‘L’Age d’Or’: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s banned surrealist sex comedy
As a pair of singular creative minds who marched to the beat of their own drum, normalcy was the last thing on either one’s mind when Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali put their heads together to create art that was unmistakably born from the combined might of their maverick individualism.
Their first collaboration yielded one of the greatest short films ever made. 1929’s Un Chien Andalou presented a 21-minute mockery of cinematic convention, with its dreamlike quality and disjointed narrative bouncing back and forth between whimsy and fantasy with enthrallingly reckless abandon.
Deciding that their next partnership was required to up the ante, Buñuel and Dali reconvened for L’Age d’Or, one of the first major sound films produced in France that was three times longer than Un Chien Andalou and turned out to be at least three times more controversial.
With a budget of a million francs, it was hardly a small-scale independent production, either, with the dynamic duo opting to stick to what they knew and cast a harsh gaze at the bourgeoisie. Gaston Madot and Lya Lys star as the two main characters known only as ‘The Man’ and ‘Young Girl’, who are madly in love with each other.
As tends to be the case when romantic sparks fly, they want to take their burgeoning relationship to the next level and have sex for the first time, only to be thwarted at every turn by the strict morality of the church, their families, and society at large.
With its scandalous storyline, scenes of wanton desires and near-miss titillation, and a vignette inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom that focuses on a castle-set orgy interrupted by a man who looks an awful lot like Jesus Christ and ends with female scalps billowing in the wind after being draped over a cross, it goes without saying plenty of people were left up in arms.
When it screened the Studio 28 cinema in Montmartre, right-wing protestors made their presence felt, with the Italian embassy informing the French foreign minister that the country wasn’t best pleased by L’Age d’Or‘s presentation of sacrilegious sensuality. In December 1930, the film was banned outright from screening in Paris and would remain that way for over half a century until the original negative was restored in 1981.
To be honest, it’s difficult to imagine why the authorities expected anything less than an overt act of rebellion from the mischievous marvels Buñuel and Dali, who weren’t even on speaking terms when the shooting started after falling out. They were never going to deliver a formulaic, conventional work of cinema, and there was plenty of evidence, both individually and separately, stating that very case.
