L'Age d'or: The Surrealist film perhaps most often identified with the movement was described by Luis Buñuel in his autobiography: "The story is also a sequence of moral and Surrealist aesthetic. Around the principal characters, a man and woman, is disclosed the existing conflict in all human society between the sentiment of love, and any other sentiment of a religious, patriotic, humanitarian order; ...the setting and characters are realistic, but the hero is animated by egoism, which imagines all attitudes to be amorous, to the exclusion of control or of other sentiments. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form the substance of the film. It is a romantic film performed in full Surrealistic frenzy." The French Surrealist Group published a manifesto to coincide with the first screenings of the film. In it they declared, "One would have to go back a long way to find a cataclysm comparable to the age we live in. One would probably have to go right back to the collapse of the ancient world... Projected at a time when banks are being blown up, rebellions breaking out and artillery rumbling out of arsenals, L'Age d'or should be seen by all those who are not yet disturbed by the news which the censors still let the papers print." Ironically, the film was banned a short time later, following demonstrations by the "Anti-Jewish League" and other right-wing groups, and a violent campaign in the press. The same year saw the banning of Eisenstein's The General Line and, in Berlin, Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. After the banning of L'Age d'or, the French Surrealist Group distributed a questionnaire which included the following question: "Can it for one moment be pretended that this intervention, under pretext of protecting children, youth, the family, the fatherland and religion, this clear conversion to fascism, has not the object of destroying everything that might oppose the approaching war?" --Kathy Geritz