Un Chien Andalou + L’Age d’Or

Un Chien Andalou
France 1928. Director: Luis Buñuel
Cast: Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff, Jaime Miravilles, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel

Described by Buñuel as a "despairing, passionate call to murder," and made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, this most famous of avant-garde films has come to epitomize the surrealist aesthetic. Dream-like, disturbing, and resolutely anti-rational images spew forth like unmediated eruptions from the subconscious. The powerful provocations include one of cinema’s most supremely shocking moments. Buñuel himself wields the razor. B&W, 35mm, silent. 17 mins.

L'Age D'Or
France 1930. Director: Luis Buñuel 
Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst, Pierre Prévert, Jacques Brunius

Luis Buñuel’s legendary 1930 shocker, a scathing assault on Church, State, and the Middle Class, is one of surrealist cinema’s great masterpieces. Co-written with Salvador Dalí, this blasphemous, anarchic slap-to-the-bourgeois-face abounds with the bizarre, dislocating, disturbing images of the subversive sort that characterized Un Chien Andalou, the previous Buñuel-Dalí provocation: a cow in a Louis XVI bedroom, a passionate woman sucking the toes of a statue, bishops tossed from windows, a Sadean orgy attended by the Son of God. In true surrealist fashion, the film extols the power of amour fou — wild, crazy love — as a liberating antidote to stultifying bourgeois convention. Buñuel got it past the French censors by presenting it as the dream of a madman, but the film didn’t take long to hit its intended mark, meeting with howls of indignation and outrage soon after its Paris release. The establishment paper Le Figaro denounced it as a "crop of utterly obscene, repugnant, and tawdry episodes" devoid of "the slightest artistic merit". After provoking a riot by angry French fascists, the film was banned. "The most scandalous of all Buñuel’s films. Surreal, dreamlike, and deliberately, pornographically blasphemous" (Pauline Kael). "They have called Buñuel everything: traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they dare not call him" (Henry Miller). B&W, 35mm, in French with English subtitles. 63 mins.