Un Chien Andalou
(aka; Andalusian Dog)
(1928)
L' Age D'Or
(aka; The Golden Age)
(1930)
(BFI Video Region 2 PAL DVD 2-Disc Set)
review by Blackgloves

The European artistic movement of the 20s and 30s known as surrealism, started out as a literary movement which grew out of the post-war anti-art chaos of the "Dada" school. Its founders (led by the poet, André Breton) embraced the freedom that Dada's nihilistic rejection of all artistic values entailed, but saw their movement as a positive means of reuniting the unconscious with the conscious world through automatic artistic expression of the irrational, rather than Dada's destructive thumbing-of-the-nose to the orthodox values that were perceived to have guided European culture up to that point.

Breton and the Surrealists believed that the subconscious mind could be tapped by suitably inclined artists or, indeed, by anyone who freed themselves from traditional artistic sensibilities, which relied for their currency on reasoned interpretation. There was, therefore, a clear revolutionary intent behind the Surrealist project. Breton and his followers really thought they could destabilise conventional bourgeois society and its supporting structures (the Church, the Family, conventional moral norms) through unleashing the unconscious drives and forces they thought had been suppressed by society's values, which had resulted in the horrors of the First World War.

Surrealism took a surprising amount of time to find a noteworthy form of cinematic expression despite its founders' enjoyment of the early cinema. Superficially, the medium would seem perfectly suited for mimicking the primary mechanisms by which the unmediated ramblings of the subconscious mind are turned into the curiously potent non-logic of dreams: the techniques of editing and montage afford the filmmaker the opportunity to create cinematic spaces which exist nowhere but in the collective consciousness of a film's audience -- a result of the irresistible, inbuilt tendency of the human mind to look for associations and create meaning through narrative organisation. For this reason, the surrealists considered cinema to be an intrinsically surrealist media. But, although the mind's eye appears to be at the mercy of similar operations during the dream state, there is one obvious flaw in film's ability to represent the results of these subconscious processes -- one that the founders of the surrealist movement, initially, valued above all else: as commentator Robert Short points out, film making requires forethought, learning, rehearsal, skill, organisation, premeditation; it is therefore, of all the arts, probably the least available to the surrealists' methods of creation -- which looked to avoid intentionality in the production of art -- and instead, reached out to the unsullied "voice" of the unconscious by depending on techniques such as automatism.

Early Surrealist experiments with film involved Breton and friends purchasing tickets in a number of Parisian cinemas, paying no heed to what was actually playing in any of them, and wandering from venue to venue, randomly watching snippets of each film and letting their minds concoct outlandish interpretations of the resulting collage of images! The actual films made by adherents of the movement such as the artist Man Ray, failed to have the kind of impact the surrealists hoped they would: their resolutely non-narrative approach consigned them to the avant-garde ghetto. "Un Chien Andalou" and "L'Age d'Or" -- the two film collaborations between the Spanish artist Salvador Dali and budding Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel -- were a reaction against these previous unsuccessful attempts at surrealist film expression. Their importance springs from the fact that their creators managed to reconcile the apparently conflicting values of film-making and surrealism: on the one hand, they thoroughly embraced the cinema's narrative, storytelling techniques; while, on the other, both Dali and Buñuel insisted on relying on pure automatism for the generation of their ideas for the films. The two wrote the screenplay which became "Un Chien Andalou" by exchanging images -- rejecting anything that sprang from memory or had a conscious association with other ideas: "They accepted only those representations as valid which, though they moved them profoundly, had no possible explanation...the motivation of the images was, or was meant to be, purely irrational" -- stated Buñuel later -- "Nothing in the film symbolises anything"!

