L'Age d'Or

Luis Buñuel, France, 1930, 60 minutes

One of Buñuel's legendary films, L'Age d'Or is perhaps the most radical allowing blasphemy and uncompromising criticism full reign. Banned for several years, due to violent reactions upon its release and screening - a group of fascists splattered the screen with ink in one of its showings - it still retains all its venom in its attack on bourgeois ideology.

The story follows a couple whose sexual desires are continually inhibited by the bourgeois establishment. Scripted by Dali, it is undoubtedly the most successful incorporation of Surrealism into cinema. The structure of the film is disjointed to extreme, and it is actually comprised of a bombardment of bizarre, irrational yet often beautiful and erotic images. Its start is a documentary on scorpions and its anti-clerical messages do not take much time to follow: skeletons of bishops on a rocky seaside, a blind man being kicked (a scene which is repeated in Los Olvidados), and Christ participating in an orgy, they all caused the wrath of the Catholic Church (Viridiana was another victim of censorship a few decades later). The film's treatment of sexuality is as timely as ever and the eroticism whicih emanates from scenes such as the one with a woman performing fellatio with the toe of a statue surpasses the vast majority of contemporary explicit erotica on film.

Buñuel in his attempts to conjure irony and contradiction adds to his already disturbing imagery some glorious music by Wagner, Beethoven and Debussy. The film deserves several viewings neither for its historical significance nor its ruthless critique of the establishment, but rather for the fact that such creative imagination ought to be rediscovered.

Review by Spiros Gangas
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94