L'Age D'Or

“Surreal” is a much over used adjective but L'Age D'Or is the real deal. Made in 1930 by the Surrealist dream team of Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, it mixes the former's characteristic hallucinatory images with the latter's scurrilous anti-bourgeois humour. So it features a man with a loaf of bread on his head, a cow in a bed, a horse cart in a ballroom, a suicide stuck to the ceiling, and an urbane, dandyish hero with extreme anger management issues who is compelled to squash beetles, kick dogs and slap old ladies at cocktail parties.

This hectic, often funny film is loosely structured around the repeated failure of a couple to consummate their frenzied passion for each other, making it an artful and disturbing meditation on desire and the impossibility of its fulfilment. Also included in this dual format edition is Dali and Bunuel's earlier collaboration, Un Chien Andalou, with its still shocking razor-across-an-eyeball shot. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]