L’âge d’or (1930).
Age of Gold, Luis Buñuel, France 1930
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Running time: 63 minutes
About the print
Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française was traveling the US with nitrate prints, and while visiting Rochester found himself low on funds. His friend (and Eastman Museum’s first film curator) James Card purchased this print for the museum’s collection. Shrinkage: 0.65%
About the film
“Never before at the cinema, and with such vigor, such contempt for decency, has bourgeois society and its properties—the police, religion, the army, morality, the family, even the State—received such a volley of kicks in the ass. . . . Obviously, in making L’âge d’or, the authors wanted snobs and fashionable people, who had freely admired Un chien andalou and had, thus, insulted them, not to misunderstand their intention this time and to feel the disgust in which they hold them.”
— Léon Moussinac, L’Humanité, December 7, 1930 (translated by Alicia Chester)
“Will discord always reign over the Surrealists? . . . Wednesday evening . . . around thirty protesters had decided to interrupt the screening of a film whose incoherence, to tell the truth, must more readily draw a smile than indignation. But it was in the plans of this little troop to be indignant. They did so by blowing whistles, throwing bottles of ink that splattered in unexpected overlays, and using batons to break everything around. Calm was restored only by a squad of agents.”
— Le Figaro, December 13, 1930 (translated by Alicia Chester)
“All those who have safeguarded the grandeur that is France, all those, even if they are atheists, who respect Religion, all those who honour family life and hold childhood sacred, all those who have faith in a race which has enlightened the world, all those sons of France whom you have chosen to defend you against the moral poison of unworthy spectacles appeal to you now to uphold the rights of the censor.”
— Richard Pierre Bodin, Le Figaro