L'Age d'Or: Buñuel and Dalí's Scandal

Films get banned all the time. Very few of them earn it. L’Age d’Or is the rare case where the outrage was proportionate to the provocation — where a picture set out, with total deliberation, to insult every institution its audience believed in, and the audience responded by wrecking the cinema. On 3 December 1930, a few days into its run at Studio 28 in Montmartre, members of the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue Anti-juive arrived at a screening, threw ink at the screen, attacked the seats and slashed the surrealist canvases hanging in the lobby — work by Dalí, Ernst, Man Ray, Tanguy and Miró, destroyed by men who had come to defend the nation from a sixty-three-minute film. The right-wing press ran a campaign. The prefect of police banned it within the fortnight. It would not be publicly screened in France again until 1981.

That is a long time for a film to be dangerous, and the interesting question is why this one and not another. Buñuel’s answer, throughout his life, was that he had simply removed the excuses. L’Age d’Or does not smuggle its blasphemy into a story where a censor could argue the story required it. There is barely a story to hide behind. What is left is the insult, delivered at eye level, with the calm of a man reading out a list.

The premise, kept above the line

Calling it a premise overstates the case. The film opens with several minutes of straight documentary footage about scorpions, lifted from an educational film and presented without irony — their anatomy, their habits, the sting in the tail. Then bandits on a rock coast. Then a ceremonial party arriving to found Imperial Rome, whose dignitaries are interrupted by a man and a woman making love in the mud, and who separate them by force. The man is Gaston Modot, the woman Lya Lys, and for the remainder of the picture they attempt to reach each other while the entire apparatus of European civilisation — church, state, army, high society, family — intervenes.

That is the through-line, such as it is. Around it Buñuel arranges the images that have been reproduced in every history of surrealism since: the cow lying placidly on a bed in an elegant room, the man crossing a drawing room with a rock balanced on his head while nobody remarks, the burning giraffe going out of a window. His method is already the one he would use for forty-five more years and which he perfected in Simon of the Desert: put the impossible in the frame, light it like a magazine advertisement, and never let a single character notice.

The production, which is half the picture

The money came from the Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure, aristocratic patrons who had funded Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète in the same period and who gave Buñuel a budget with no strings on it as, essentially, a birthday present. They watched the finished film with friends and applauded. It cost them more than money. In the aftermath of the ban, Charles was expelled from the Jockey Club, the family faced the threat of excommunication, and Marie-Laure’s mother reportedly went to Rome to plead the case. Buñuel, characteristically, appears to have found the whole business bracing.

Dalí’s role is the film’s great scholarly dispute and worth knowing before you watch. He and Buñuel had co-written Un Chien Andalou the year before in a genuine collaboration; by the time L’Age d’Or went into preparation the relationship was breaking down, and the two men’s accounts diverge permanently thereafter. Dalí claimed authorship of the script and complained the film he saw was not the one he wrote. Buñuel maintained that Dalí contributed a handful of ideas and that the picture was his. The prudent position is that the imagery has Dalí’s fingerprints and the structure, the cruelty and the timing are Buñuel’s, and that the rupture between them is audible in the film’s split personality — half a painter’s catalogue, half an executioner’s schedule.

Why it works: the sound, one year in

This is Buñuel’s first sound film, made when the technology was barely two years old and most directors were using it to record theatre. What he does with it remains startling. The soundtrack is largely music, and the music is impeccable: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde laid across the garden sequence, where the lovers writhe with the Liebestod swelling over them at full romantic pitch, and the drums of Calanda, the deafening Good Friday drumming of the Aragonese town near Buñuel’s birthplace, which he loved and which he uses here as pure percussive dread.

The Wagner is the sharpest joke in the picture and the one that gets least credit. Buñuel takes the most exalted music ever written about erotic love and plays it, unaltered, over two people scrabbling in a flowerbed, repeatedly interrupted, filthy and increasingly desperate. He does not undercut the music. He lets it be gorgeous. The gap between the transcendence in the score and the squalor in the frame is where the film’s argument about desire lives, and it needed no dialogue at all — which is why the sequence still works on audiences who cannot place the opera.

