L'Âge d'or (1930)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

It wasn't long after he became acquainted with the great surrealist innovators of the 1910s - Salvador Dalí and André Breton -  that Luis Buñuel began to see the untrammelled possibilities for surrealism in the still fairly new medium of film art.  Throughout the 1920s, the pioneers of the French Avant-garde dabbled with surrealist ideas and created some of the most bizarre films of the decade, notable examples including René Clair's Entr'acte (1924), Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924), Jean Renoir's La Fille de l'eau (1925), Man Ray's Emak-Bakia (1926) and Germaine Dulac's La Coquille et le clergyman (1928).  It was whilst working as an assistant to Jean Epstein on the latter's impressionistic masterpiece La Chute de la maison (1928) that Buñuel had firsthand experience of how naturally surrealism and cinema melded together.  A year later, he was able to fulfil his ambition of creating an entirely surrealist film with Un Chien andalou (1929), perhaps the most celebrated and dazzlingly original film of this kind.

On this shockingly experimental film, Buñuel collaborated closely with Dalí and their success led them to attempt an even more ambitious work - mischievously titled L'Âge d'or - in which both men would give free rein to their unbridled loathing for the conventions and hypocrisies of bourgeois society.  It was whilst working on the script for this new film that artistic differences arose and brought about a permanent rift between the anti-religious Buñuel and Catholic-sympathetic Dalí.  Once the film was in production, Dalí withdrew from it altogether and refused to acknowledge his part in it, so deeply was he offended by the anti-Christian symbolism that Buñuel insisted on including in what would become one of the most subversive and fiercely condemned artistic creations of the time.

No longer held back by the restraining influence of his more cautiously iconoclastic collaborator, Buñuel was free to complete the film he had set out to make, mocking not just the absurdities of modern life and the contemptible double standards of the bourgeoisie but also the false values and symbols of the Catholic Church.  It was the latter that would cause most difficulty for the rookie filmmaker, forcing him to move on to safer, more conventional subjects before he ever dared to court controversy again.  Buñuel would make a dramatic volte-face in the 1960s and '70s with the films for which he is now best known, the fiercely anti-bourgeois satires that would predominate in the latter stages of his career - El Angel Exterminador (1962), Belle de jour (1967), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974).  Buñuel's fierce anti-clericalism would return with a vengeance in Simon of the Desert (1965) and La Voie lactée (1969), a far more subtle mockery of Christian piety than the full-on sacrilegious onslaught served up in L'Âge d'Or.
    
It is hard to imagine today just how shocking Luis Buñuel's second film was when it was first seen in 1930, but it could hardly avoid kicking up a firestorm with its anti-bourgeois lampoonery and vicious trashing of Christian iconography - to say nothing of its in-your-face eroticism, which takes in some pretty explicit allusions to masturbation, bestiality and oral sex.  In hindsight, it seems hardly credible that L'Âge d'Or was ever able to get past the French Board of Censors, but when it did it wasn't long before the film had acquired a seductive notoriety among the Parisian cultural elite and inflamed the indignation of the easily provoked rightwing moralists.

At a public screening on 3rd December 1930, two groups of activists - the Ligue anti-juive and Ligue des patriotes - stormed the venue (Studio 28 in Montmartre), throwing bottles of ink at the screen and driving spectators from the auditorium with their fists and sticks.  Meanwhile, an exhibition of surrealist art in the foyer was vandalised, with many canvases by notable artists (including Dalí, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy) slashed with knives.  A week later, the film was banned  by the Préfet de police Jean Chippe through fear that it would lead to further civil unrest.  Not long after this, the Board of Censors reviewed its decision and the film was immediately withdrawn from circulation, its one available print seized and destroyed.  The de Noailles family held on to the negative but refused to allow the film to be publicly screened until 1980.  It wasn't until 1981 that L'Âge d'Or became widely available for viewing and almost immediately it was hailed as a masterpiece of surrealist cinema.  Buñuel had the last laugh, just two years before his death.

The fact that L'Age d'Or came with a synchronised soundtrack (mostly pieces of classical music, but with some snatches of dialogue in a few scenes) no doubt contributed to its short-lived success on its first release, but what must have been a greater draw was its almost rampant subversiveness.  It was a thoroughly modern film for a thoroughly modern film audience, savage in its critique of the starched repressive morality of its time, a bourgeois notion of order which (as Buñuel argues more effectively in his later films) keeps individuals permanently in chains and prevents them from ever finding true fulfilment in their lives.  The opening sequence concludes with a tiny scorpion killing a rat many times its size with a single, well-aimed flick of its poison-tipped tail.  Could this be how the film's author sees himself, stinging his mighty adversary to death with the gift nature has endowed him with?

