Luis Buñuel's second film is a surreal attack on bourgeios ideals that incited a riot when first released and still retains its power to shock. Buñuel began the film as a collaboration with Salvador Dali, but after a few days working together the two had a falling out and Buñuel made the film himself, incorporating many of Dali's ideas. Its narrative follows two nameless characters, a man and a woman, through a series of scenes connected by dreamlike logic as they try, unsuccessfully, to make love. One memorable sequence finds the couple writhing around on a cliff when a mob of socialites comes upon them and pries them apart. Frustrated, the man sees a yelping poodle and kicks it into the air. L'AGE D'OR is not only an attack on bourgeois life but also a doctrine that directs humanity to live as the surrealists believed they should: that is, by placing love before everything else in life, such as the church, status, and family. Funny, disturbing, and thoroughly bizarre, Buñuel's film is a purposefully blasphemous and corrosive work that attacks social institutions with such vigor and imagination that one cannot help but be entertained.

Filmed at Billancourt Studios in France and on location in Spain.

L'AGE D'OR was financed entirely by the Vicomte de Noailles, who also financed Cocteau's THE BLOOD OF A POET. After the film's first showing, the vicomte, a French socialite, was threatened with excommunication by the pope.

During one of the film's first screenings at Studio 28 in Paris, around 200 right-wing extremists attacked the cinema with axes and smoke bombs, destroying seats and paintings by Dali, Tanguy, and others.

Three prominent artists of the era appeared in the film: Max Ernst, Pierre Prevert, and Pancho Cosio.

L'AGE D'OR was inspired in part by the Marquis de Sade's notorious book THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, of which only five copies were known to be in existence in France during the 1920s when Buñuel read it.

The film was supressed for 30 years by religious authorities.

DVD Features:

Region 1
Keep Case
Full Frame - 1.33
Additional Release Material:
Audio Commentary - 1. Robert Short
Text/ Photo Gallery
Still Gallery
Filmography - 1. Luis Bunuel

Max Ernst: German Surrealist/Dada Painter
Pierre Prevert: French Director
Gaston Modot: French Actor

Luis Buñuel: Spanish Director, L'AGE D'OR

Salvador Dali: Painter/Designer/Writer/Surrealist

"[S]hocking and beautifully immortal."
"[T]his is essential art film is richly humorous, too."
"Several scenes still drop the jaw, and the film has cumulative power amid the wicked laughs engendered."
"[O]ne of the milestones of the surrealist movement."
"[The film] morphs from an entomological pseudo-doc to a tale of hilariously overheated, thwarted lust to a blasphemous joke."