The diffinative surrealist masterpiece OF ALL TIME. Banned for 50 years/Andre Brenton said :"L'AGE D'OR" says it all and all others must follow!!! If you love surrealism you must see this film!!
If you don't get it, see it till you do.
Buñuel & Dali Persecuted for Surreal Subconscious Trip...
In the second film that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí collaborated on, they accomplished the infamous L'Age D'or, and this after they stirred the world of art and politics with their Un Chien Andalou a year before. This second film was about to exercise a full out assault on the established guidelines of society through irrational thoughts leading the audience to question their own ideas of society. However, in order to provide more detail to this notion one should know that surrealism grew out of Dadaism, which was a consequence of war. In the beginning of the 20th century, Tristan Tzara, the father of Dada, expressed himself that a world that can create war machines not worthy of art. Thus, he decided to generate an anti-art of ugliness against the up and coming industrial bourgeoisie, but instead of offending the new upper-class they embraced his new art. They felt that the Dadaism was attacking old traditions of feudalism and Christian dominance.
Surrealism is an expansion of Dadaism that grew out from the notions of the French doctor Andre Breton, who had fought at the trenches of World War I. Breton had studied the works of both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Through his studies a heavy interest grew with the notion of the unconscious and its functions. Later, Dali developed his own unique technique to capture his unconsciousness onto the permanent medium of the canvas. Buñuel who also was interested in the subconscious did not have the talent of writing, painting, or music, which left him with the new coming art form of cinema. And he truly became one of the masters of cinema, whose films can still provide much pondering and pleasure.
Upon the release of the film the Board of Censors would not have released this film with a screening permit, if it was not for the ingenuity of the artists to call it madman's dream. The film received both appraisal and hatred, as some considered it pornographic and despicable while others found it to be a refreshing touch of reality in the 1930s. It was the bizarre content of the film that raised so much debate, even violence. The pinnacle of controversy came when the League of Patriots, a fascist organization, began to throw purple ink on the screen in the middle of the screening. These fascist thugs continued to vandalize the theater and cut apart artistic pieces by Dali, Man Ray, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy. Through several legal issues that came about from L'Age D'or, it was unfortunate that they removed the film from public screenings, and it was not until 1979 that the film received its first legal screening in the United States. Despite the outcome of withdrawing the film, Buñuel and Dalí created a surviving cinematic epitome of cerebral rebellion on societal prejudice bestowed to those who rule.
The film itself offers a peculiarly intriguing journey of the growth of a city, Rome, but in the light of surrealism. The narrative does not follow conventional methods, as it displays notions and concepts through a number of bizarre artistic scenes. The opening of the film displays scorpions while the audience is thoroughly enlightened of its anatomy and how territorial these arachnoids are against same and other spices. Maybe this is a subconscious hint of mankind's way of bordering themselves within countries, companies, and groups. Nonetheless, the scorpion sequence unexpectedly jumps to a scene with some bandits and papal characters, which eventually leads a strange scene with immigrants that claims the ground for the birth of Rome and the Vatican. Within the conquest like society Buñuel creates a society governed by rules of moral conduct and other appointed positions. This society receives an intricate dissection through a love affair between a man (Gaston Modot) and a young woman (Lya Lys) that ventures through scenes with a cow in the bed and toe sucking.
L'Age D'or does not provide any reason with its surreal imagery, yet there is something very familiar in each scene. This familiarity generates a link between the thoughts that the audience experiences. However, the imagery remains disconnected and dreamlike. One cannot help to think that Buñuel found a key to unlock the subconscious within the audience, as he playful juggles images of Christ and Marquis de Sade. There is nothing in the story that connects each scene, but the audience will make the deduction themselves and find a mutual connection from which they will derive the controversial material. This is a step away from Buñuel and Dali's previous film Un Chien Andalou where nothing was supposed to reveal anything in regards to rational thought. In the light of their second film, one should take a couple of steps back and reflect upon the power of the brain and cinema whilst one could feed the brain with thoughtless imagery of cinematic vacuity.
Three stars for shoddy DVD
The film itself is beautiful...the transfer of it to DVD is not. The film is a critique on the struggle between man's carnal desires and his spiritual obligation to the Catholic Church--a theme Bunuel constantly explores in his films. Either you like surrealism or you don't. A man shoots himself in the head--his shoes and gun are lying on the floor while his body is splayed across the ceiling--very odd. A cow is used as a household pet, taking the place of a dog--very odd indeed. A couple is engaged in a cannibalistic romance, the female apparently chews off her lover's caressing fingers--very Bayonne, NJ to say the least. And at the end of the film, Jesus Christ is associated with depraved sex fiends--highly offensive--I did not care for that, but again, it sticks to the theme. Veiwer discretion is advised.
Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Simone Mareuil - Pierre Batcheff Director(s): Luis Buñuel DVD Release Date: Released the 28 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The musical accompaniment for most of these seminal avant-garde films is very bad. A previous reviewer mentioned that it was done by "the best in the business." Well, I am of the opinion that, unfortunately, there are not enough interesting minds in that business (silent film scoring), or at least not enough employed by Kino Video, to make for a competent collection.
There is electric guitar (Creed-style riffing!!!). There is arbitrary "Frenchy" sounding music. And yes, there is even some dreaded Casio keyboard "vox" effect.
Who could possibly think that keyboard "vox" was a good idea? Not me.
These films, like all those Kino releases, are rare and under-appreciated, and worth owning on DVD because this is the only way you'll get them. I only wish... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 02 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 23 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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For a knock-out combination of timeless entertainment and vintage studio history, you can't do much better than The Warner Brothers Gangsters Collection. In the 1930s and '40s, Paramount specialized in glossy comedies, MGM popularized lavish musicals, Universal produced signature horror classics, and Fox scored hits with sophisticated dramas. But it was Warner Bros. that generated controversy--if not always box-office profits--with so-called "social problem" films, and that meant gangsters. When viewed in their pre- and post-Prohibition context and in chronological order (Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, 1931; The Petrified Forest, 1936; Angels With Dirty Faces, 1938; The Roaring Twenties, 1939; White Heat, 1949), these six films... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Cagney - Humphrey Bogart - Edward G. Robinson DVD Release Date: Released the 25 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A summit meeting of great Italian directors of the era, Boccaccio '70 is an antipasto platter of vintage sex symbols and naughty material. Cooked up and bankrolled by Carlo Ponti and American producer Joseph E. Levine, the four-part film was meant to tap the international smash of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which gave audiences some refreshingly, you know, "mature" subject matter. Four directors were hired to create segments ostensibly based on the tales of Boccaccio: Fellini himself (in the lull between La Dolce Vita and 8-1/2), Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, and Mario Monicelli.
