L'Age d'Or and the construction of dream logic: How does the use of micro elements in L'Age d'Or construct dream logic?
Starter - what questions do you have after watching this film?
- Why does the film start with a documentary about scorpions?
- What is actually going on?
- Why was she sucking a statue's toe?
- Why was their a cow in the bed?
- Why did he throw a giraffe out the window?
- Why did he kick the dog?
- Why did they ignore the horse carriage?
- Why does the man attack the woman?
- Why does the man kill the boy?
- Why does nobody care about anything?
- Why does the woman run off with the conductor?
Da Funk - Daft Punk (Jonze, 1996)
What surrealist elements are included in this video? The central premise, the central joke, is that the man is a dog. And yet no character acknowledges this. This follows the logic of dreams, and certainly not a conscious logic!
CENTRAL THEMES
- Comedy and silliness
- Barriers to love
- The church and issues with sin
- Bureaucracy (excessively complicated rules)
- Nature and animals
- Criticisms of the bourgeoisie
- Sexual morality
- Wish fulfilment and fulfilling unconscious desires
- Transgression
Challenging the status of the privileged spectator
“L’Age d’Or is a different film for every spectator. It’s emphasis on individual interpretation over a privileged preferred reading absolutely destroys conventional approaches to film”
What are some possible interpretations of this scene?
The Imperial Rome montage
- The montage explores sexual desire through symbolic references. An advert dissolves in to a female hand moving briskly, symbolic of female masturbation. While some audiences may simply not understand the sexual reference, and audiences may have been horrified by the explicit reference to female sexuality
- Freud referred to the Madonna/whore complex, where men have unreasonable expectations of women and female sexuality. There is a societal expectation that women should not only be chaste and virginal, but also sexually available. Does this scene explore this contradiction?
- The man is overwhelmed with sexual desire when confronted with the MES of sexualised images of women in adverts. This reinforces the hypocrisy of mainstream advertising, which presents highly sexualised images of women in order to sell products
- The tracking shot of the man kicking the violin down the road could be a symbolic code for the hatred of art, beauty, music, and culture, which may be an attack on the bourgeoise audience. The idea that one form of culture is more privileged than another is highly discriminatory, and there is pleasure in actively destroying things. After the intertitle 'sometime on a Sunday', a montage of buildings collapsing is presented, which constructs a confusing, upsetting and problematic binary opposition
- The connotation of 'Sunday' is clearly religious. The fact that the holy city of Imperial Rome is being demolished could be seen as an attack on organised religion
- Bunuel had a fetish for black tights, and the scene could be him exploring his sexual fetish...