Luis Buñuel (1900-83) was, as the title of a Juan Goytisolo novel has it, exiled from almost everywhere. He was born in a small village in Spain, and would live in Paris in the 1920s, Hollywood in the ‘30s, and Mexico in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He started out in the Surrealist movement – his first and best-known film, An Andalusian Dog (1929), was co-directed by Salvador Dali – and, in a career move no one would consider seriously today, did his best work after he turned 60.

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In 1960, Buñuel was fresh off the success of Viridiana, the first of his three collaborations with actress Silvia Pinal (who had played the lead) and her husband, the producer Gustavo Alatriste. Viridiana was Buñuel’s first film in Spain after a half a lifetime of exile; it was Spain’s official entry for the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a Palme d’Or, but was almost immediately condemned by the Vatican for sacrilege (one its sequences mocked the Last Supper) and banned in Spain. The film’s (and Buñuel’s) nationality had to be changed from Spanish to Mexican for distribution, and Buñuel poured his anger and desire for freedom into The Exterminating Angel, “a film about domestic entrapment made by a man exiled from his own home.” It was the first time in eighteen years he had complete artistic control.