After the success of their seventeen-minute surreal Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were commissioned by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles to make another short film that experiments with sound resulting in more surreal imagery juxtaposed with music by Wagner, Debussy, Mendelssohn, and the Good Friday Drums of Calanda. Audiences in 1930 weren't ready for L'Âge d'or, and modern audiences aren't much better prepared to handle the content, though it's more likely that people today would walk out shaking their heads in puzzlement instead of rioting like the League of Patriots and the Anti-Semitic League did upon the film's initial release. The outraged viewers tossed ink and acid at the screen and ransacked the adjoining art gallery, damaging paintings by Dali and Max Ernst.

What could possibly provoke such a reaction? Although sexually suggestive (a woman's leg juxtaposed with a religious sacrament, for example), most of it doesn't seem too outrageous--though a sexual orgy scene that includes Jesus would send a few over the top.

Banned for years because of its controversial content, it's difficult to find a suitable print of Buñuel's first feature film. The copy I was able to obtain is subtitled in French, and my limited understanding of the language prevents me from comprehending the film as fully as I'd like. Fortunately, Buñuel's visual sense still comes through--his trademark criticisms of religion and the bourgeoisie remain as evident as the marble statue foot fetish scene.

Beginning with a documentary style sequence of scorpions stinging each other and then battling a rat, Buñuel and Dali switch to a man sexually assaulting a woman in the mud (Gaston Modot and Lya Lys)--yet she yearns for him. Both appear obsessed and pursue each other while surreal images emerge--the woman sitting on a toilet juxtaposed with bubbling mud, an unexpected kick of a small white dog, a milk cow on the apartment bed, advertising posters coming to life, and a violent beetle stomp that foreshadows the trashing of a violin on the sidewalk.

Many scenes play like Monty Python sketches, taking pot shots at an uptight society. Four bishops emerge to pray on the rocks only to rot away into skeletal forms, a man stops to presumably help a blind man but kicks him instead, a child steals a small item and is promptly shot (twice for good measure), and another bishop is tossed out the window.

Then there's that controversial orgy scene, with drum accompaniment. Buñuel fondly refers to it in his autobiography:

"When two groups beating two different tempi meet on one of the village streets, they engage in a veritable duel which may last as long as an hour--or at least until the weaker group relents and takes up the victor's rhythm. By the early hours of Saturday morning, the skin on the drums is stained with blood, even though the beating hands belong to hardworking peasants."