A double-bill from the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, described as a " lifelong antagonist of the bourgeoisie".
Un Chien Andalou (1928) is best known for its opening, in which a woman's eye is sliced open by a razor (it's Buñuel's hand we see doing the slicing). There is also a scene featuring ants emerging from a stigmata-like hole in the palm of the hero's hand.
Was the whole film inspired by dreams? "Nothing in the film symbolises anything," Buñuel said later. "It does not attempt to recount a dream." Still, try explaining the sequence in which two priests attached to ropes are dragged on their backs across the floor of a large bedroom along with two grand pianos, over which is draped a dead donkey. And the music doesn't even change.
My favourite: a woman sees a moth, then imagines her husband without a mouth,
then the same mouth is suddenly covered in her underarm hair. So much for Cronenberg.
L'Age d'or was made a couple of years after Un Chien, and was banned for an age. It is uniquely expressive and serene, although certainly best accompanied by diazepam.
As in Un Chien, it generally follows the conventions of a silent film - it is just that sometimes someone does something like chucking a giraffe out of the window. One very boring conversation about seating arrangements at a party is followed by the heroine going upstairs to find a cow in her bed.
When all is said and done, of course, it's all about sex. Watch out for the hero's face as he sucks the fingers of his leading lady - the shock and desire in his eyes is wild. And seconds later we see him thinking of his lady love sitting on the loo. Films made by a man who signed his name to the 1925 Surrealist Manifesto that yelled, "Beware your deviations! We shall not miss a single one!"
