A Note on the Affair of the Surrealist Film L'Age d'Or.

Bookseller Notes

A scarce tract, recounting the early history of Luis Buuel and Salvador Dal's seminal surrealist satire, showing how it quickly attracted controversy from right-wing quarters as it was put before the Paris public - even if the public themselves 'remained to see the end of the film and, on their way out, organised and signed a protest against the demonstration' - and then suffered at the hands of the censors, whose 'Fascistic methods' were 'publicly commended' in the press, and then banned by the authorities, who 'seized all the copies of the film on which they could lay their hands'. This was not however, an absolute measure, for, Cloud relates with some glee, 'by an unpardonable oversight, the Paris police failed to seize all the copies extant' - one copy being obtained by Nancy Cunard, who was determined to screen it in London, where it was screened (having apparently been smuggled by Louis Aragon) at the beginning of January 1931. This leaflet, printed by Cunard (as Anne Chisholm relates in her biography), addresses those who 'count themselves unfortunate' at having missed this 'private showing'. It proceeds to describe its major incidents - even if, Cloud allows, 'it is not possible to give a synopsis, in the orderly Hollywood sense of the term'. It is a passionate defence of the work, 'whose own aesthetic form is based on a significant selection and rejection, wherein sequence means emotional sequence, cause and effect being transposed into the key of event and symbol: more in the likeness, we may say, of the realities we are occasionally able to recognise within ourselves than of those phantasies with which the Church, the State, the Law, the Police, the Yellow Press, the Station Bookstall and the Paramount screen seek to scarify or distract attention away from the reality of their own corruption'. Once understood, Cloud concludes, the film is edifying, though its fare be 'plain but unpalatable' - her closing remark lamenting the 'acute indigestion' of the 'French authorities'.The author, whose career as a novelist began the following year, had recently separated from her husband, the caricaturist Edmond Xavier Kapp, 'after which [she] spent six months as part of Nancy Cunard's entourage' (ODNB) - the two united by the left-wing views and political activism that underlie this scarce work (a single copy listed on WorldCat, at Yale - none added by LibraryHub).