L'âge d'or

Extremely rare first edition of this pro­gram leaflet by the Studio 28 cinema, founded by Jean Mauclaire, featuring texts by the Surrealist group on Luis Buñuel's film L'Âge d'or.
Slight lacks on the spine, with two small tears at the head and foot, and a shad­ow mark at the head of the first cover.
Handwritten bookplate "Jean Vigo" — likely autograph — inscribed in black ink in the lower right corner of the page featuring Salvador Dalí's illustra­tion.
Literary contributions by Louis Aragon, André Breton, René Char, Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Georges Sadoul and Tristan Tzara.
The program is illustrated with works by Hans Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy, as well as numer­ous stills from Buñuel's L'Âge d'or.
A very rare copy of this very fragile programme of Luis Buñuel's film, with well-preserved gilt covers. With an exceptional provenance, it belonged to the filmmaker Jean Vigo, the cele­brated director of L'Atalante, a rebel­lious figure in cinema with a dazzling career. An admirer of Buñuel's work, Vigo also wrote a glowing review of Le Chien andalou.

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Directed by Luis Buñuel in 1930 with a screenplay co-written by Salvador Dalí, L'Âge d'Or is the paragon of avant-garde and Surrealist cinema. Commissioned by Charles de Noailles, whose wife Marie-Laure de Noailles was one of France's wealthiest, the film was first shown in July 1930 in the De Noailles mansion. It was later shown on Octo­ber, 22 at the Panthéon Rive Gauche and on November 28 and December 3, 1930, at Studio 28 in Montmartre. During the final screening, the theater was vandalized by far-right militants shouting, "Let's see if there are any Christians left in France" and "Death to the Jews". They threw ink at the screen, released smoke bombs and stink bombs, and forced the audience to leave. The film was immediately censored for its anti-patriotic and an­ti-Christian content, and seized on De­cember, 12.
This "Revue-programme" [program leaflet], divided into 2 parts (the leaflet is to be flipped upside-down to read the second half), was published for the Studio 28 screenings in 1930. One part, the largest, of 38 pages, is devoted to Luis Buñuel's film and begins with a short text by Salvador Dali: "My gener­al idea when writing the script of L'Âge d'or with Buñuel was to present the straight and pure line of "conduct" of a being who pursues love through the despicable humanitarian, patriotic, and other wretched mechanisms of reality". The program includes the film's script, subtitles, dialogue, and a long essay ending with "Aspect social - éléments subversifs" written by the leading Sur­realists of the time. It also features the Catalogue des oeuvres exposées au Studio 28 ('Catalog of works exhibited at Studio 28'), a list of Surrealist books available at Corti's bookstore, and thirty black-and-white stills from the film.
Cinephile turned filmmaker, Jean Vigo was drawn to Buñuel's Surrealism in his first cinematic work, À Propos de Nice (1930), which includes surrealist-in­spired scenes such as bare feet being waxed and a woman smoking a cigarette before suddenly disrobing. This social documentary premiered two months before L'Âge d'or. Vigo had already ad­mired the "savage poetry" of Un chien andalou in an film critic that remains authoritative. Like Buñuel, Vigo was no stranger to scandal with his film Zero for Conduct (1933), heavily influenced by his difficult childhood and murdered anarchist father. It remained censored for over fifteen years. Shortly before Vigo's early death, the two filmmakers joined the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires. Vigo's short-lived career was rediscovered by the Nouvelle Vague, notably Truffaut, who was"immediately overcome with an in­tense admiration for this [Vigo's] body of work, whose total runtime does not even reach 200 minutes".
An exceptional copy linking two tow­ering figures of cinema—Surrealist and Impressionist—indisputably connect­ed by their poetic and rebellious por­trayals of bourgeois society.
Provenance: Jean Vigo; Claude Aveline, his executor.