The catalog of startling images and sequences in L'AGE D'OR include a man's face covered with flies; a blind man being kicked; a pseudo-documentary on scorpions; clerically-garbed skeletons on rocky cliffs; a pompous foundation-laying ceremony interrupted by a man and a woman noisily coupling in mud - then later, in evening clothes, trying to tryst while sitting on clumsy cane chairs and being interrupted by a phone call from the Minister of the Interior; guests at a fancy reception ignoring a farm cart rolling through; a cuckolded lover throwing a live archbishop out the window; a survivor of the "most brutal of orgies" emerging dressed as Christ. Bunuel & Dali's follow-up to Un Chien Andalou (original title: La Bete Andalouse) was financed by Gallic moneybags the Vicomte de Noailles as his annual cinematic birthday gift to his wife (a previous cadeau was Cocteau's Blood of a Poet); contemporary rightwingers threw stink bombs and purple ink at the screen, the cops banned it, and Noailles was kicked out of the Jockey Club (a good sport, he still pronounced it "exquisite and delicious"). If brutal assaults on religious, political, and social establishments no longer constitute the novelty they posed in 1930, Bunuel's first sound film remains perhaps the screen's greatest ode to Surrealism, and a veritable checklist of the obsessions that would mark the rest of his long career.
Bunuel & Dali's first collaboration, UN CHIEN ANDALOU slaps the audience in its opening moments with a shocking close-up - then piles on images that would still make both David Lynch and David Cronenberg jealous: hands swarming with ants (Bunuel studied entomology at school), breasts transforming into buttocks, mysteriously-disappearing underarm hair, a donkey corpse on top of a grand piano, with a bound priest in tow, etc. etc. Explained Dali, "the theme is 'the pure and correct line of 'conduct' of a human who pursues love through wretched humanitarian patriotic ideals and the other miserable workings of reality." Uh-huh.
