Admission: $2.50

L'Age D'Or
L'Age D'Or, the famous “forbidden” surrealist classic, Luis Bunuel's second film and “perhaps his definitive work, in fact owes little to Salvador Dali. Two lovers (Gaston Modot and Lya Lys) declare war on a bourgeois society intent on thwarting the fulfillment of their desire. Charged with a surrealistic glee, L'Age D'Or shows a blind man being beaten, a dowager being slapped, a father punishing his son for a misdemeanor by shooting him down. In the final section of the film Bunuel doffs his hat to the Marquis de Sade, whose ideas on liberty the director holds dear. Shown at Studio 28, L'Age D'Or was officially banned after the cinema had been wrecked by a protesting mob of right-wing extremists.”

-“Oxford Companion to Film.”

Bunuel himself reflects, “L'Age D'Or is the only film in my career conceived and created in a state of euphoria and enthusiasm, of vertigo for overthrowing things and deliberate seeking of scandal, dedicated to attacking the representatives of ‘order' and ridiculing their ‘eternal' principles. The period called for such a spirit...”

• Directed by Luis Bunuel. Screenplay by Bunuel and Salvador Dali. With Lya Lys, Gaston Modot, Caridad de Laberdesque, Pierre Prevert, Max Ernst. (France, 1930, 63 mins, Print from PFA Collection)

Etoile de Mer
Etoile de Mer is based on a poem by Robert Desnos, which director Man Ray found to be like a scenario, containing “no dramatic action, yet all the elements for a possible action.” Scene titles are taken from the lines of the poem and their moods and images are visually recreated.

• Directed by Man Ray. With Kiki. (1928, 15 mins, silent (18 fps), Print Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art)

Anemic Cinema.
This characteristically Dada film consists of a series of verbal and visual puns with nonsense phrases (like the title: anemic is an anagram of cinema) inscribed around the rotating spiral patterns which entrap the eye in deep revolving cylinders of space.

• Directed by Marcel Duchamp. (1926, 7 mins, silent (18 fps), Print Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art)

Land Without Bread (Las Hurdas) - An Excerpt.
In this film - an extraordinary social and anthropological document - on the impoverished inhabitants of the region of Las Hurdas in Spain, Bunuel's personal vision of the place and its people is so strong, and so unnerving, that it becomes a near surrealistic experience, one quite worthy of the creator of Un Chien Andalou.

• Produced and Directed by Luis Bunuel. Photographed by Eli Lotar. (1932, 28 mins, Print Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art)