The Exterminating Angel

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Experimental music duo Magazinist is pleased to invite you to a special evening at the cinema, where they will perform a live score alongside Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador, 1962).

In this claustrophobic allegory of class divisions, a group of bourgeois opera-goers are walled off from the outside world when their extravagant dinner party becomes an inescapable prison. For reasons none of them can understand, and no matter how long the party grinds on and their little society breaks down into chaos, none of them can leave the room. As Roger Ebert writes, “The dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends.”

Magazinist will accompany the film with a lavish sonic feast of their own, using everything from ceramics to stale bread, ice cubes, crystal singing glasses, resonant bowls, pepper grinders, and other sound objects both culinary and out-of-the-ordinary.

Uncanny attire welcomed, concession snacks encouraged.

Buñuel’s ferociously brilliant The Exterminating Angel is one of his most provocative and unforgettable works. In it, we watch a trivial breach of etiquette transform into the destruction of civilization.

Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain

Devastatingly funny, illuminated by unexpected shafts of generosity and tenderness, it remains one of Buñuel’s very best.

Tom Milne, Time Out Film Guide