L’Age d’Or and Un Chien Andalou Review

• 31st May 2011

It’s not hard on viewing both these films, even today, to imagine how shocking they would have seemed when they premiered at Montmartre’s Studio 28. As a result they were banned for many years. On understanding the biographies and backgrounds to both Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalί it’s easy to see who suggested what in these collaborative efforts. The initial idea for Un Chien Andalou came from Buñuel who dreamed of the moon being severed in two by a cloud which he described as being like “a razor severing an eye.” And that dream image is presented here literally in what is perhaps the most iconic and shocking image in both films. It is, and what follows truly dreamlike. Buñuel himself plays the man severing the girl’s eye (although in reality a bull’s eye was used). This shocking moment isn’t referred to again and later Dalί’s dream and recurring theme of ants crawling out of a man’s hand is inserted – again relating to a story from Dalί’s youth after he witnessed ants crawling out of a dead bat. These images among others aren’t merely placed there to shock, but instead open up the unconscious under the Surrealist maxim of being like “the chance encounter of a sewing machine on a dissecting table”. Of course some images are as comical as they are shocking vis-à-vis the man pulling a piano with two rotting donkeys inside and two priests trailing behind. And so the images go – totally unconnected; just a random stream of the unconscious committed to celluloid. At a little over 17 minutes it’s a non-stop barrage of images that will linger in the imagination for a long time.

Two years later Buñuel and Dalί collaborated again on L’Age d’Or. Although the two Spaniards had known each other for 10 years having met at art school in Madrid, they fell out due to clashes of ideas during the making of this film, never to speak again. Buñuel was a communist with a hatred of the Catholic Church whereas Dali was more concerned with tapping into the dream world and the unconscious.

Neither of these films has a conventional narrative. L’Age d’Or initially seems to have one presenting the struggle of Ibiza peasants (the leader is played by another leading Surrealist artist, Max Ernst), but it collapses a short while later and descends into chaos. A new narrative starts with a bourgeois man being snubbed by other members of the bourgeoisie as he seduces a girl. The scenes that shock include the kicking of a blind man, a cow sleeping on a bed and walking around the house, as well as the shooting of a boy for merely irritating the gamekeeper. Un Chien Andalou is silent, while L’Age d’Or uses little dialogue and opts more for montage with only sparse dialogue. Both use the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde to powerful effect.

What may be seen as games being play being played on the viewer are in fact were taken very seriously by those concerned as can be demonstrated by Buñuel and Dalί’s fallout as well as the movements leader, André Breton expelling Dalί from the group for using excrement in a painting (and this alluded to in L’Age d’Or with montages of a toilet and lava spewing out like diarrhoea).

Surrealism is better known for its paintings and poetry (led by the left-wing and revolutionary poet André Breton), and perhaps best known for the publicity seeking Salvador Dalί. Surrealism, despite its open praise for the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Dalί’s own love of comedy, rarely ventured into cinema (although Dalί did, however, go on to direct the dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945)).  Buñuel’s films throughout the 50s during his exile in Mexico contained little of the surreal elements found in these two earlier revolutionary avant-garde films. It wasn’t until The Exterminating Angel (1962), also made in Mexico, that Buñuel returned to some of themes and the heavily anti-bourgeois surreal narrative of L’Age d’Or. In that film a bourgeois dinner party is held in a large house and the guests end up losing all their moral and social sense, reduced to their baser instincts when they are unable to leave the house for no good reason. In his later French film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) similar themes are once again covered.

The Blu-ray disc also comes with a commentary on Un Chien Andalou and an essay booklet by Surrealist historian Robert Short, breaking down not the interpretation of the image, but rather than asking “what [do] the films mean”, instead asks “what position does this put the spectator?”. He addresses how both films are about sexuality and desire and the conflicts this creates. On the DVD only there’s a documentary called A Proposito de Buñuel, a feature-length study about the life and career of the prodigal Spanish director. Both films were released by the BFI only a few years ago, and although this release allows them to be presented in Blu-ray, I don’t think the benefits of Blu-ray in these old films are necessarily warranted.

Chris Hick