The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

The Exterminating Angel
97
It turns out to be purgatory.
Gibney: Yeah.
You’re right. The title is not from him, it’s from his co-collaborator on
the project, Jose Bergamin. Buñuel told him, “You know, if I saw The
Exterminating Angel on a marquee, I’d go in and see it on the spot.”
Gibney: Sometimes that’s the way it works, and Exterminating Angel certainly
does have a catchy vibe to it. It does seem to resonate. It’s always
tempting with Buñuel films to get overly analytical.
I wrote him a letter once, asking him to let me do a documentary about
him, which he kindly refused. But I also sent him an essay I had written
about The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He wrote back and said he
thought it was great in terms of the Sherlock Holmes aspect of trying to
figure out what his movie was about, but I think these were things he didn’t
give too much thought to. He put them in the movie because he liked them,
not because he had some kind of carefully constructed scaffolding of themes
and ideas. He goes where he wants to.
I don’t know whether he was being gentle or whether he was being sincere.
Did you have any other contact with him?
Gibney: No, just that one letter. I think it was like ’81 or ’82. I wrote him a
letter, and then I got a very nice letter back, which I have mounted on my
wall at my office. He basically said, “I love your essay. It was like Sherlock
Holmes and I love Sherlock Holmes. As for your proposal, forget about it.”
[laughs]
He said, “Jean-Claude Carrière did a film about me that was at the Cannes
Film Festival. I didn’t like it at all, and I retired from all moviemaking activities.
But if you ever come to Mexico City, look me up.” Unfortunately, by the
time I got there, he was gone. He died in 1983.
Whenever you think about the film, what’s the one scene that haunts you?
Gibney: It’s not the darker stuff toward the end of the film. It’s really the
opening of the film, the early scenes of the film that really, to me, are so
masterful. Because you have a series of sequences where the servants are
mysteriously all asking to be excused, or they’re all slipping out the back.