And of course, the one where it all began: L'AGE D'OR is the sacred beast that people stay away from not just because of its reputation but because it's maddening and at times incomprehensible, but then again, Surrealism as an art form is meant to be just that -- shocking, disturbing, and with only the vaguest sense of meaning. Beginning with a documentary on the nature of scorpions, it segues into the image of cardinals on a beach, chanting, and Max Ernst posing as a haggard soldier who spots them and heads back to his hideout where he informs other equally haggard men that "the Mallorcans are coming." They prepare to "fight" but in fact, never do and drop dead from exhaustion. From here on, the loosely connected "story" about a man and a woman who are caught making love on the beach, separated, and the way they try to get back together. As the man -- revealed later to be a high diplomatic official -- goes into reveries where he sees his loved one in advertisements (including one where her hand furiously rubs itself on a surface in a sexual way), so does the woman. When they finally reconnect at a dinner party held at her house, a fire breaks loose and kills a maid to no one's surprise, a guest's face is crawling with insects, and a man kills his young son after apparently touching him inappropriately. Pandemonium breaks loose, and the final sequence, in pure Bunuelian fashion, is about the four aristocrats who in Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" engaged in extreme orgies of destruction. One of these men, the first, emerges like Christ and does look powerfully erotic even when there is nothing erotic about him, and we're back in the beginning, with the symbol of scorpions rising from the dead.
L'AGE D'OR is a patchwork of fundamental dreams that repeat themselves even when the main players -- the man and the woman -- aren't aware of it. Eternally longing for each other, they can never seem to act out their physical need for each other, and even when it looks like they won't be interrupted, it's Bunuel's own nascent mischief that continually plays tricks on them. He remains entrenched in his own bizarre intimacy, and as they talk about the destruction of the children -- an event that is later alluded to with a phone call in which another official yells at the man for allowing society to run riot and devour itself -- the man's face emerges looking horrendously bloody, a hideous mask. It's this interruption that has the girl resorting to committing an act of fellatio on a statue, an image that even now can cause a little bit of surprise here and there, not because of what she is doing, but because of its very audacity. That these two people become forgotten as the movie walks towards its bizarre climax lays testament to its surrealist roots and only increases its importance in the evolution of film and visual media. When seeing how nightmarish dream sequences became constructed in later years, first in science fiction (INVADERS FROM MARS), horror (ROSEMARY'S BABY, REPULSION), and even suspense films (SPELLBOUND, VERTIGO), and then in all genres (ANNIE HALL, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE MATRIX, all David Lynch movies, etc. to name a scattered few), print and video, it's not hard to find the long arm of Surrealism and Bunuel in them. L'AGE D'OR is not a perfect movie -- the end sequence is a little too long even for a 60 minute nightmare -- but its power can't be denied, over 75 years later. All of the elements of Bunuel's own themes are here: the dinner party where all but dinner takes place, the shooting of an innocent, acts of terrorism, interrupted intimacy, and normalcy gone haywire. Of course, in Bunuel's own world, all this was just another day, but then again, it takes someone of the caliber of Bunuel to make this topsy-turvy world a mirror-image of ours.
L'AGE D'OR is a patchwork of fundamental dreams that repeat themselves even when the main players -- the man and the woman -- aren't aware of it. Eternally longing for each other, they can never seem to act out their physical need for each other, and even when it looks like they won't be interrupted, it's Bunuel's own nascent mischief that continually plays tricks on them. He remains entrenched in his own bizarre intimacy, and as they talk about the destruction of the children -- an event that is later alluded to with a phone call in which another official yells at the man for allowing society to run riot and devour itself -- the man's face emerges looking horrendously bloody, a hideous mask. It's this interruption that has the girl resorting to committing an act of fellatio on a statue, an image that even now can cause a little bit of surprise here and there, not because of what she is doing, but because of its very audacity. That these two people become forgotten as the movie walks towards its bizarre climax lays testament to its surrealist roots and only increases its importance in the evolution of film and visual media. When seeing how nightmarish dream sequences became constructed in later years, first in science fiction (INVADERS FROM MARS), horror (ROSEMARY'S BABY, REPULSION), and even suspense films (SPELLBOUND, VERTIGO), and then in all genres (ANNIE HALL, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, THE MATRIX, all David Lynch movies, etc. to name a scattered few), print and video, it's not hard to find the long arm of Surrealism and Bunuel in them. L'AGE D'OR is not a perfect movie -- the end sequence is a little too long even for a 60 minute nightmare -- but its power can't be denied, over 75 years later. All of the elements of Bunuel's own themes are here: the dinner party where all but dinner takes place, the shooting of an innocent, acts of terrorism, interrupted intimacy, and normalcy gone haywire. Of course, in Bunuel's own world, all this was just another day, but then again, it takes someone of the caliber of Bunuel to make this topsy-turvy world a mirror-image of ours.