The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

L’âge d’or
133
L’ âge d’or
1930
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Starring Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque,
Max Ernst, Josep Llorens Artigas, Lionel Salem, and Germaine
Noizet
How would you describe L’ âge d’or to someone who has never seen it?
Maddin: It’s Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s follow-up to their first surrealist
masterpiece, Un chien andalou. I like this one more, for the reason
that this one spoke directly to me. It’s a series of unrelated gags that aren’t
funny for any fun reason. It’s a movie presented in a number of sections,
one section for each segment of a scorpion’s tail and a stinger at the end. The
longer section in the middle takes up most of the movie, and that’s the one
that really zings me. It’s just a love story, every bit as surreal as a love story
deserves to be. It’s delirious and it’s primitively put together as any movie
ever has been, and it’s acted out by Gaston Modot, the only actor with a lot
of experience in the movie, and he carries the whole thing.
The woman whom he falls in love with is this quintessentially surreal
l’amour fou, who is played by Luis Buñuel’s mistress at the time, Lya Lys. The
rest of the roles are filled out by famous and not-so-famous surrealist artists.
The whole movie was shot on the Townsend Noir estate, so there are all
these far left–leaning artists messing around with the bourgeois playthings,
or films. They seem to be slashing and pasting scenes together, and you can
tell they have no experience. They’re not quite sure what they’re doing, but
the sheer energy and hubris of it all puts it over.
It had never really occurred to me to make a film until I saw L’ âge d’or and
looked around at some of my clever pals. We all loved each other, and each
of us loved ourselves. We had an analogous little gang, and just the excitement
of a primitive movie made by people who weren’t slick and didn’t have
any experience or training and yet still told this great mad love story with so
much froth excited me because it made me realize I didn’t need to go to film
school. I didn’t need a lot of practice. I even seemed to be the same age that
Buñuel was when he made the movie, and I just thought it was time to make