(Note: This was originally commissioned for Scarlet Street magazine in 2005, but never saw print.)
Kino Video, 2005 - $24.95
Notoriously attacked upon its release in 1930, and not officially screened in the United States until 1979, Luis Buñuel's incendiary L'Age d'Or (The Age of Gold), previously available on VHS, finally finds a digital home thanks to Kino Video. Their attractive DVD package, which features a gorgeously restored print, affirms the film's ability to shock over 75 years after its initial impact.
Though ìnarrativeî only in the loosest sense of the word, L'Age d'Or uses the vehicle of an unconventional love story between a Man (Gaston Modot) and a Girl (Lya Lys) to provide a wide-ranging critique of bourgeois capitalism, prim morals, and a corrupt and acutely hypocritical church. Framed on either end by a pseudo-documentary about the violent capacities of scorpions, and a theatrical vignette about four aristocrats who emulate the Marquis de Sade's 120 days of debauchery (famously revisited in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò [1975]), the main story takes a transgenre approach to exploring a young couple's revolt against propriety. Like its direct predecessor Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928), L'Age d'Or combines absurd gags with a sterile, detached camera, all to disturbing effect. Over the course of their struggle, the Man famously kicks both a blind man and a dog, throws a member of the clergy from a window, and slaps an aristocratic woman in the face, while the Girl encounters a cow in her bedroom and erotically sucks on the toe of a classical statue.
Cued by co-writer Salvador Dali's love of the uncanny, the prerogatives of the Surrealists in general, the scatological humor of Alfred Jarry's earlier Ubu plays, and the personal politics of Buñuel (an anarchistic marriage of Sigmund Freud's theories, communism and militant anti-fascism), L'Age d'Or remains shocking because of the way that it takes melodramatic conventions and infuses them with a heretical edge. Next to Bunuel's later works, L'Age d'Or compares most closely with The Milky Way (1969), another pointed attack on organized religion that combines a banal narrative with isolated moments of alienating, shocking, or just-plain-purely nonsensical protest. Look out for Surrealist painter Max Ernst, who cameos as the leader of the men in the cottage toward the beginning of the film.
Kino's DVD presents the film in as great a state as can be hoped for. Sound (Mono) and picture (1:33:1), though far from perfect, have held up surprisingly well for a movie that never saw wide theatrical release. Scholar Robert Short, author of the recent study The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, provides an informative though almost inaccessibly academic audio commentary. Though his discussion of Freud and Marx is integral to an appreciation of such a dense film, his delivery is staid and staged, and there are substantial gaps between comments. Extras round out with a small stills gallery and a thorough filmography.
L'Age d'Or is the basis, in spirit if not directly, of the transgressive films of today. It deserves to be seen both by fans of unconventional horror and the by those interested more generally in the politics of art.
