Interested in the most daring, up-to-date, irreverent, iconoclastic satire of social restrictions currently available? Want a film that celebrates the anarchy of subconscious passions through surrealism and black humor? Look no further! You’ll find all that and more in Luis Buñuel’s brilliant, disarming and unclassifiable masterpiece L’Age D’Or. Did I mention yet that this audacious film was released in 1930? Never mind, that! This film was easily 70 years ahead of its time. It was banned after its initial release in its native country, France, for 49 of those years. You’ll never encounter another film so old with such a modern sensibility.

Historical Background: Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), was born in Spain and grew up in Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon. Buñuel became involved while at the University of Madrid with an avant guard circle that included Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, and Morena Villa, who were inspired by the surrealist movement that had emerged in France. While studying film and working as an assistant, Buñuel collaborated with Dali, an irreverent surrealist agitator, to produce the highly experimental work, Un Chien andalou (1928). Two years later, Buñuel and Dali were expressly commissioned by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles to provide a follow-up. Dali ended up contributing little to the project, though he was generously credited with a share of the script by Buñuel. L’Age D’Or is primarily the work of its senior author and director. This great film proved to be the last of the collaborations between Buñuel and Dali because Dali was soon to be transformed and socialized by his future wife, Gala. When the Spanish Civil War began, Buñuel found it necessary to flee Spain for America. Unfortunately, that largely side-tracked Buñuel’s career, since the only opportunity that opened up to him in America was work on military documentaries and Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films. His career was later revitalized when he moved to Mexico in the 1950’s.

When Buñuel’s great surrealist masterpiece premiered in Paris in November of 1930, it caused a riot. Outraged Fascists threw bottles of ink at the screen, released stink bombs, and fired guns into the air. Later, paintings by some of the surrealists, including Ray, Ernst, and Dali, were destroyed in galleries.

The nature of Buñuel’s Surrealism: Buñuel’s version of surrealism champions the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind – the id in Freudian terminology – is dominated by passions and drives, such as lust, anger, and hunger. We don’t typically observe the subconscious mind in operation without the restraining influence of the conscious mind. The subconscious can be seen in its pure form only when the overarching influences of the ego and superego (components of the conscious mind) are inactive, as in sleep or drunkenness. It is only then that we realize that the subconscious mind, taken by itself, is inherently irrational, erotic, and fanciful. In the confines of polite society, the subconscious is held in check by the ego (rational thought) and the superego (guilt, desire for acceptance, and self-imposed expectations). For most people, superego is largely derived from religion, social mores and family up-bringing. Surrealism aims at examining the subconscious mind outside the usual constraints of reason, censorship, or repression that disguise our base urges.

The surrealist movement was determined to remind us that it is the passions of the subconscious mind that provide much of the impetus for our activities, both constructive and destructive. Buñuel gave expression to this point in the program notes that accompanied the film’s showings in 1930: “It is love that brings about the transition from pessimism to action: Love, denounced in the bourgeois demonology as the root of all evil. For love demands the sacrifice of every other value: status, family, and honor.” By “love”, Buñuel really meant “passion.” Thus, the surrealism of L’Age D’Or can be viewed as id running around in the buff. Buñuel’s express intent was to produce “a militant film aimed at raping the conscious mind.” The product was a rollicking, exhilarating masterpiece that is oh so decadent, like a gut-purging drunken binge, but, also, oh so liberating!

Surrealism is insistent on the point that its currency is ideas rather than images. Although L’Age D’Or is often praised by critics for its rich imagery, Buñuel specifically rejected the implied complement, stating that surrealists were “anti-visualists.” What he meant was that the imagery of the subconscious, such as in dream sequences or drunken reveries, is significantly different from conscious visual perception.

In some respects, Un Chien andalou is even purer than L’Age D’Or as surrealist expression, since it consists of an unrestrained sequence of largely disjointed and unrelated images without any semblance of plot or continuity. In other words, it unfolds in much the same way that the subconscious mind operates. Yet, L’Age D’Or is the more successful of the two films precisely because the surrealism is continuously contrasted with and at odds with the narrative thread, which stands in for the operations of the conscious, rational mind. We can clearly see the jagged edges of the surreal sequences (emanating from the subconscious mind) precisely because they are shown in relief against the struggle of the conscious mind to assert order in the form of a narrative.

Most of us understand that a world governed by uninhibited subconscious impulses of humankind would be a scary place indeed and possibly indistinguishable from hell itself. To check our worst emotions, human society has evolved all sorts of restrictive structures and influences to reign in and sublimate the subconscious, from laws to religion to community standards to family discipline. Many times such restrictions also make rational sense but some restrictions are merely excessive, ritualistic, overbearing, and inhumane. Buñuel’s specific intent was to “expose the shameful mechanisms of contemporary society” that stand in the way of the rightful culmination of the just passions of the subconscious. Buñuel wanted to imagine a world in which men and women had the freedom to express desires without the often arbitrary constraints of religious doctrine, genteel bourgeois etiquette, and the oppressive, unbending and impersonal legal system of the state. Buñuel’s surrealism was not ultimately about anarchy, as the rioters and censors supposed. Buñuel was more than happy to point out that surrealists understood the difference “between good and evil, justice and discrimination, the beautiful and the ugly.”

The Story: On the narrative level, L’Age D’Or can be viewed as a semi-pornographic fantasy about a man (Gaston Modot) and a woman (Lya Lys) whose attempts at love-making are constantly interrupted and thwarted by the forces of righteousness. The film opens with a documentary-style segment depicting a scorpion, a poisonous arachnid. The title screen informs us that the scorpion is “not at all sociable, it ejects the intruder who comes to disturb its solitude.” We observe the scorpion crippling and then consuming a large rat.

