La edad de oro

Dream-like, funny, and compelling, Luis Buñuel's surrealist masterpiece is required viewing for anyone who claims to have a grasp of the history of cinema.

Too thought-provoking to be called hallucinogenic, L'Age D'Or nevertheless has the disjointed narrative of a dream. It makes sense on its own terms the same way a dream does.

Monty Python fans may see in its brazen non sequitors a similarity to the Python TV skits. Material like this can only come in small chunks; the message would be lost in a conventional narrative.

One memorable scene has a (fully-clothed) couple embracing and kissing while crowd of people arrives and breaks them up. A city is constructed on the very spot of this thwarted love. Message: civilization is built on repression of natural urges. If the man and women ever get together again, the world as we know it will be destroyed. The counterculture movement of the 60s echoed this and other themes that the surrealists explored 35 years previously.

This extremely influential movie should be viewed by anyone interested in Luis Buñuel's career and anyone interested in surrealism in film and anyone looking for a mind-expanding experience.

Luis Bunuel was a filmmaker of great imagination and scathing wit, and Salvador Dali was a magnificent, albeit demented, artist and painter. Combined they made Un Chien Andalou (The Andalousian Dog), a short-film that somehow made it through the decades to reach another generation after another. This is because surrealism, the field they were working in, was one that could be endlessly creative. Surrealists could and still can captivate, startle, amuse, primarily provoke and/or even delight an audience by the story elements and images that come right out of fantasy, both on the bright and dark/bleak side of things. L'Age D'Or was a chance for Bunuel to go further, and if his goal was to enlighten the audience as well as to stir the s***storm, he succeeded.

In the first five to ten minutes of L'Age D'Or, I didn't know whether I knew exactly what was going on, or was totally boggled- the first images Bunuel puts forth are of scorpions (insects were one of his fascinations), and how they're shaped and how ferocious they can be. Then he cuts to some men who have guns by their side, walking through deserted rocks. THEN, after this, he cuts to a ship docking by the coastline where the guys with the guns were walking, and he never goes back to them again. Instead he focuses on one of the bourgeoisie men who is raping a woman, and who is dragged off into the imperial city. If you look at this story structure it doesn't seem to make sense - what is it that Bunuel and Dali are trying to get at here? It was when the rest of the story unfolded- with a particular bourgeoisie woman at a party who meets the man who was dragged off of the rocks- that I understood the logic I had first discovered in Un Chien Andalou and a later work of his, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Bunuel doesn't just toss a bunch of ideas together and think that it'll all make sense. In the thought process of a dream - one with light-hearted moments with romance and wonderful music, as well as terrifying moments like a cow on a bed or a man shooting his son in broad daylight - L'Age D'Or works like a kind of clockwork. Though the last ten five minutes of the film did throw me off almost completely, by then I didn't care. I knew that, overall, Bunuel accomplished his goals of making a film that hypnotizes, repulses, opens the eyes a little wider, and almost gets one cross-eyed. With his attacks on whatever was considered decent, straightforward art in cinema, both political, sociological, psychological, and personal, there are many messages to be seen in the work. However, when it's looked at as a whole, this is simply a work of art, one that has to be interpreted by the individual. Like one of Dali's paintings, one could view the work as nonsense, the work of an amateur mentally masturbating for the viewer. One could even see it as being rather entertaining when looking at the human elements that come through from the actors and the actions that take place. And one could see it as meaning so much that it will take another couple of viewings to "get" what was being said.

I turned off the movie feeling breathless, like being put through a washing machine of astonishing turns and emotions. At one point my jaw dropped, and then at the next point I smiled. To sum it up, I definitely want, and need, to see it again...one more note- this is a very, very hard film to find, one that has been kept out of circulation on video (it was also kept out of circulation in movie theaters for decades due to its controversies at the time of its release), but to seek it out is to take a chance that could equally pay off or disturb a particular viewer.

In the Tate Modern's "Dalí & Film" exhibition, the fourteen-odd rooms were mostly paintings but three or four had films of one kind or another. Having just seen Un Chien Andalou I decided to watch this one as well and was lucky to catch it just as it started. I say lucky because there is really nothing to tell you when these things are starting or ending. This is maybe OK with a short film that lasts seven minutes or a three minute clip from Spellbound but with a film that lasts an hour I really don't understand why the Tate didn't make at least a discrete effort to let us know start times – maybe it is beneath them to act like a cinema but it does mean that people were constantly flowing in and out and the implication is that the films can be just dipped in and out of.

