104 in 2009 Week 33: Fahrenheit 451 and L'Age D'Or

And we're late again.

Fahrenheit 451
Francois Truffaut, 1961

In the future, where books are outlawed, a fireman (Oskar Werner) is drawn into the underground world of reading, which leads to the complete destruction of his comfortable life.

I would have loved to have seen a half-hour version of this story. An episode of the Twilight Zone, perhaps. Basically, what I’m saying is that it’s a story that revolves almost entirely around its central conceit, that of a world where firemen burn books instead of put out fires. It’s a fun idea, an interesting one, but it’s also a very simple inversion that doesn’t have enough nuance to sustain an entire movie. The rest of the running time is made up of fairly standard thriller material, which is only moderately effective. The penultimate scene, though, in which our hero is introduced to the book people, is fantastic and inspired.

6.5/10

L’Age D’Or
Luis Bunuel, 1930

There’s a documentary about scorpions, and then there’s some catholics, and a kid gets killed with a shotgun and a cow walks through a bedroom and – ah, hell, it’s a surrealist movie. Let’s just say weird stuff happens.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the last Bunuel/Dali collaboration, although I did find things to like about it. Several of the images were quite striking, but without some sort of connection between the vignettes or a real sense of forward momentum, it quickly became kind of tiring and dull. Fortunately, the movie was extremely short, so this didn’t become a huge issue. My feelings about L’Age D’Or are basically the same, except that it’s a lot longer.

To be fair, Bunuel and Dali make a lot more of an effort to link the events over the course of the movie, and there are even a few characters that are involved throughout. Nonetheless, it’s still basically a series of non-sequiter vignettes of varying interest filled with surreal images that are all over the place in terms of effectiveness. The surrealism is hurt, I think, by the general crudeness of the production (typical of the era, not particular to this movie). To make that sort of thing work, you need a real sense of reality that you can then distort. With effects, editing, and especially sound that are as rough as this, things that don’t mesh with what we expect to see don’t feel surreal, they just feel wrong – like mistakes. Of course, I can intellectually understand that they aren’t mistakes, but I can’t get that important visceral reaction that makes surrealism so compelling. It’s the same sort of problem I tend to have with Cocteau’s work, particularly Blood of the Poet.

3/10

Progress: 75 (Par +9)