“L’Age d’Or” is a film so weird, depraved, bizarre and perverse that in 1934 it was withdrawn from circulation and not seen again for 65 years. When it was made, it had to be pitched as a madman’s dream to even get a screening, and that screening did not end well. Throughout its 63 minute run, audience members hurled purple paint at the screen and slashed paintings in the theater lobby by Salvador Dali, Joan Miro and other surrealists.
It was made by Luis Bunuel, the father of all surrealist cinema. He was making avant garde films before that was even a genre. His first film, arguably one of the most famous shorts of all time, “Un Chien Andalou,” was just a taste of a mischievous mind at work. In that film that he made with Salvador Dali, he showed a woman’s eye sliced open with a razor blade, a man with ants crawling out of his hand and more. People have analyzed that film for decades to no avail, because the film has no meaning. It’s only significance is that Bunuel imagined it and had the capacity to imagine more.
“L’Age d’Or,” or “The Golden Age,” is his first feature a year later, but it is no less of a surrealist work of art. The film has a very loose plot and very little significance if any. The film opens with a documentary on scorpions shot 15 years earlier. It then intercuts to a vision of who like Vatican Bishops standing on a mountain top. Flash forward an unknown amount of time to present day 1930, and a group of people holding a groundbreaking ceremony see the skeletons of these Bishops in the same positions.
But they’re distracted by a man rolling in the mud and making out with a woman who can’t help screaming in passion. The man is arrested, and as the cops lead him around, he develops into a real jerk and a pervert. He glimpses advertisements and fantasizes sexual acts with his girlfriend. He struggles with the cops until revealing his importance, and then kicks a blind man in the stomach to steal away his taxi.
At a wedding the next day, he shoots a playful boy with a rifle, and then once again in the head after he’s dead, he slaps a woman who spilled a drink on his suit and elopes with his girlfriend to a garden where they bite each others fingers and she sucks the toes of a nearby statue that he becomes transfixed with.
When she leaves him at the party for an orchestra conductor in pain, he throws oddball objects out a window and destroys a pillow, which in the film symbolizes the story of a group of people who hid away in a castle and had orgies. One of the men that steps out of the castle looks strikingly like Jesus.
Does that begin to describe the film? Not even close. It is a movie that speaks in its cinematics, and such is the magic of Bunuel, whose more modern films were less obscure and more narrative driven but no less imaginative.