L'Âge d'or · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman kneels in a garden, takes the stone toe of a marble statue into her mouth, and sucks it. The party is still going on somewhere behind her. Nobody intervenes. Hold onto that image, because it is the whole film in one gesture: a drive surfacing through good furniture and good manners, and the world politely declining to notice.

The first thing to see is how plainly Buñuel shoots it. The outrages of L'Âge d'or arrive in clear, evenly lit, classically composed frames, with the flat matter-of-factness of a nature documentary. The film literally opens with one — scorpions, lifted from an existing natural-history reel. The scandal is never in the camera. It is in what the camera consents to look at without blinking.

Deleuze has an exact name for the kind of image Buñuel is making, and Buñuel is one of his two great examples of it (Stroheim is the other). He calls it the impulse-image. Between the affection-image — the felt close-up — and the action-image — the hero who reads a situation and acts to change it — Deleuze finds a degenerate, riveting middle. Here we don't have a man who perceives and acts. We have a man ridden by an appetite that erupts in him and drags him down. Gaston Modot's lover is that man. His love is not a feeling he manages; it is a force. It makes him kick a small dog in passing, slap a society hostess across the face, throw a burning tree and a plough out of an upstairs window. Each act is what Deleuze calls a symptom — a discharge of a drive that has nothing to do with the polite occasion it interrupts.

Why does the world stay so calm around it? Because, in Deleuze's account, the naturalist world is always double. There is the derived milieu: a real, dated, specific setting — here the drawing rooms, the diplomatic reception, the Church, the maintained surface of the European bourgeoisie. And underneath it an originary world of raw drives, hunger and sex and death, of which the milieu is only the kept-up skin. Buñuel's signature method is to let the second tear through the first while the first holds its expression. A cow lies on a bed in the salon. A cart of drunken peasants trundles through the reception and no one remarks it. A gamekeeper shoots his own small son almost as an aside, and the guests barely turn their heads. The originary world is already in the room; it was never anywhere else.

The statue's toe, the toilet bowl glimpsed gushing in the heroine's erotic reverie — these are fetishes in Deleuze's strict sense: the part-object pulled loose and charged with the whole compulsion. And naturalism, for Deleuze, always has a direction, and it runs down. He calls it the line of slope, entropy toward exhaustion and death. L'Âge d'or obeys it to the letter and then keeps going past the bottom. The last episode decamps to the Château de Selliny, lifted bodily from Sade, where the survivors of an orgy stagger out, and the chief libertine emerges with the face of Christ. The slope runs all the way through the floor of the civilization the film has been insulting for an hour.

Where did this grammar come from? Directly from Un chien andalou (1929): the cut as free association, admitting only images that can't be rationally explained. Buñuel carries that method and Albert Duverger's plain photography wholesale into a feature, loosening it across episodes. Behind it sit Entr'acte's absurd non sequiturs, the deadpan marvels of the Feuillade serials the Surrealists adored, and Eisenstein's October, whose god-idol sequence skewers religion by colliding shots — Buñuel redeploys exactly that anti-clerical editing rhetoric, here against a Mass said over bishops left to rot on the rocks.

There is one more thing the film is, looked at from Deleuze's later book. The grand party that absorbs a fire and a murder without dropping a fork is an aristocratic order rotting from inside while perfectly keeping its form — crystal-decomposition. Buñuel found that image in 1930 and spent the next fifty years refilming it, all the way to the dinner that cannot end in The Exterminating Angel and the dinner that cannot begin in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

The significance is blunt. Un chien andalou prided itself on meaning nothing. L'Âge d'or means a great deal: it took surrealist shock from the scale of the short to the feature and aimed it — Church, family, patrie — in the name of l'amour fou. It paid for it with a riot and a fifty-year ban. And listen while you watch: Wagner's Liebestod swelling over the lovers' graceless fumbling, sound used against the image at the very dawn of the talkies.

So next time, don't watch the lovers. Watch the servants and the surfaces. Watch how long a beautiful room can keep its composure — and the precise instant it can't.