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If you haven't seen L'Age D'or, you're missing out on one of the great classics of cinematic surrealism. Directed by the great Luis Buñuel and written by Buñuel and Salvador Dali, L'Age D'or is rife with nonsensical dialogue and bizarre, disjunctive images. In it, romantic lovers prostrate themselves before statues, Jesus appears as a monstrous hedonist, and the acts of copulation and defecation are linked. The film is alternately shocking, haunting, and outrageously funny.
Paul Hammond's guide to L'Age D'or is as twisty and elliptical as the film itself. As he walks us through its "plot," his enthusiastic and punning prose provides data about the making of the film, Buñuel and Dali's peculiar obsessions, the Freudian underpinnings of the work, and the meaning of its images, particularly of its chief metaphor, the scorpion. --Raphael Shargel
Book Description
Illustrated In one of the great collaborations of cinema history, L'age d'or united the geniuses of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in the making of a uniquely savage blend of visual poetry and social criticism. One of the outstanding works of the Surrealist movement, L'Age d'or was banned and vilified for many years in many countries, becoming justly legendary for its subversive eroticism and its furious dissection of "civilized" values. In a remarkable, intuitive reading of L'Age d'or, Paul Hammond interweaves a detailed account of the extraordinary circumstances of its production with a dazzling interpretation of its aesthetic and political nuances. At once authoritative and polemical, this is a study entirely in tune with its subject, a fitting accompaniment to one of the major landmarks of world cinema.