With this film though, you do need to be in from the start because, unlike Un Chien Andalou, there is more of a plot here and the film has fewer of Dalí's images across the running time. That said the plot here isn't any easier to follow if you did manage to catch it from the very start because this is still very much a surrealist film in structure and content even if it has fewer of the images that made the first film I'd seen so engaging. With Buñuel forming more of the film than Dalí, the film does take on more symbolism in less surreal ways but yet it is still quite hard to follow. To me as a viewer this was a bit of a downside because there was less to stimulate me and more to frustrate me as I struggle to understand the meaning of what I was watching.

Despite this I still did find it interesting and you can see why (to a point) that the screening did draw a reaction from those that saw it as attacking conservative values in its depiction of violent attacks etc. Quite why it was hardly screened for fifty years though, I can't say. With a difficult plot to follow and an hour to watch, the film asked a lot of me and I'm afraid I wasn't really up to the challenge and I did struggle to follow along. The scattering of surrealist imagery did help to hold my attention though and it is not without value – just a lot harder to watch than I would have liked it to have been.

This film is often regarded as the best surrealistic film of all time. Like in his previous film "un chien andalou", Bunuel introduces us a film with a cock-and-bull screenplay. In this movie, he's using the power of his imagination and this is one of the surrealism's goals. The movie starts with a documentary on the scorpions, then some thieves are discovering four archbishops on the rocks, next, come the founders of Rome. Later, in Rome, a young woman is finding a cow on her bed; during a reception, in a beautiful castle, a tipcart full of workers is crossing the living-room and other weird events like these ones happen later..... It's easy to find out why this movie was forbidden for a long time in France (it was finally re-released in 1981). If you think that some elements of the story (if there is one!) like the four archbishops or the tipcart are funny, well they aren't. It's only his second film and Bunuel's showing us his obsessions: he's laughing at religion and upper middle class by ridiculing them and he is against the conformity. That's why his movie's got nonsense and even the title: why the Golden Age? However, behind all this nonsense, there is a love story between Gaston Modot and Lya Lys which is more sketched out than told.

Moreover, the film also created a huge scandal due to the last sequence. It was inspired by the most horrible French novel: "les 120 journées de Sodome" by the Marquis de Sade (Bunuel used to admire him). This French writer's novels were forbidden for a long time due to their violence and their philosophy. In the movie, the scene created a double scandal because the count of Blangis's got the Christ' head! This film is incredible and fascinating due to the screenplay and its unexpected events. If you want to discover Bunuel's films, this one is a good start

Some movies you'll watch because they touch your soul or challenge you in ways that grow.

Some you'll watch because you want to be exposed to adventure or shock outside your experience; these won't directly feed you, but they'll help you situate yourself in a larger world than you otherwise would have. And after all, the hard parts of life are in what you choose not to accept.

And then there are movies that do neither of these things, that you will watch out of obligation, or because you have a need for historical context. These are pretty worthless experiences in terms of building a life.

The problem is of course that often you don't know which of the three a film will be, going in. You might get some indication from people you trust, but because a life in film is so personal, you really won't know until you go on the blind date.

For me, this was pretty worthless. Yes, yes, I know for many Bunuel is the epitome of the sublime and rich. And you should know (if you don't) that among my greatest film experiences are some very strange films, very strange indeed.

It isn't that this isn't cinematic, or symbolically deep, or apolitically/politically friendly to the way I think. Its how it gets there that is off base. Its the deviance from real deviance that annoys me.

Part of the problem is that this is successful alternative art, which means that it is successful commercial art. Which in turn means that it can be simply explained and the explanation is not only widely acceptable but simply coded in shorthand. Surely all this is true.

When the term "surreal" is used, generally it is used incorrectly to denote any film image or world that differs from reality or seems strange. But when it is used correctly, meaning according to consensus theory, it always revolves around Bunuel, and in particular this film and the one he genuinely did with Dali. So because they invented surreal cinema, they define and control the term. That by itself chafes me, and I have my own alternative definition that doesn't come from their philosophy.

Its because the philosophy is wholly contrary. It isn't a philosophy at all but a rejection of philosophy, an anti-order. Its packaged anarchy, carefully selecting the things that they use and the things they oppose without clearly differentiating them.

So okay: against linearity, against narrative, against history, against religion (an easy one), against deliberate love. But for an illinear linear narrative, for establishing its own history (celebrated by countless film school professors; what else can they do?); for a sort of transcendent "accidental" love.

It is its own enemy. If there were a Bunuel alive today as he sold his image, the first thing he would do is attack the church or the surreal.

My regular readers know that in nearly all matters cinematic, I cleave to the Spanish and avoid the French. But in the matter of the surreal, I'd like to you consider the reverse: get your surrealism from Alfred Jarry, not Bunuel.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.