniture: we’ve moved it around a hundred times and […] right
now we’re all here – people and furniture – in the exact position and place
where everything was that first night. Or is this another hallucination?
(original emphasis; [Buñuel, 1962])

This is a Buñuelian invitation to the detective-minded viewer to view the film

again to see if that ‘solution’ makes sense. On a second viewing one might
note that there are a total of 32 living creatures in the house during the long
sequester of the victims (twenty aristocrats, eight servants, three sheep and a
bear), corresponding to the number of pieces on a chessboard. Or one might
read chess metaphors in other details in the film, such as the ‘knight’s move’

Figure 7: Left and Right: The Valkyrie proposing her solution to a chess problem
(The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

332    Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Buñuel’s social close-up

Figure 8: Left: The guests in their positions at the end of the confinement; Right: In
their positions at the outset of the confinement (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

L-gesture that the two Freemasons conspiratorially use to reveal themselves

to each other. Furthermore, the ‘Valkyrie’ may be a chess queen, since her
name refers to the Norse myth of the valkyrja, female divinities whose name
means ‘choosers of the slain’ and who are as powerful on the battlefield as the
chess queen on her board.
But these hints of clues are nebulous, not leading very far, and should
be considered, at most, minor solutions to superficial puzzles. For while the
aristocrats do indeed find themselves each back at their starting positions
on the ‘chessboard’ of the drawing room (Figure 8, Left), they must actually
‘do’ something in order to escape: they must repeat the words they spoke
at the moment when they were caught in those positions (Figure 8, Right).
Once they do so, they perform a conscious repetition of the normally uncon-
scious repetitiveness characteristic of polite conversation and the stultifying
nature of unthinking bourgeois routine and automatism. In Derrida’s terms,
they must consciously confront the infinite ‘iterability’ of themselves as empty
signatures, as counterfeit traces in their social milieu (see Derrida [1972] 1988:
9, 50–53). And this ‘solution’, of course, echoes and repeats the theme of
repetitions that Buñuel later underscored and which we have been witness-
ing as a device of artistic defamiliarization throughout the film. The concept
of repetition writ large is precisely what Buñuel’s social close-up has been
conceiving in a myriad of ways. The repetitive, self-perpetuating, autopoietic
social system of the haute bourgeoisie must recognize itself for what it is – a
dialogical system of social parasitism – before the true wizard of the castle, the
social entomologist here under discussion, will allow the objects of his study
a temporary reprieve.
So the Valkyrie ‘saves’ them by breaking the glass of the entomolo-
gist’s encasement, as it were, which would be another repetition: after the
dinner party and just before the magical detention began, we see her throw
an ashtray, without provocation, through the dining room window. But
Valkyries, in Norse mythology, determine those battlefield dead who deserve
a place at the table of Odin’s mead hall, a warrior’s immortality in Valhalla.
This sets up the film’s final, terrible repetition: we see the contrite faces of
the ‘saved’ aristocrats, including the Valkyrie, worshipping in a Mexico City
church along with hundreds of other bourgeois parishioners (Figure 9, Left).
Multipersonal subjectivism seems finally to have restored the social order after
the long rupture with rationality. But when the Te Deum chorus ends, the
priests – whose opulent attire recalls those chanting archbishops from L’age
d’or – find they cannot leave the church (Figure 9, Right). They turn around

www.intellectbooks.com   333
James Ramey

Figure 9: Left: Faces of the ‘saved’ aristocrats in the church; Right: The priests
realizing they are trapped (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

and discover that the faithful too are trapped and becoming frantic. We no
longer see the faces of the ‘castaways of Providence Street’ – Buñuel’s original
title for the film (Aranda [1969] 1975: 207) – for they have merged with the
rest of their ilk, all trapped by the infernal incarceration of the predictable,
chantingly ‘iterative’ social system from whence they came (Figure 10, Left).
In Niklas Luhmann’s terms, the haute bourgeoisie from the main narrative have
now melted into their environment, thus deconstructing the inherent disar-
ticulation between themselves as system and their environment, a separation
necessary for all systems to maintain autopoietic closure in a ‘self-referential
mode of operation’ and thus continue to exist ([1984] 1995: 37). Nothing has
been learned, no mystery has been solved, no enchantment has been broken:
the insects are simply trapped in a new, larger entomological experiment. The
final scene is of a flock of sheep entering the church, guided by an unknown
force (Figure 10, Right).
We already know what will happen to them: the repetitive slaughter
of innocents will take place once again, the sacra parodia will be replayed.
Remotely, perhaps, we remember those first titles from the prologue: to the
same chanting music of the Te Deum, they were scrolling over a dim image
of this very church’s cupola. ‘There is no explanation’. Inside the glassed-in
casement of that church, a parody Valhalla, we can be certain that the dual
parasitic impulses of ‘exterminating’ cruelty and desire are in the process of
bursting free. The wealthy paragons of the social elite will again become ‘los
olvidados’/‘the forgotten ones’, and thus invert the social system once more.

Figure 10: Left: The bourgeois flock, trapped and frantic; Right: A flock of sheep,
heading again to the slaughter (The Exterminating Angel, 1962).

334   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Buñuel’s social close-up

This dialogical portrait of a ‘world upside down’, repeating its inversions

ad infinitum, a mise en abyme of parasitism, is the social close-up offered by
Buñuel’s entomological gaze in El ángel exterminador.
This article proposes a new way of reading Buñuel’s film-making strate-
gies by examining his own early theorization of the Griffithian close-up as
a technique whereby edited film-making can be made to conceive in a way
that simple images or continuous shots cannot. This attitude towards film-
making, I argue, implies the opposite of Auerbach’s unipersonal subjectivism
in modernist literature, requiring a cinematic multipersonal subjectivism that
is covalent with Bakhtinian dialogism. And in developing his multi-personal
subjectivism into a rational tool for opening a window on the irrational world
of the unconscious, I believe Buñuel´s entomological training, or insect-
educated gaze, ultimately led him to conceive and represent a dialogical para-
sitism as being inherent in all human social systems. This entomological gaze
appears in many of his films, including the early Surrealist films, Los olvida-
dos, and especially El ángel exterminador, so it may not be wrong to consider
this gaze an aspect of Buñuel’s approach to film-making that is posthumanist,
avant la lettre.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Ramey, J. (2016), ‘Buñuel’s social close-up: An entomological gaze on El ángel
exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (1962)’, Studies in Spanish & Latin
American Cinemas, 13: 3, pp. 319–337, doi: 10.1386/slac.13.3.319_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
James Ramey (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is Professor of Humanities at the
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, in Mexico City.
He is currently writing a book entitled Micro-Modernism: Hosts and Parasites
in the Life of Narrative, a study of intertextuality conceived as a form of para-
sitism in works by Luis Buñuel, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir
Nabokov.
Contact: Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, Av. Vasco de Quiroga 4871, Col. Santa
Fe, Delegación Cuajimalpa de Morelos, México, Distrito Federal C.P 05300.
E-mail: jamestramey@yahoo.com

James Ramey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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sible to audiences from a diversity of intellectual backgrounds and dis- University of the West of England
ciplines as well as providing a forum for practitioners. The Soundtrack’s estella.tincknell@uwe.ac.uk
aim is to nurture this new and expanding area of academic investiga- Michael Filimowicz
tion in dialogue with soundtrack producers of all kinds. Cinesonika

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