A Film Canon

The Golden Age construes sexual repression as social mortar, structuring an eccentric architectural narrative around the mythological foundation-stone of civilisation, the technical and aesthetic accomplishments of the Vatican, and the ejaculatory dirt, dust, gravel and rubble of contemporary Paris. From this perspective, society is Christianity, and sexual liberation a distinctly antisocial gesture. That said, Buñuel's antisocial manifesto takes two quite different forms. On the one hand, he advocates the wholesale destruction of society, as evinced in a series of meaningless, violent episodes that take its most vulnerable members (children, the aged, animals) as victims. Conversely, violence is presented as liberation, most pointedly in the condensation of Sade's 120 Days Of Sodom to the moment at which the libertines emerge from the castle, as well as the identification of their leader with Christ. Yet Buñuel simultaneously advocates the constructive reinterpretation of society and, more specifically, the extrication of its objects from this repressive mortar so as to rediscover their intrinsic, fetishistic potential. Not only are inanimate objects persistently sexualised, but they are preferred to the human body; or, rather, collapsed into a radical vision of the sexualised human body as part subject and part object, comparable to the fragmented invertebrate bodies anatomised in the prologue.