L'Age D'Or

Imagery of savages. Savage imagery.  It's little wonder that right-wing French "patriots" violently denounced 1930's L'AGE D'OR, some even taking to disrupting screenings and desecrating artwork in theater lobbies and galleries.  Some of that art had been created by Salvador Dali, co-screenwriter of this film with director Luis Bunuel.   For a classic surrealist piece of cinema, it must sound like the most inspired collaboration possible.

Dali and Bunuel had a disagreement/fight/whatever, leaving the director to solely orchestrate this mad hour of audacious vignettes, threaded by a story of a man and woman who repeatedly attempt to consummate their love/lust.  Bunuel's film, his first fill length picture, is crudely made but its power to constantly surprise, and sometimes shock, remains.  Several decades and oceans of ink spilled over it have not dulled the sentiment.  The artists are quite pissed at the Catholic church, or maybe they were just looking for some rabble rousing and controversy.  They certainly got it: L'AGE D'OR was banned for forty years.

A theme: society's collectives, namely the burgeois, will crush one's will, maybe even crush love altogether.  Certainly the church is guilty.   Maybe even the very notion of religious faith.  Check that final scene, with someone who resembles Jesus and the castle in which an orgy lasted for one hundred and twenty days.  A woman in need of rescuing, but perhaps merely fated to have her scalp hanging from a crucifix.  Religious imagery is rampant in Bunuel's film, unsurprising for one immersed in the Church in his youth.  It was also a man's world, where women, children, the blind, and even dogs are merely to be discarded and abused.  Man is no better than the scorpions we see at film's opening.

Obvious references, there.  Much more going on.  I'll bet every single frame means something.  The cow in the bedroom.  The giraffe statue.  The kicking of the violin down a sidewalk.  The infamous fellation of a statue's toes.  Sexual, political, religious, social mores are turned inside out.  Bunuel makes reference to Richard Wagner and the Marquis de Sade to elucidate his points.  But Luis Bunuel was an original, continuing for many years to document what beasts humans (mostly men) can be.  Governed by the basest of instincts, destroying the very civilized civilizations they seek to erect.  Squelching desires begetting desire run amok.  Destructive and a recipe for insanity.  L'AGE D'OR is a work of art that moves, and stuns.