Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel puzzles many, as it is intended to do. Buñuel likes mystery, to shake people out of their complacency, and he likes to disturb what he calls our “conventional morality… and sentimentally.” But his film, like any good work of art, has real meaning.

A rotten, anarchistic comedy like What’s New Pussycat deliberately tries to destroy meaning. There is even a scene in which ex‑Lawrence‑of-Arabia O’Toole raises his head to utter sublime truths while a light flashes on the screen: “Author’s Message.” This is great fun, perhaps, but it’s a Dance of Death. Buñuel in his early years, when he worked as a surrealist on the film with Salvador Dali, also deliberately “threw out everything that could mean anything.” But Buñuel is serious about the kind of meaning he wants to deliver.

The connection with surrealism is essential. Buñuel, a Spaniard, began making experimental films in France in the 1920s. Later, almost forgotten, he did odd jobs for American film companies, dubbing in Spanish for Hollywood films; and became a director of commercial melodramatic films in Mexico. Gradually, however, his personal character emerged, and he has made several powerful creative films since 1950. The Buñuel type of film is to cinema what little magazines are to literature, a true art medium that insists on integrity at all costs as against commercial appeasement.

The influence of surrealism in The Angel may be seen in the way that reality is made to dissolve into the supernatural. Buñuel wants to push our conventional “rational” world over the brink, into mystery, “the marvelous world of the unknown.” He says he has no desire to preach; he simply wants to open up the unconscious. In an address he delivered in 1953 he said that a film is “reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep… an involuntary imitation of a dream.” On the screen, “the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins.” We can see where this takes us.

Western art and literature from Aristotle to Lessing, has always aimed “to imitate nature.” Even dream visions, fictions, allegories, were guided by rational purpose. This new kind of art, like a good deal of literature since Lessing, aims to imitate, not nature, but the disturbed mind—its nightmares, imaginary horrors, fears, and unconscious desires. The result is really an imitation of madness. Imitating madness, of course, is very different from being mad. Like Hamlet, it can lead to controversy; and you ask who is really mad. Henry Miller wrote in the 1930s: “Either you are crazy, like the rest of civilized humanity, or you are sane and healthy like Buñuel. And if you are sane and healthy you are an anarchist and throw bombs.” It’s a difficult question.

For one thing, no one can actually imitate the unconscious; it would be a contradiction in terms. To give us the feeling of the sub‑rational in human nature the artist has to submit to his own free fantasies—hence the “automatism” of surrealism—and the result is confession, the spilling out of sickness. Buñuel’s Angel reveals his terrible destructive hatred of “the bourgeois” and of religion. The film deals with a group of affluent highly‑cultured people trapped in a room by a supernatural” “hypnotic” spell which prevents them from leaving. The beastliness of human nature is gradually released as they begin to starve and turn on one another (la condition humaine). Innocent sheep are sacrificed. Finally, the prisoners are released; and at the end of the film the same nightmare begins again, as a whole church‑full of people is held within the church doors by the same spell.

Clearly, both the cultured “bourgeois” and the “Church” are captives of their own mind forged manacles. Clearly, an Exterminating Angel is what Buñuel calls down upon them. (Buñuel of course doesn’t believe in angels: “I am an atheist still, thank God,” he says.) The film is a kind of nightmarish representation of life, in which “the horror, the horror” emerges as the meaning. This isn’t Buñuel’s “message,” but it is his confession, or self revelation. It fascinates me with its strange power; but it repels me, also, since I do not share this kind of nihilism.

For me, the bitterness of Buñuel’s prejudices limits the impact of his art. He is not a sadist, as some have maintained, but he is an artist warped and narrowed by his rage—a dwarf, like those that recur in his films. Nevertheless, I would never miss one of his extraordinary productions.