The Golden Age

“This film is still the only enterprise that exalts total love as I envisage it, and the violent reactions to its screening in Paris have only heightened awareness of its unique value. There is the potential for a true Golden Age in love which breaks away completely from the Age of Mud that Europe is going through, and it has an inexhaustible wealth of future possibilities to offer.”

This was how André Bretón described the film L’Age d’Or, (The Golden Age), directed by Luis Buñuel in 1930. He also summed it up as “a romantic film, produced with all the frenzy of Surrealism”.

The film’s groundbreaking, occasionally wounding and disconcerting visual language, as well as the controversy that arose because of its subject matter – love stories, sexual desire, violence, decadence, criticism of the bourgeois hierarchy – led L’Age d’Or to be seen as a “cursed film” for several decades. After a very brief screening period in autumn of 1930, it was banned for several decades. It was nevertheless considered one of the great Surrealist masterpieces, because of both its aesthetic value and its poetic and transgressive content.

The screening of the film coincided with the exhibition Beyond Painting. Max Ernst in the Würth Collection. Max Ernst himself has a role in the film, and Salvador Dalí was also involved, having previously worked with Buñuel on Un Chien Andalou, another film which, along with L’Age d’Or (1929), became milestones in the history of 20th-Century art and cinema.

Free entry. In collaboration with Filmoteca Española.