Director / editor: Luis Buñuel
Writers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Marquis de Sade
Photography: Albert Duverger
Music: Luis Buñuel, Georges Van Parys
Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lis, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibanez, Luis Buñuel
Surrealism means never having to say you're sorry, as director, cowriter, and editor Luis Buñuel seeks to show in his 1930 follow-up to the ragingly weird Un Chien Andalou. That short picture remains famous for an eyeball shot that will probably always work for as long as people look at movies. L'Age d'Or does not have anything nearly as memorable—very few movies do, actually—but Buñuel appears to have more confidence about what he is doing as a filmmaker. There's more juice to this one. He is once again working with Salvador Dali and in 1930 you couldn't get much more outré than that, or at least Parisian. Max Ernst is along for the ride as well in a small part.
L'Age d'Or, for one thing, has a much more detectable through-line. There's this couple, see—well, I can't tell you a lot more than that. Gaston Modot is billed as "The Man," Lya Lis as "The Woman." They're in a lot of scenes, together and separately. I didn't say it made sense, I said the movie has a more detectable through-line. Buñuel's loathing of the Catholic Church is often front and center. Pontiffs in full garb and later their skeletons are seen early. And there's something about Rome—stock aerial shots of the city, some locations on the ground. A clip from a documentary about scorpions starts it off. A cow is found in a very nice bed. A horse-drawn cart passes through a fancy indoor social gathering.
Surrealism means never having to say you're sorry, as director, cowriter, and editor Luis Buñuel seeks to show in his 1930 follow-up to the ragingly weird Un Chien Andalou. That short picture remains famous for an eyeball shot that will probably always work for as long as people look at movies. L'Age d'Or does not have anything nearly as memorable—very few movies do, actually—but Buñuel appears to have more confidence about what he is doing as a filmmaker. There's more juice to this one. He is once again working with Salvador Dali and in 1930 you couldn't get much more outré than that, or at least Parisian. Max Ernst is along for the ride as well in a small part.
L'Age d'Or, for one thing, has a much more detectable through-line. There's this couple, see—well, I can't tell you a lot more than that. Gaston Modot is billed as "The Man," Lya Lis as "The Woman." They're in a lot of scenes, together and separately. I didn't say it made sense, I said the movie has a more detectable through-line. Buñuel's loathing of the Catholic Church is often front and center. Pontiffs in full garb and later their skeletons are seen early. And there's something about Rome—stock aerial shots of the city, some locations on the ground. A clip from a documentary about scorpions starts it off. A cow is found in a very nice bed. A horse-drawn cart passes through a fancy indoor social gathering.
So it goes—Surrealism as sight gag as images and scenes appear without explanation. It could be a Marx Brothers movie if someone were talking fast enough. The couple appears first making love at a solemn occasion for which they are severely rebuked. Later the man is seen under arrest in Rome, accompanied by police in handcuffs, but then things change and he isn't.
Getting a look at L'Age d'Or was a typical adventure for a lot of these highly regarded but older classics. I thought it was on Criterion, because they feature a bunch of Buñuel movies, but it wasn't. Amazon Prime wanted to charge me for it and I've paid for some bad prints there. YouTube had two versions, both of which had the right running time and reasonably good-looking prints. One appeared to have a skimpy and intermittent soundtrack with no subtitles and the other much more musical accompaniment, with subtitles, so I went with that one.
I think now the audio was some kind of live recording with an audience, almost certainly not the score credited to Buñuel and Georges Van Parys. But it was a very weird, unsettling, and ultimately effective one, I thought, with sounds of voices moaning and groaning and saxophones randomly honking and so forth. The YouTube comments on that version tended toward derisive, so caveats if you're looking it up, but I thought that audio, with lots of the music too, worked well for the images and plot points, such as they were. I agree I could have done without the occasional crowd noises of restlessness and coughing.
