L’âge d’or [The Golden Age] (1930)

(YouTube Streaming, March 2020) Hark, dear viewer, and abandon all hope of making sense of L’âge d’or. Notable for it being a collaboration between famed surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, it’s absolutely not designed to make sense. (Dali wasn’t a filmmaker, and neither was Buñuel at the time—legend has it that the finished film includes nearly everything ever shot during the sequential production.) Interestingly, it was one of the first sound movies made in France and yet it’s not designed to take advantage of that either: while there’s some narrative sound, much of the so-called plot is “given” through wall-of-text title cards. Not that you should pay attention to plotting: Since there’s no narrative consistency, either shrug or try to watch L’âge d’or on another level. At least it’s short. This being said, the plot isn’t everything and in the finest surrealist tradition, the film is occasionally very funny—and also very violent. (For added laughs, try to read the Wikipedia plot summary after watching the film, as it seems intent on imposing some rational order on a film that rejects any.) I made my peace with L’âge d’or not by trying to understand it, and by seeing it as a cruel playground to explore the relationship between humour and the unexpected—there’s plenty of the unexpected, although maybe not as much of the funny as I’d like.