Gaston Modot is perhaps most familiar to PFA audiences as the intrepid hero of Buñuel's L'Age d'or, but throughout the twenties he was a leading figure in the French avant-garde cinema as actor, writer, and ciné-club activist. There seems to be hardly a major French classic from the thirties in which he does not appear. A former Montmartre painter and a friend of Picasso and Modigliani (who painted his portrait in 1918), his film career spanned over five decades. In 1928 he directed the highly regarded feature La Torture par l'espérance, based on one of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "cruel tales."