The other sound trick is the deadpan use of sync effects against absurdity. A cow is removed from a bed and the room’s ambience does not change. A rock on a head produces no comment. Buñuel had understood within a year of sound arriving that its real power was to make the impossible feel documented, and directors are still catching up.

The collector’s note

The essential context is Un Chien Andalou, made the previous year for a fraction of the cost and with more precision. The short is the better film — tighter, stranger, entirely without the padding that a feature budget encouraged — and L’Age d’Or is where the same authors discovered that scandal is easier to buy at length. Watch them together and the trajectory is unmistakable.

The descendants are everywhere, but the two that matter are The Phantom of Liberty, where Buñuel returns to the ruined dinner party forty-four years later with a butter knife instead of an axe and lands the blow properly, and Themroc, Claude Faraldo’s wordless 1973 comedy, which is L’Age d’Or’s working-class grandchild — the same conviction that the bourgeois interior is a prison, delivered by a man who had actually worked in a factory. For the aristocratic-patronage half of 1930 Paris, Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète was financed by the same Noailles money in the same year and makes an instructive double bill: one film was made to be beautiful, the other to be intolerable, and the money did not know the difference.

The honest case against

L’Age d’Or is a great historical event and a patchy film. The scorpion prologue is a wonderful gag that outstays its purpose; the middle movement, once the target has been established, spends real time restating things already proven; and the picture’s structure is the structure of a grudge rather than an argument. Buñuel at seventy could disassemble a class in a single dinner scene. Buñuel at thirty needed an hour and a burning giraffe.

There is also the uncomfortable fact that its transgressions have been fully absorbed. The images that got a cinema attacked in 1930 now appear on postcards, and the film’s blasphemy is legible today mainly as art history rather than as insult. That is what happens to successful provocation, and it is not the film’s fault. It does mean that a viewer arriving expecting to be shocked will instead be charmed, which is a strange fate for the most banned film in French history.

The verdict, above the line

This is the founding document of cinematic surrealism as a weapon rather than a style, and it is worth seeing for the Wagner sequence alone. It is uneven, occasionally tedious, and completely essential. Everything above this line is safe to read before watching. The ending is the reason for the ban and the greatest single insult in Buñuel’s career, so it goes below.

Spoilers below

The film’s last movement leaves its lovers behind entirely and cuts to the Château de Selliny, where — as an intertitle explains — four aristocratic libertines have spent a hundred and twenty days in an orgy of cruelty, and are now emerging. This is the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, then an almost unobtainable text with a scandalous underground reputation, dropped into the final reel of a film funded by two of the richest patrons in France.

The survivors come out of the castle. The last of them, the Duc de Blangis, the chief libertine of Sade’s book and the author of its worst atrocities, appears at the top of the drawbridge — bearded, robed, gentle-featured, unmistakably the Jesus of a thousand devotional paintings. He descends. A young woman follows him back inside. There is a scream. He returns alone, and his beard is somewhat shorter.

Buñuel is doing more than defacing an icon. He is proposing an identity: that the man who spent four months organising torture in a locked castle and the man venerated by Europe are the same figure, drawn by the same hand, indistinguishable in a wide shot. The transgression is not the beard or the scream; it is the calm, unremarkable continuity of the walk down the drawbridge. Nothing in the staging separates the sacred from the sadistic, because the film’s whole position is that nothing ever did.

Then the final image, which is somehow worse. A cross planted in the snow, its arms hung with women’s scalps blowing in the wind, held for a long beat while a jaunty paso doble plays. There is no comment, no fade to a message, no attempt to soften. A crucifix as a trophy rack, scored like a holiday.

You can see, laid out plainly, why the men with the ink bottles came. This is a film that ends by proposing that Christianity is Sade with better public relations, and it makes the case in pictures rather than in argument, which is why no censor could answer it and why the only available response was to break the seats. The ban held for fifty-one years. Buñuel spent every one of those years refining the same thought into forms too elegant to prosecute — the pillar in Simon of the Desert, the ditch at the end of The Milky Way, the lavatories in The Phantom of Liberty. My verdict: the crudest film he ever made and the only one that told the truth about his intentions. Everything after it is the same message in a better suit. The scalps are still on the cross, and the band is still playing.