The second segment is introduced by the caption, “some hours afterwards.” Four bishops are seen worshiping near of a rocky mountain. So devout are they, that they sit and pray until their bodies virtually rot away into skeletons under the scorching Spanish sun. Next, we see a disheveled group of armed peasants (including among them, as performers, some of the famous surrealists of the period: Max Ernst, Pierre Prévert, and Paul Étuard), heading toward the cliffs that line the rocky shoreline to resist the arrival of invading Mojorcans, but the peasants collapse in exhaustion along the way, never so much as making contact with the enemy. The Mojorcan dignitaries thus disembark uncontested, dressed in 1930’s attire but arriving in ancient ships, and launch a ceremony to mark the founding of a new city – Imperial Rome. The crowd of on-lookers is organized in accordance with the established social hierarchy. The upper class citizens, in the front, decked out in three-piece suits and fine dresses, top hats, and jewelry, enjoy the best view. Behind them, the middle-class behave similarly though less finely attired. In the back, the scruffy working class struggles for a view of the proceedings.

Behind the crowd, at a short distance, and taking advantage of the crowd’s preoccupation with the high ceremony, is an amorous couple – a man (Gaston Modot) and a girl (Lya Lys) – rolling passionately around in the mud. They are first spotted by the children of the lower class at the very back of the crowd (they’re too insignificant to be effectively included in the ceremonial event). The children are at first brightened upon spying the passionate couple, but quickly sensing the approbation of the crowd, join in the general condemnation. The girl is turned over to her parents while the mud-splattered man is escorted away by the police, presumably for the crime of being happy and horny. As he is dragged away, he expresses his anger by crushing a beetle, lofting a poodle with a well-placed kick, knocking down a beggar (a concept reused by Buñuel in Los Olvidados), and generally cursing. The ceremony continues – transformed into a series of images of modern Rome, including an aerial view of the Vatican with the caption, “The Ancient City of Rome, Mistress to Pagan Times.”

In the third segment of the story, the scene shifts to an upper-class villa – the home of the lustful girl, who, it seems, is the daughter of a marquis. Though her parents are preparing a fancy and sophisticated event for the Majorcans, the girl continues in a state of passionate distraction, longing for her lover. Despite the heroic attempts of the righteous bourgeois society to impose order and decorum on the gathering at the villa, chaos subversively intrudes. A peasant’s cart rumbles through the ballroom, a fire breaks out in the kitchen, a cow is found napping in a bed, and insects crawl disrespectfully over the festering wound on a dignitary’s face. The male lover, meanwhile, has slipped away from his captors and has found his way to the event. Since knocking down the beggar, he has been mysteriously appointed as “Ambassador of Good Will.” He angrily punches the girl’s dignified mother in the face when she accidentally spills a drink on his hand, before slipping away into the garden with his girl, while the general company is distracted with the strains of Debussy played by an orchestra. In the garden, the man and the woman enjoy a series of dream-like sequences expressive of their erotic passion for one another, yet once again they are denied consummation by interruptions. A phone call informs the man that their lust for one another is causing widespread civil unrest and violence. Next, they are interrupted by the appearance of the conductor of the orchestra. In utter frustration, the man rushes to the girl’s bedroom and throws a variety of unlikely objects out of the window – a burning tree, a bishop, and a giraffe. Meanwhile, back in the garden, the girl releases her frustration by sucking suggestively on the toes of a marble statue of Venus, in a manner so reminiscent of fellatio that viewers fully expect the face of the statue to sport an expression to heightened arousal.

The film then concludes with an especially controversial segment derived from the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. It portrays an orgiastic event whose ringleader looks shockingly much like the Christ figure. The film concludes with tufts of hair (possibly beards or pubic patches) nailed to a crucifix.

Themes: The film itself is much like the scorpion in its opening sequence – emerging from an iconoclastic underground packing a lethal sting. Its targets are the Church, the State, and the polite conventions of the bourgeoisie.

In Buñuel’s symbolism, however, the scorpion represents the various repressive elements of society, including the Church, the law, and the irksome expectations and standards of the middle and upper classes. One scene that especially captures Buñuel’s views on the cruelty of authoritarianism is a brilliant dream sequence through which the protagonist comes to recognize how thoroughly the societal restraints are stacked against him. He dreams of a happy, carefree, expressive boy greeting his father as he returns home. The boy is archetypal boy – with unkempt hair and alive with naïve freedom and passionate energy. The father is archetypal father: superficially friendly and reassuring but carrying a rifle, presumably loaded with accusations and condemnations, should the need arise. We see the father delivering a lecture to the boy about some aspect of behavior. The boy merrily laughs and knocks an object from the man’s hand to the floor. As the boy runs off, waving to the audience, the father shoots him dead with two rounds. Here we see Buñuel’s conception of society: supportive on the surface but cruelly indifferent and, even, inhumane in its insistence on harsh enforcement of rules and regulations.

Bottom-Line: L’Age D’Or is disgustingly nonsensical, laughably erotic, dangerously revolutionary, and deploringly scandalous. In short, it’s darn near perfect! L’Age D’Or arguably ranks as the single most successful incorporation of surrealism into cinema ever filmed. It is a “must-see” for every serious lover of film, but especially those of liberal or iconoclastic disposition. L’Age D’Or is a silent film with title screens in French with English subtitles. It has a running time of sixty-three minutes.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Spain:

All About My Mother
Belle Epoque
Butterfly
Carmen
Cria!
El
The Grandfather
Labyrinth of Passion
Sex and Lucía
Spirit of the Beehive
Talk to Her
Thesis
Tie Me Up! Time Me Down!
Tierra
Tristana
Vacas
Viridiana
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age