- Director: Luis Buñuel
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Avant-garde / Experimental
- Movie Type: Surrealist Film, Religious Comedy
- Themes: Fighting the System, Religious Zealotry
- Main Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst, Pierre Prevert, Lionel Salem, Jose Artigas
- Release Year: 1930
- Country: FR
- Run Time: 62 minutes
Plot
L'Âge d'Or begins as a documentary about the habits of scorpions, utilizing library footage and silent-style intertitles. Amid the rocks of an inlet, archbishops are seen chanting by a beggar-soldier (Max Ernst), who then makes a long journey back to his hideout. He informs his fellow beggar-soldiers that the "Mallorcans" have arrived and it is time to bear arms and fight. But this small group of soldiers is weak and exhausted through starvation, and only one of them survives the trip back. The Mallorcans, a caravan of wealthy dignitaries and their servants, arrive to lay a cornerstone commemorating the now skeletal archbishops. The ceremony is interrupted by the screams of lovemaking, and the couple is separated by gendarmes and led away. The man (Gaston Modot), whom we later learn is a government official of some standing, establishes his nasty and anti-social character through the kicking a dog. The ceremony continues; a title card identifies this as the foundation of Imperial Rome. The next sequence intercuts scenes of the girl (Lya Lys), who is the daughter of a wealthy marquis, lost in a world of erotic fantasy, with scenes of the man being led down the street by the gendarmes. The man finally produces diplomatic papers, and is released.The marquis (Ibanez) and marquise (Germaine Noizet) throw a large party at their villa, where a number of strange events occur without the slightest notice from the guests. A momentary distraction is caused when the gamekeeper shoots his son over a minor incident. The government official arrives at the party and is soon in pursuit of the girl, although the social nature of the event, at first, keeps them apart. The marquise accidentally spills a little wine over the government official's hand, and he slaps her, exciting the girl. (Alfred Hitchcock would later echo this very scene in Strangers on a Train.) The girl and the government official are finally allowed to consummate their fetishistic desires to the strains of Wagner in an extended love scene in the garden. This is interrupted when the conductor (Duchange) of the concert nearby has a headache and walks off the podium, directly into the arms of the girl. The government official gets a phone call, where he is told that his actions have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of the "women, children, and old people" he is sworn to protect. He curses the caller, and enraged, he goes to his apartment to rip apart pillows and to hurl several objects, including an archbishop, out the window. The final sequence begins with a series of lengthy, and increasingly agitated, intertitles announcing that the Duc de Blangis (Lionel Salem) and his henchmen are due to emerge from 120 days of debauchery inside a secluded castle. When the party does emerge, the duke is seen to be missing his beard. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide
Review
L'Âge d'Or was director Luis Buñuel's first feature, and was produced by the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, wealthy friend to the surrealist group. It was intended as a satire on the European bourgeoisie, and while de Noailles could have easily included himself among their number, he secretly detested them. In a sense, L'Âge d'Or is as much de Noailles' statement as it is Buñuel's. The satire is so pointed that it borders on outright comedy, and in 1933 de Noailles and Buñuel did re-edit the film down into a two-reel comedy entitled In the Icy Wastes of Dialectical Materialism, which was distributed to left-wing theaters in Eastern Europe and Russia. Sadly, this short version has not survived. Anti-Semitic right-wingers staged a riot at the Paris premiere of L'Âge d'Or, thinking Buñuel was Jewish. While their own organization, the League of Patriots, condemned the riot, the action did open a dialogue among French conservatives that L'Âge d'Or was too anti-clerical, and the paper Le Figaro began to pressure the censorship board to withdraw the film's certificate. It did so on December 1, 1930.Only three prints of the film were struck initially, and two of these were seized by authorities and destroyed. The Vicomte de Noailles hid the negatives of L'Âge d'Or in a Paris bookshop of which he was part-owner. In 1933, a few more prints were struck, and one of these was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that same year. Buñuel claimed the notoriety of L'Âge d'Or made it difficult for him to work in the 1930s and '40s. It certainly cost Buñuel his job as a director of Spanish-language documentaries at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, as Cardinal Spelman of New York branded Buñuel as an "antichrist" and put pressure on MOMA to fire him. Although Salvador Dali is credited as co-scenarist of L'Âge d'Or, he had practically nothing to do with the film's creation and wasn't present for the shooting. Nonetheless, after the cause célèbre surrounding the film got underway, Dali traveled to Rome in order to beg forgiveness from the pope himself. When de Noailles died during the Second World War, L'Âge d'Or was "orphaned" and could only be obtained through MOMA or the Cinemathèque Française.
In the years after 1933, both institutions would show their prints once in awhile, and it was seen at the New York Film Festival in the 1960s. Ultimately, it wasn't censorship that kept L'Âge d'Or out of circulation so much as a lack of prints and proper distribution, which was not obtained until 1979. By that time, the Paris ban was long null and void. Now that it has been generally available for awhile, it is easy to see that L'Âge d'Or is technically the most accomplished of the early surrealist films. It has nothing of the brutish intensity of Un Chien Andalou, nor the strange, otherworldliness of Le Sang d'un Poète. But it is by far the most successful of the de Noailles films in terms of progressing from scene to scene in an illogical/logical surrealist dream state, and the impact of the satire can be felt in comedies made 40 to 50 years down the line, particularly in the work of Monty Python's Flying Circus. While the beginning and end sequences of L'Âge d'Or may feel slow, the main part of the film has lost little of its power, and is still highly amusing and mildly shocking, even today. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide
Cast
- Gaston Modot - The Man
- Lya Lys - Young Girl
Max Ernst - Bandit Chief- Pierre Prevert - Peman
Lionel Salem Jose Artigas
