What makes it different from others?

So much average

A Disappointing Continuation

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

I recognised the name of the director Luis Buñuel for his highly surreal nightmarish and memorable short film Un Chien Andalou which I saw in Film Studies, that and this film were listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, so I was looking forward to see this his first feature film. Basically this French film is all about a loving couple, the Man (Gaston Modot) and the Young Girl (Lya Lys) and their many attempts to embrace and consummate their feelings, but all are interrupted and thwarted by various events and occurrences. These distractions often occur because of the families, the church and generally bourgeois society, and they find it very difficult to get away from these things and final sexual release and satisfaction, there is even a scene where all the Girl can do is suck the toe of a statue. Also starring Caridad De Laberdesque as a Chambermaid and Little Girl, Max Ernst as the Leader of men in cottage, Josep Llorens Artigas as Governor, Lionel Salem as Duke of Blangis, Germaine Noizet as Marquise and Duchange as Conductor. Alright, I will be completely honest and say that I didn't really understand anything going on, and I did get a dozy because of this, but I suppose I can see reasons why this film was banned for forty-nine years from what I can recall, and there are some humorous and erotic scenes, so it is I suppose not a bad satire. Good, as far as I remember!

The Man (Gaston Modot) and the Young Girl (Lya Lys) go through the film consumed by passion for each other. They long to be together but their moments together are constantly interrupted. The film is strewn together with imagery and comes to a halt after an hour.........do the lovers find happiness....?..The film starts interestingly with footage of scorpions but you soon realize that its all a pretentious piece of nonsense. It's made as a silent film with occasional dialogue and it has a non-stop soundtrack playing that at one point is so irritating that you will turn the sound down and want to watch it as a silent film. The continuous drum rolls must have driven cinema audiences mad. There are some genuinely funny moments, eg, when the Man kicks a dog and when he knocks over a blind man. Unfortunately, this humour is carried out in the name of art so its just pseudo nonsense. The film is crap.

So easy to watch but rather more difficult to write about. I first saw this with 'Un Chien Andalou' in the 60s and was an overnight Bunuel fan, gradually getting to see most of his subsequent films. The exception was some of the earliest Mexican ones, which just recently I have seen, thanks to DVD releases. Once a director only seen in film societies and art galleries, now available to all. Of course there were later films that got reasonable releases but rarely to your local Odeon. I have never understood why. I admit that watching this film nearly 80 years after it was made a few allowances have to be made, but it is still shocking, it is still disturbing and it is still funny and at the same time uplifting. It is something that seems to run through all of Bunuel's work, this sunny disposition. At one with the earth. This is despite his fury bordering on hatred of authority and the church in particular and this certainly shows here, whether it's shooting a child, pushing over a blind man, tipping a cardinal out of a window. Just to add to this potent mix there is of course the sexual angle and this film contains one of the most erotic sequences in all of cinema, complete with Wagner's, Tristan und Isolde soaring on the soundtrack. I've just realised I haven't even mentioned the surrealism!

In the Tate Modern's "Dalí & Film" exhibition, the fourteen-odd rooms were mostly paintings but three or four had films of one kind or another. Having just seen Un Chien Andalou I decided to watch this one as well and was lucky to catch it just as it started. I say lucky because there is really nothing to tell you when these things are starting or ending. This is maybe OK with a short film that lasts seven minutes or a three minute clip from Spellbound but with a film that lasts an hour I really don't understand why the Tate didn't make at least a discrete effort to let us know start times – maybe it is beneath them to act like a cinema but it does mean that people were constantly flowing in and out and the implication is that the films can be just dipped in and out of.With this film though, you do need to be in from the start because, unlike Un Chien Andalou, there is more of a plot here and the film has fewer of Dalí's images across the running time. That said the plot here isn't any easier to follow if you did manage to catch it from the very start because this is still very much a surrealist film in structure and content even if it has fewer of the images that made the first film I'd seen so engaging. With Buñuel forming more of the film than Dalí, the film does take on more symbolism in less surreal ways but yet it is still quite hard to follow. To me as a viewer this was a bit of a downside because there was less to stimulate me and more to frustrate me as I struggle to understand the meaning of what I was watching.Despite this I still did find it interesting and you can see why (to a point) that the screening did draw a reaction from those that saw it as attacking conservative values in its depiction of violent attacks etc. Quite why it was hardly screened for fifty years though, I can't say. With a difficult plot to follow and an hour to watch, the film asked a lot of me and I'm afraid I wasn't really up to the challenge and I did struggle to follow along. The scattering of surrealist imagery did help to hold my attention though and it is not without value – just a lot harder to watch than I would have liked it to have been.