L'Age d'Or is shocking and funny in equal measure and whilst it may lack the sophistication and polish of Buñuel's subsequent convention-busting offerings it is undoubtedly one of his great achievements, so uninhibited is it in its freedom of expression and technique in the service of its highly subversive agenda.  There are visual gags that look as if they might have been lifted from an early Chaplin film - a man kicking an irritating dog out of shot, a blind man being violently assaulted by someone wanting to take his place in a taxi, a father shooting dead his infant son after a touching reunion - and yet all of these acquire a much darker undertone when you see them in the context of a broader assault on the diseased mores of a society that has become completely desensitised through its self-serving hypocrisy.  The tolerance of the governing bourgeois elite for violence, the film argues, is why wars are inevitable.  It isn't hard to see why this may have caused offence, particularly among those who had fought and lost both limbs and comrades in the so-called War to End Wars.

But it is the film's brazen disregard for public sensitivities around sex and religion that was much more provocative.  A young couple's constantly interrupted attempts to consummate their boiling passion is the central thread that runs through L'Âge d'Or and gives it at least the semblance of narrative cohesion.  (The couple are played by two familiar performers of the silent era - Gaston Modot, a favourite of Avant-garde directors Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac and René Clair, and Lya Lis,  who had previously worked in Hollywood on French versions of several MGM films.)  There are some bizarre digressions along the way which hint at something much kinkier than we'd like to contemplate - such as one scene in which the heroine coyly manoeuvres a cow off her bed and out of her bedroom as if it were a secret lover.  For the most part, however, Buñuel is pretty direct in his allusions to sex.   Most explicit is the sequence in the garden where the lovers simultaneously suck on each other's fingers with expressions of intense delight on their faces, although even this is mild compared with a later shot in which the woman sucks on the toe of a stone statue, her whole body quivering with desire.

There is no nudity, not even the merest hint at the kind of lubricious skin-on-skin content that is now depressingly de rigueur in just about every genre of cinema, and yet L'Âge d'Or manages to be more pruriently suggestive than anything seen by today's mainstream cinema audiences.  Just as with the famous eye-slitting shot at the start of Un Chien andalou, Buñuel exploits his spectator's fascination with the more sordid realities of life to make him aware of his own dual nature - to see the untamed beast contained within a self-constructed shell of sham respectability.    

But this unveiling of man's earthier appetites is not why the film was so fiercely attacked and had to be banned.  Buñuel's boldest transgression, the one that could never be justified and which Dalí found so unpalatable, was to make an overt connection between Christianity and the libertine ideas of the Marquis de Sade.  This comes at the end of the film, with a somewhat jarring digression that references de Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom (written in 1785 but first published in 1904).  Most shockingly, one character from the novel, the Duc de Blangis, appears in the conventional western guise of Jesus Christ, and he even acts in a Christ-like fashion as he ministers to one of his female victims.  The last image we are shown is that of a crucifix bearing the scalps of women who have been tortured and perhaps killed for the sexual gratification of the French nobility.  It's an odd way for Buñuel to conclude a film paid for by his aristocratic sponsor.

L'Âge d'Or was both the summit and end of Luis Buñuel's brief flirtation with surrealist cinema.  The brouhaha caused by the film earned him an invitation from MGM to Hollywood but that led nowhere and the director was soon back in Spain making a documentary feature Las Hurdes (1933), a cinematic oddity with some curious surrealist flourishes.  This was followed by a stint serving the propaganda interests of the Spanish Republic, something that made it impossible for Buñuel to remain in the country when Franco came to power.  It wasn't until the late 1940s that Buñuel was able to establish himself as a professional filmmaker, turning out crowdpleasing melodramas in his adopted home, Mexico.  His subversive streak would remain firmly in check until the 1960s, when, in a more liberal-minded era, he would finally come in to his own and resume what he had attempted so feistily with Un Chien andalou and L'Âge d'Or - to tear down the pillars of the bourgeois high temple of orthodoxy and sanctimony and expose us for what we really are.

Film Synopsis

On a remote rocky island in the early years of the 20th century a large crowd assembles to pay their respects to fallen heroes at a newly erected war memoriam.  The solemnity of the occasion is disturbed by the frightful spectacle of a young couple making love in full sight of everyone at the ceremony.  The police brutally intervene and the offensive young man is taken away in handcuffs.  As he is led through the streets of a city on the mainland the man finally convinces his captors that he is an important servant of the state and must be set free.  Released, the man gets into a taxi and a short while later arrives at a palatial residence hosting a grand society party.  Here, the man soon notices his lover, but their attempts to get together are constantly thwarted by the guests milling around them.

In the end, the couple take refuge in the garden and here they surrender themselves to their passions, just as an orchestra strikes up a rousing rendition of Wagner's Liebestod.  Just before the climax, the conductor loses concentration and strays into the garden in a daze.  He immediately attracts the attention of the passionate young woman, who comes to his aid.  His lovemaking frustrated yet again, the young man wanders off to a bedroom and throws everything he can find (including a bishop and stuffed giraffe) out of an upstairs window.  Meanwhile, in the 1780s, a wild orgy is taking place at a remote castle at the invitation of the Christ-like Duc de Blangis.  The nobleman's 120 days of infamy include acts of unspeakable depravity and are ultimately commemorated by a crucifix dressed with the scalps of his female victims...