L'Âge d'or

At least sixty years ahead of its time. This collection of surreal scenes satirising every possible social value you can think of and revelling in anything considered by the aristocrats to be vulgar was made with a delicious sense for black comedy, a taste for which would not become socially acceptable for sixty years. This movie caused riots on its first release in 1930, and was banned for forty years. If you see this on the program to be shown at an art gallery near you, like i did, you won't regret seeing it. Think of it as Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel sticking their finger up at everything everyone else takes seriously, and laughing at their being offended. Seventy years later, the art gallery audience i was with were laughing along with Bunuel and Dali. This is about the most modern feeling thing you'll see from early cinema. I'll give you a sample: a couple are such nymphomaniacs, whenever they see each other, they can't stop from leaping on each other and writhing on the ground together. At one point in the movie, they are kissing, and all of a sudden he sees the foot of a statue behind her and is distracted by its beauty. He becomes dazed and zoned on the foot. She pulls away from him, tries to talk to him, he holds his hand up to her face as if to say: "hang on, just give me a minute." Then he feels compelled to leave her. Left on her own, mourning her momentary separation from her lustful partner, she begins sucking on the toes of the statue, as she was sucking on the fingers of her love a few scenes before. Camera cuts to a close-up of the statue's face, as if to check its reaction. The entire audience broke up at this. It was all too much. An absolute riot which can only be appreciated today as taking the p*ss out of every form of conservatism you can imagine.

WARNING= it is at times disturbing. If you are at all feint-hearted, and can not separate movies from reality, especially surrealist movies from reality, then stay away.

Written on August 30th, upon my first viewing: I'm not saying that I love it, though. It's infinitely more watchable than the other two Buñuel "masterpieces" that I've seen, the execrably boring The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie and the somewhat lame Belle de Jour. I have been told time and time again to go back to his early stuff, that I'd be much more likely to enjoy those films. And those who pushed me were right. Of course, when I sat down to watch it, I didn't have the highest hopes. Immediately, I began to nitpick. "What is that supposed to mean?!?!" "What the heck is going on!?!?" My favorite three letters became, throughout the first half hour of this film, WT&F. But, as much as its narrative (or anti-narrative) was annoying me, its technical aspects were very much delighting me. The cinematography is quite good, the editing is fabulous and unique, and the use of sound is simply fantastic. Eventually, I just decided that the narrative wasn't supposed to make much sense and that Buñuel's purpose was anything but a storyteller. He was after the absurdist image and the absurdist mood. After that, I had a lot more fun and enjoyed it quite a bit. All good film watchers have to eventually train themselves away from depending on narrative. I'd still not call it a masterpiece, or even a great film, but it was very interesting and quite entertaining. I give it an 8/10. However, I do plan to rewatch it, since it is short and I do have it for another four days. Perhaps, now that I can watch it entirely prepared from the very beginning, I will raise that score.

Upon watching it the next day: Nope, sorry. I didn't get anything new the second time 'round. I still liked it as much, which is a huge compliment, but I certainly didn't like it more.

Just a few days prior to viewing "L'Age d'Or," I had sketched out a few of my views on Surrealism, and will begin by complimenting this review with them...

"Possibly the most accurate description of surrealism came from film director Luis Bunuel when he called it `a rape to the conscious.' This is how it is, and how it should be, for it is a form of art that forces the spectator into the paradoxical mind state that is surrealism. To view a document of surrealism is to be simultaneously repulsed and delighted. As such, this is surrealism: the blending of two or more contradictory emotions to form one emotion divorced from logic. There can not realistically be a like or dislike of a piece of pure surrealist art, for to like or dislike something requires decision, and decision requires logic. Surrealism is an art form to be experienced purely on a visceral level, and not, as many rational forms of art, on an intellectual one. Likewise, the creation of surrealist art requires the subversion of the intellect, for it demands complete spontaneity, unsuppressed by ego or super-ego dictatorship. So in many ways surrealism is the most pure form of art."

If surrealism is the most pure example of art, then "L'Age d'Or" is the most pure example of cinema, perfectly fitting the requirements stated above. It is a delightfully subversive, ecstatically liberating, maddeningly offensive bid for individual freedom. And, most ironically, the truest love story ever told!

Though L'Age d'Or has a firmer plot line than "Un Chien Andalou," Bunuel's previous film, a 16 minute marvel, it is still more dreamlike. This is because while "Un Chien Andalou's" surrealist images are more contained, one bizarre image after another forming a barely apprehensible link, "L'Age d'Or's" are far more detached, because they jut awkwardly out of a noticeable plot line. Surrealism must accentuate the bizzare found in a perfectly normal situation, and while "Un Chien" does this, there is still very little normal in the film. Not to say that it is any less inspired than "L'Age d'Or," quite the contrary, but ironically, it is "L'Age d'Or's" use of plot that makes it all the more surreal.

The "plot" of "L'Age d'Or" is about how we compromise ourselves in the name of society, more specifically how we compromise our sexual desire. Whether the man and the woman, the centers of the film, trying desperately to overcome social obstacles to consummate their love, are actually in love is never made perfectly clear, but they do suffer the same barriers couples find in society today. The majority of the humor in the film comes from the ways its immortal couple disrespects this need to compromise, and the sexual misplacements that occur when they are forced to abide by it (the infamous toe fellatio scene is hysterically erotic). Another recurring idea is that society is built on this compromise, and due to it, is always lingering on the edge of madness.

Like he did with "Un Chien Andalou," in "L'Age d'Or" director Bunuel disrupts rational time and space continuum to satisfy his own flights of fancy. In an early sequence, a group of people, dressed in contemporary 30's clothing, step off some historic looking ships to lay the first stone of what is to be Imperial Rome. We then cut to Rome in it's contemporary glory, where we find the people looking no different, and the main character's, seen during the previous scene, not really looking any older. What is Bunuel trying to say with this scene? That things do not really ever change. Maybe he's just once again indulging in the beauty of the irrational.

The beauty of the irrational... That was something Bunuel clung to throughout his career, but it was never again so evident, so pure as it was in the days of "L'Age d'Or." I spent a great deal of time searching for this little treasure, and now that I've found it, I have no regrets. Love it or hate it, love it and hate it, "L'Age d'Or" is the type of film that will never be made again. It is too alive with the possibilities of it's medium, too fresh to be reproduced. And too brilliant, audacious, and liberating to be topped.

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.

After completing Un Chien Andalusia with Salvador Dali (who helped write the screenplay) Bunuel began his new film titled L'age D'or, translated as The Golden Age. Altho not entirely collaborating on the screenplay, Dali still received his credential for L'age D'or; however, this film was primarily a sole project for Bunuel. In this film Bunuel attacks religion with the famous image of a skeletal clergy resting on the shore of Catalonia. In addition, the film contains other sensational and bizarre imagery (i.e. a cow laying on a bed, a woman having a bowel movement, a man with a boulder on his head, a festering wound on a man's eye, and the like). Obviously, L'age D'or was controversial at it's time, and still is for some audiences. However, the films takes at least 3 times to completely understand Bunuel's symbolism (the way I saw it), as well as the ambiguous conclusion which is still a bit hazy for me. The film's pace is rather slow and can be dull at moments; nevertheless, it takes a lot of patience to even enjoy this film, considering the irregular structure of the story-line. However, that doesn't mean the film is a bomb: it's definitely a standard in the history of art-and-film, influencing a dozen surrealist filmmakers (ie, Cocteau, Fellini) as well as underground directors. In Short, this film will start to grow on the viewer after several viewings. Bunuel was ahead of his time as a director, therefore L'age D'or may seem out of place for todays audiences as well as todays critics.