L'Âge d'or

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.

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.

I've always felt that it was somewhat unfortunate that the concept of a cinema presented as art has been largely abandoned in the last sixty years or so in favour of a cinema of wanton commodity. The idea that a film is little more than a consumer product intended to offer passive entertainment that won't require any kind of further thought or challenges for the viewer is incredibly sad, and inevitably leads to the endless regurgitation of codes, conventions, stories and images that we're currently seeing through the endless production of re-makes, literary adaptations and variations on TV. I suppose it depends largely on how you view the notion of "art" in an entertainment sense. I'd gather that very few of the people posting negative comments here would gladly spend the afternoon in an art gallery, not simply learning something about the artist and their work, but actually enjoying it. Many think of art as something incredibly serious; there to be admired from a distance without ever attempting to form a personal connection or engagement with it on an emotional or intellectual level. It is this attitude that leads to the various implications of the term "art film", which now has a number of incredibly negative connotations that suggest something po-faced and pretentious; the idea that these films should be sat through and looked at with no real appreciation for the sense of fun, frivolity and subversive glee that the filmmakers bring to their work or the ideas behind it.

As one of the previous reviewer already noted, it was not Buñuel's intention for this film to be looked at as something entirely serious; though there are certainly serious ideas being expressed. Instead, you could approach it as something radical, like rock n' roll or punk music, with the idea of a cinema of revolution and defiance that goes against all accepted conventions of what cinema is and what cinema should attain to; as well as commenting on the nature of society - with all its bourgeois values and the (then) prevalent idea of religious hypocrisy - in a way that would inspire thought and provoke a reaction. You might not enjoy it as much as a more conventional film that offers a plot and a theme and characters you can believe in - and all presented in a way that is comfortable and safe - but the experience, for me at least, is as a hundred times more rewarding than the latest Marvel adaptation or exercise in Hollywood nostalgia. Look at the current films at the top of the US box-office and it becomes clear that films like L'Âge d'Or (1930) and the proceeding Un Chien Andalou (1929) have become part of the minority. Nonetheless, when we view this film within the context of something like Kung-Fu Panda (2008), You Don't Mess With Zohan (2008), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Sex and the City (2008) - all currently top of the American box office - we can see the extent of how facile and meaningless much of contemporary cinema has become.

It has never been my belief that a film requires a story or a character that we attach our own thoughts and feelings to, but rather, can survive simply as a platform for creative thought and artistic expression. The true power of cinema is in the sense that it is the only real art form that combines elements from every single separate art-form that you can possibly think of; from performance art, to photography, editing and design and of course, the various literary traditions that gave us the ideas of narrative and character. So, with L'Âge d'Or, we are presented with a mad jumble of images all flowing dreamlike from one scene to the next - sometimes boring, sometimes fascinating - often without interpretation or any kind of greater context outside of the broader notions of surrealism for the sake of it. It's still seen as something radical - perhaps even dangerous - seventy-odd years after it was first released, but really, its classic cinema in the traditional sense; e.g. a collection of abstract but penetrating images intended to be viewed by as many people as possible at the same time to create a shared and sensory experience. In this sense, the film is almost beyond criticism, or at least, beyond the higher intellectual/interpretative level of criticism that it normally receives, with the film standing as an ode to cinema at its most simple and sublime. All notions of intellectualism, or pseudo-intellectualism, are therefore thrown out of the window as the film transfixes us with some stunningly imaginative images that flicker to life on the screen.

To seek answers from the film is missing the point, as there are no questions to be asked. The point of the film is not to entertain on the base levels of character, narrative and simple human emotions, but rather, to present us with something that we've never seen before. It's artist expression. If you have no interest in this then you'll have no interest in the film - which, although incredibly difficult and almost certainly not to all tastes, is still as close to the purest sense of cinema as you can possibly get. Some of the images are intended to shock, others to amuse and others to titillate and provoke thought, even when there seems to be nothing to really think about. Above all else, it is an experience, like all films, and one that is entirely visual and approachable on even the most immediate of levels. Don't think too much about it, or attempt to see something that isn't there. The point of surrealism was to go beyond such notions of the real and mundane to present something illogical, imaginative and devoid of rational thinking in order to find a new way of approaching the world. That's what this film represents.

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

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.