L'Age d'Or

L'Âge d'Or
Theatrical poster of L'Âge d'or
Directed by	Luis Buñuel
Produced by	Vicomte Charles de Noailles Marie-Laure de Noailles
Written by	Luis Buñuel Salvador Dalí
Starring	Gaston Modot Lya Lys Caridad de Laberdesque Max Ernst Josep Llorens Artigas Lionel Salem Germaine Noizet Duchange
Music by	Luis Buñuel Georges van Parys Richard Wagner Felix Mendelssohn W. A. Mozart Claude Debussy Ludwig van Beethoven Franz Schubert
Distributed by	Corinth Films (1979 U.S. release)
Release date(s)	29 November 1930 1 November 1979 (U.S.)
Running time	63 minutes
Language	French
Budget	1 million francs

L'Âge d'Or (French pronunciation: [lɑʒ dɔʁ], English: The Golden Age) is a 1930 surrealist film directed by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and written by him and Salvador Dalí.

The film began as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, by the time the film went into production, Buñuel and Dalí had had a falling-out, and so Dalí actually had nothing to do with the actual making of L'Âge d'Or. During this film, Buñuel worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. It has generally been seen as a scathing attack on bourgeois society and the Roman Catholic Church.^{[citation needed]}

Plot summary

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general. In one notable scene, the young girl passionately fellates the toe of a religious statue.

In the final vignette, the place card narration tells of an orgy of 120 days of depraved acts – a reference to the Marquis de Sade's 1785 novel 120 Days of Sodom – and tells us that the survivors of the orgy are ready to emerge. From the door of a castle emerges the Duc de Blangis (a character from 120 Days), who strongly resembles Christ, with his long robes and beard. When a young girl runs out of the castle, the Duc comforts the girl, before taking her back into the castle. A scream is heard and the Duc emerges again, his beard mysteriously vanished. The film suddenly cuts to its final image, with the scalps of the women flapping in the wind on a crucifix, accompanied by jovial music.

It has been said that this, along with scenes of violent expression earlier in the film as the lovestruck protagonist is manhandled along by two enforcers, may suggest that the film's message is that sexual repression, whether propagated by civil bourgeois society or by the church, breeds violence. This scene is alluded to in the opening sequence, which is an excerpt from a short science film about a scorpion. There we are informed that scorpions have five prismatic articulations, culminating in a stinger. Film critic Ado Kyrou claimed the five sections of the scorpion represent the film's five sections.

Production

The film cost a million francs to produce and was financed by the nobleman Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who beginning in 1928 commissioned a film every year for the birthday of his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles. When it was first released, there was a storm of protest. The film premiered at Studio 28 in Paris on 29 November 1930 after receiving its permit from the Board of Censors.

Response

On 3 December 1930, a group of incensed members of the League of Patriots threw ink at the screen during a screening of the film, assaulted members of the audience, and destroyed art works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and others on display in the lobby.

On 10 December, the Prefect of Police of Paris, Jean Chiappe, arranged to have the film banned after the Board of Censors reviewed the film. A contemporary Spanish newspaper condemned the film as “...the most repulsive corruption of our age... the new poison which Judaism, masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people.”

The Noailles family pulled the film from distribution for nearly 50 years. In 1933, it was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, but the film did not have its official United States premiere until November 1, 1979 at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco.

Cast

• Gaston Modot as The Man
• Lya Lys as the Young Girl
• Caridad de Laberdesque as a Chambermaid and Little Girl
• Max Ernst as the Leader of men in cottage
• Josep Llorens Artigas as (Governor)
• Lionel Salem as Duke of Blangis
• Germaine Noizet as Marquise
• Duchange as Conductor

The film's illustrations were created by Luis Ortiz Rosales.

External links

• L'Age d'Or at the Internet Movie Database
• L'Age d'Or at AllRovi
• L'Âge d'or at Rotten Tomatoes