Un Chien Andalou & L'Age D'Or

Here are two great surrealist films from the great Luis Bunuel, two great films that challenged the status quou of their times.
The first, a surrealist masterpiece made by both Bunuel and Salvador Dali, is a stick-together of vignettes that really don’t make any sense, and at the same time they do. But then again, that was the point. The image of a smoking man leads to the evisceration of an eyeball to a young man/child in Nun’s clothing to meeting a woman to having a hand full of ants and well, it just goes on and on until the end, in what seems like the death of a romance being buried alive at the beach. The movie has been called everything, from filth to art, from the first punk movie to the prototype of today’s modern music videos.
And although Un Chien Andalou is the most remembered of the two, it’s L’Age D’Or, however, that is the most controversial, at least when it came out. The story is also compiled of vignettes, but features more of a concrete story, that being of a man and a woman who are trying their hardest to have sex with each other but are forced again and again to stop by the people around them. They have some sort of party/orgy at a house and it all goes insane, from cows in the bed to shooting kids. In the end we get an off-screen representation of 120 Days Of Sodom, led by a man who looks like Jesus Christ. It was famous for causing riots in France, with it’s premiere being sabotaged by the fascist League Of Nations by throwing black ink at the screen. In the end, both films are very similar and very different, but both very important.