The subtitles were another quirk of that version. I understand from the Wikipedia article that L'Age d'Or was shot with sound—in fact, it's one of the first sound films made in France—but Buñuel chose to dispense with dialogue, frequently resorting to intertitles, which are then translated by this video into subtitles. These subtitles can be awkwardly separated from the intertitle cards—they come both early and late. At some points, subtitles start to appear with only proximate connection to the images: there are no voiceovers, no one appears to be speaking, and there are no intertitle cards for minutes on either side of them. But there they are, saying things I dutifully read, and the things did seem to relate to the images.
Is that a bad transfer or is it Buñuel? Is it someone who doesn't know or care what they're doing or is it Surrealism? It's too much like the narrative plot point of insanity—all it means is that anything goes. And when anything goes, nothing matters. The continuing problem for middlebrows like myself with experimental fare like this is that it's difficult knowing how to judge it. Mostly it bores me (mostly, honestly, Un Chien Andalou bores me, except that eyeball shot) but I try to go with the flow. I notice these moans and groans and think that's pretty cool, when they work. They don't always. Then I find out it's something probably completely to the side of Buñuel and nothing to do with him.
Hey, I'm not much onboard with the Catholic Church or organized religion either myself so I can find connection points here. The sexuality is more problematic—it reads too often as antiquated progressive 1920s "free love," which more or less equates nowadays to polyamory and all its problems and virtues. L'Age d'Or doesn't look very enlightened to me about women, but I have the advantage of almost another century and birth control. I like the adventurous spirit of L'Age d'Or but I think most of it is lost on me. It could well benefit from a thorough and credible restoration.
Getting a look at L'Age d'Or was a typical adventure for a lot of these highly regarded but older classics. I thought it was on Criterion, because they feature a bunch of Buñuel movies, but it wasn't. Amazon Prime wanted to charge me for it and I've paid for some bad prints there. YouTube had two versions, both of which had the right running time and reasonably good-looking prints. One appeared to have a skimpy and intermittent soundtrack with no subtitles and the other much more musical accompaniment, with subtitles, so I went with that one.
I think now the audio was some kind of live recording with an audience, almost certainly not the score credited to Buñuel and Georges Van Parys. But it was a very weird, unsettling, and ultimately effective one, I thought, with sounds of voices moaning and groaning and saxophones randomly honking and so forth. The YouTube comments on that version tended toward derisive, so caveats if you're looking it up, but I thought that audio, with lots of the music too, worked well for the images and plot points, such as they were. I agree I could have done without the occasional crowd noises of restlessness and coughing.
The subtitles were another quirk of that version. I understand from the Wikipedia article that L'Age d'Or was shot with sound—in fact, it's one of the first sound films made in France—but Buñuel chose to dispense with dialogue, frequently resorting to intertitles, which are then translated by this video into subtitles. These subtitles can be awkwardly separated from the intertitle cards—they come both early and late. At some points, subtitles start to appear with only proximate connection to the images: there are no voiceovers, no one appears to be speaking, and there are no intertitle cards for minutes on either side of them. But there they are, saying things I dutifully read, and the things did seem to relate to the images.
Is that a bad transfer or is it Buñuel? Is it someone who doesn't know or care what they're doing or is it Surrealism? It's too much like the narrative plot point of insanity—all it means is that anything goes. And when anything goes, nothing matters. The continuing problem for middlebrows like myself with experimental fare like this is that it's difficult knowing how to judge it. Mostly it bores me (mostly, honestly, Un Chien Andalou bores me, except that eyeball shot) but I try to go with the flow. I notice these moans and groans and think that's pretty cool, when they work. They don't always. Then I find out it's something probably completely to the side of Buñuel and nothing to do with him.
Hey, I'm not much onboard with the Catholic Church or organized religion either myself so I can find connection points here. The sexuality is more problematic—it reads too often as antiquated progressive 1920s "free love," which more or less equates nowadays to polyamory and all its problems and virtues. L'Age d'Or doesn't look very enlightened to me about women, but I have the advantage of almost another century and birth control. I like the adventurous spirit of L'Age d'Or but I think most of it is lost on me. It could well benefit from a thorough and credible restoration.
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