Salvador Dali

(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.

(YouTube Streaming, July 2019) Often mentioned as a classic of surrealism, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un chien Andalou can be a tough watch. It starts on the single most unpleasant note imaginable, with a succession of two shots suggesting a woman’s eye being cut open with a straight razor. (If you look closely at the second shot, you can see it’s a dead farm animal’s eye, but most people don’t look that closely … and it’s not much of an improvement.)  Old-school surrealism was extremely violent by design, and the following scenes certainly give into that tradition what with ants drawling out of a hole in a man’s hand, someone getting hit by a car, amputation, a disappeared mouth and so on. Do not try to make sense of the film, which -at best—follows a twisted kind of dream logic and at worse is just trying to get a rise out of an audience craving narrative. Some of it can be very funny (such as the title cards boldly announcing things like “Sixteen years later” without it having any sort of bearing) and some of it quite horrifying. Un chien Andalou does feel like a far more modern film than a 1929 title, mostly due to pre-Code levels of eroticism and ultra-violence. Paradoxically, it’s a large part (aside from the pedigree of the creators) why it’s still worth a (well prepared) look today. At least it’s barely more than twenty minutes long, meaning that it will soon be over even if you don’t enjoy it.