kicking off with two images from each of the dreams that they'd had the previous night (a thin slither of cloud slicing across a full moon like a razor blade across an eye ball [Buñuel] and a hand crawling with ants [Dali]) the two ex-college mates managed to invent a surrealist film language which has been highly influential ever since in informing the approach taken by subsequent directors right up to the Surrealist language in the work of modern filmmakers such as David Lynch. "Un Chien Andalou" is still, possibly, the most concentrated expression of the logic of dreams ever captured on film. Over the course of its short, sixteen minute running time, Dali and Buñuel playfully exploit the mechanisms of cinema that are usually used to facilitate narrative meaning -- undercutting them with content composed of non-sequiturs which continually frustrate any coherent reading and leave the viewer with a strong, indefinable impression of something just out of reach of the understanding. Unlike previous attempts at surrealism in film, Dali and Buñuel compose their film around a story structure rather than just a series of random unintelligible images. The film begins with the words "Once Upon a time..." but then proceeds to play games with the concepts which usually ground intelligible narrative stories: identity, space, time and location all conspire to thwart the male and female protagonists' lustful desires. The male (Pierre Batcheff) seems to have several different existence's which are constantly interchanged -- without comment by his prospective female lover; a man falls over inside a Parisian apartment but lands outside in a park; and a woman leaves a town apartment and steps straight out onto a windy beach! Throughout the film, strange and provocative imagery continually assaults the senses: a disturbing scene of gratuitous sadism starts off a chain of perverse and fetishistic scenarios: swarming ants on a hand dissolve into an unshaved female armpit; a swarming crowd surround a dismembered hand; and a pair of rotting donkey carcasses ooze slime on top of a couple of grand pianos!

A sign that Dali and Buñuel must have succeeded in their project is that it is pretty much impossible to do anything to summarise "Un Chien Andalou" apart from list the images and scenes that appear in the film. However, far from overthrowing the established moral and political order upon its release, the film was actually greeted enthusiastically not only by the surrealists (who quickly admitted both Buñuel and Dali into the official international Surrealist movement) but by the bourgeois artistic establishment who praised the film's outrageous but evocative poeticism. So successful was the film that the Bohemian aristocrats Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles offered Dali and Buñuel the finances to make a follow-up -- this time with a full hour-long running time, and the possibility of utilising the new sound technology.

"L'Age d'Or" was the result -- but the film is not just a longer deployment of the strategy conceived with "Un Chien Andalou": Buñuel's leftist sensibilities were appalled by the esteem in which the first film came to be held by the establishment, and he was determined that "L'Age d'Or" would not be diffused so easily. This was to cause a rift between Dali and Buñuel (whose relationship was already strained over Buñuel's animosity towards Dali's wife, Gala) since Buñuel rejected most of the ideas Dali supplied for the film (who was not present during the shooting). The finished production came to be disowned by the artist because Buñuel had, in his words, replaced Dali's "authentic sacrilege" with "a primary ant-clericalism and an over-explicit political message".

Although probably the Surrealist movement's defining film statement (and probably closer to the spirit of Buñuel's later work) "L'Age d'Or" is an extremely difficult film and doesn't wield the immediate, mesmerising power of its predecessor. Although Buñuel succeeded in his intent of creating as much scandal and outrage as possible among right-wingers and the Catholic Church when the film premiered at studio 28 -- resulting in it being banned -- its gauche blasphemy and blunt outrageousness is not going to cause much offence these days to anyone but the most sensitive of souls. The elements of the film that retain the greatest power are still those that allude to the original primal themes that "Un Chien Andalou" tapped into so resolutely -- a point which seems to, largely, vindicate Salvador Dali's criticisms.

On the other hand, Buñuel pushes the boundaries of narrative intelligibility to their very limits as the film bewilderingly switches between genre modes with cheerful abandon. While "Un Chien Andalou" had possibly the most attention-grabbing opening scene of any film ever made, "L'Age d'Ore" opens with several minutes of natural history footage of scorpions culled from a pre-war documentary! Inter-cards relate all sorts of facts about scorpion habitat and physiology when suddenly, an inter-title reads: "Sometime Later..." and we are launched into a historical episode involving a bunch of starving peasants who set out on a trek to battle the invading Majorcans (a bunch of Catholic priests who sit immobile on some rocks, reciting biblical verse at the sea!). The peasants expire before they reach their goal and a fleet of boats then arrives which disgorge a party of officials who have come to hold a commemorative ceremony of some kind (the chanting priests have now, unaccountably, turned into skeletons -- still clad in their robes). The ceremony is interrupted by the cries of two lovers rolling around in the mud; they are separated and the male is led away by police -- the film now echoes "Un Chien Andalou" in the fact that the main body of it concerns separated lovers and their constantly thwarted efforts to express their desires unencumbered by stultifying social and political conventions.

