Theater of the Absurd and cinema: Bunuel

Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel is a weird, short, social and political parable told in a quirky, even absurdist manner - not sure of the exact date (1960 or so) but you can clearly see the connecting lives between his cinematic work and near-contemporary theater of the absurd, esp Ionesco and Pirandello. As even those who haven't seen this film know, it's about a dinner party for some Spanish aristocrats - 20 or so guests gather for a midnight post-opera dinner - and find that, after the dinner, they are unable to leave the party - they're for some inexplicable reason trapped in the host's mansion, in fact in the dining all of the mansion. Before the dinner, most of the servants leave the estate rather than stay through the night serving the many courses - and they're told curtly that they shouldn't bother ever showing up for work again. Then we see the dinner party with his vapid and pretentious table talk, and a lot of under-the-table flirtation and assignation. We see, in short, that the ruling class is despicable and narcissistic - and of course they get what they deserve. It's unexplained why they can't leave, for days - but some kind of military or police rescue force gathers outside of the mansion - so the whole scene seems like a hostage situation. Throughout, I kept thinking about Ann Patchett's novel about the hostages in a Peruvian embassy, including a great opera singer as one of the guests - Bunuel must have influenced her, though her work lacks his absurdist humor. The absurdist qualities keep us from identifying with or feeling for the captured characters; the touches remind us that this is not in any way meant to be a literal, natural, or realistic drama. One example, a brown bear and a few sheep seem to wander at will through the mansion; the sheep get the last word, so to speak, as a few of them, the last frame of the film, bleat along a walkway and enter a church - about as literal a symbol as Bunuel ever created, skewering the flocks that follow the teachings of the church, especially in the class-bound dictatorship that ruled Spain in the 1960s.