DVD of the Week: L’Âge d’Or

Luis Buñuel’s first feature caused a literal riot. At a nighttime screening on December 3, 1930 (the day that, elsewhere in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard was born), the film’s sexual provocations and anti-clerical ferocity—pointedly aimed at the Catholic church—brought “a coalition of right-wing rowdies” to the Studio 28 theatre, in Montmartre, according to John Baxter in his biography of Buñuel. “In a report distributed to the British press, Nancy Cunard described what followed.”

The commissaries of the League of Patriots and certain representatives of the Anti-Semitic League interrupted the performance by throwing ink at the screen and shouting “We shall see if there are any Christians left in France!” and “Death to the Jews!” at the moment when one of the characters in the film is shown throwing a monstrance into the river. The demonstrators then lit stink-bombs [actually fumigation cartridges] and threw stink-bombs into the audience, on whom they hurled themselves with blackjacks, in order to force them to leave the cinema. Later, passing through the Exhibition Hall, they destroyed every breakable object, smashing furniture and windows, slashing the pictures by Dali, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Miró and Tanguy … and finally cutting the telephone wires.

Scandal raged in the press, with popular opinion mounting against the film, culminating in, as Baxter says, a police raid of the theatre and Buñuel’s home to confiscate prints of the film.

The movie, which I discuss in the clip below, is still shocking, if no longer riot-provoking—at least in the cosmopolitan capitals. Perhaps the most shocking element pertains to its eroticism, which, though tame by today’s standards, is peculiarly, disturbingly degrading. Or perhaps it’s the sequence, based on the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom,” in which the chief sadistic erotomaniac turns out to be none other than Jesus Christ. (Buñuel’s vision of sexual violence as transfiguration had its literary parallel in the writings of Georges Bataille.) Though much of the film is comic, and some moments may even seem laughable, the joke, now as then, is largely on us.

P.S. Studio 28, which was founded in 1928 as the first avant-garde movie theatre, is still a functioning art house.