watch two surrealism film and answer questions

GESM 110 Nov 22

Día 27

Film: L’Âge d’Or (The Age of Gold) (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1930)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDbav8hcl5U

with the original sound.

While “Un Chien Andalou” can be considered dream-like, “L’Age d’Or” defies

classification, at just over an hour in length. First screened in Paris, it was

subsequently banned within 3 months of its release.

It was shot in under three weeks.

Dalí had less input than he had had in “Un Chien Andalou”. The narrative

structure and ideological position of the film can be attributed primarily to Buñuel.

After a quarrel, Dalí declared that Buñuel had betrayed his (Dalí’s) intentions and

had introduced anti-clericalism and an over-explicit political message.

The film incorporates many Surrealist intentions, such as the joining of opposites,

rational and irrational. It is also incorporates eroticism.

Breton had declared that “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.

Convulsive beauty will be veiled erotic, fixed-explosive, magic circumstantial”

(L’Amour fou, Mad Love).

Why the film was forbidden:

 Its expression of revolutionary intent

 Its eroticism

 Its critique of the church

As you view the film, keep in mind the ideas of “framing”, “the gaze”, and “the

Other”.

Whitney Chadwick points out that in her book Women Artists and the Surrealist

Movement that she intended to “shift attention away from the Surrealist

‘Woman’- a representational category shaped by the projections of the

masculine heterosexual unconscious- and toward Surrealist women, a diverse

group of individuals for whom Surrealism had played a significant role in

their struggle to articulate an autonomous feminine subject” (pp3-4).

Male Surrealists were inclined to “project their desires outward, locating

moments of rupture between conscious and unconscious, subject and object,

in bodies Other to theirs, and almost exclusively of an otherness assigned to

the feminine” (p4).

Surrealism battled social institutions such as the church, state and family.

How do these institutions regulate women in particular?

Many Surrealist women joined the movement or adopted many of its core tenets

because they viewed Surrealism as “supporting their desire to escape what they

perceived as the inhibiting confines of middle-class marriage, domesticity, and

motherhood” (p4).

Buñuel has said about “L’Âge d’Or” that “it’s a clear, straight-forward film,

with no mystery. Nothing of the sort. Very surrealist, of course, but there’s

no mystery to it. My ideas are clear to see. Well, not mine, the ideas of the

surrealist group. They’re perfectly evident. Everything that’s anti-one thing

or another:- anti-family, anti-country, anti-religion, anti-everything- is very

clearly, and very violently expressed” (p108, Robert Short, The Age of Gold:

Surrealist Cinema).

Little or no automatism was used, “at the expense of spontaneity and dream”

(p108, Robert Short, The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema).

Discussion questions:

1) Surrealism battled social institutions such as the church, state and family.

How do these institutions regulate women in particular?

2) Can Surrealism and Surrealist films lead to social liberation? For whom?

How has this changed since the 1930s?

3) What obvious violence do you see in the film?

4) What are some examples of eroticism? How might audiences in the 1930s

have viewed them?

5) In which scenes do you find an overt critique of the church? Why might

Buñuel seek to criticize the church and its institutions?

6) How does this film compare with “Un Chien Andalou”?