Where "Un Chien Andalou" aims to provoke and shock, "L'Age d'Ore" attempts to subvert by placing allusions to shocking and perverse themes in a normalising context: an advertising poster springs to life and an agitated hand rubbing a piece of felt next to a wig-piece cannot help but conjure the image of female masturbation in the mind of the most innocent of viewers; a woman is reminded of her lover by staring at a toilet bowl, and black & white images of bubbling molten lava are accompanied by the sound of a toilet flushing -- forcing unpleasant scatological associations in the viewer's mind! Moral restraint is shed as a blind man is pushed over in the street, a puppy is kicked like a football and a hostess is punched in the face at a polite dinner bash! The Buñuelian style of absurdity (which would appear in later films) is forcefully present here: the face of the posh host of a stuffy dinner party is covered in flies; a milking cow lies in a bed chamber, a small boy is casually shot dead by his father with nobody treating it as anything more than a diverting spectacle.

Eroticism is ever-present, and some scenes still appear curiously shocking despite the fact that there is no explicit sexual imagery in the film: when the two lovers from the earlier scenes are reunited at a bourgeois garden party, their fumbling union is both comic and sexually charged as they suck at each other's fingers in a frenzy; the male's attempts at foreplay are hampered by the fact that his fingers disappear as he caresses his love's cheek, leaving only a stump and a protruding thumb! When he is called away to the telephone, his lover consols herself by erotically sucking and licking the toes of a garden statue instead!

Still the most memorable scenes are those that use cinematic techniques (including the new sound technology) experimentally and thereby force an otherworldly quality on the film. When the mud-rolling lovers are separated, the film cuts to the woman apparently remembering the incident, but later cuts back to an image which suggests that the male, still lying in the mud, is visualising events: the dreamer and the dreamt have become imperceptibly entwined. Perhaps the most famous scene from the film is probably the most Dali-esque, but also the one that best incorporates sound into the new surrealist language of film: while the female protagonist sits staring into her bedroom mirror, her male lover is being led across town by the policemen. The sounds in each environment (a cow bell from the cow that the woman has just shooed from her bedroom and a bark from a dog that the male and his captors encounter) begin to intermingle and merge. The woman stares into her mirror and sees a cloudy sky instead of her reflection; a wind blows through it and blows the woman's hair as she presses her face up against the mirror's surface. This is still the most evocative and striking scene in the film, introducing a note of mythical romance to the strange and provocative goings on.

The film certainly did provoke: ink was thrown at the screen when it was premiered, and its financier, Charles Noailles faced excommunication by the vatican! Its subsequent banning only increased the film's notoriety; as its final scenes depict the aftermath of a De Sadian orgy with Jesus Christ as the leading participant the reaction isn't surprising for the 1930s! But the importance of "L'Age d'Ore" is mainly down to its broadening of the language of film rather than the "shocking" content.

The BFI present these two landmark surrealist films in an extremely lavish (and expensive) box, which opens up to reveal a CD-sized, digi-pack wallet which holds the two DVDs. A glossy booklet is also included which contains notes on the two films; biographies of Dali and Buñuel; and André Breton's unreadable surrealist manifesto written to commemorate L'Age d'Or's premier. Disc one features "Un Chien Andalou" itself, plus a twenty-five minute video essay introduction by Robert Short which fills in the background on the surrealist's attitude to film. Another twenty-five minute mini-lecture accompanies "Un Chien Andalou" as a commentary track. Because the actual film is only sixteen minutes long, it plays at a slower frame-rate when the commentary track is accessed. Both these talks are crammed with literate ideas and demand several replays to get the most out of them. Disc one also includes a ninety-eight minute documentary profile of Luis Buñuel: "A Proposito De Buñuel" which is as much a reason for buying this set as the two films themselves. My only criticism is that the subtitles on this non-anamorphic widescreen film are placed in the lower black bar so that the picture can't be blown up to full size on a widescreen tv. Disc two features "L'Age d'Or" and another of Robert Short's twenty-five minute lectures which plays over selected highlights from the film. Neither film is in fantastic condition but benefit from the extra clarity afforded by the DVD medium.

This is an extremely opulent package for two important and very fascinating movies. An Essential purchase for all cineastes.