Symbolic Activity

http://netvideo.nyu.edu:8080/ramgen/studio/cortade/Age_Or_Amour_Toilettes.rm

"According to psychoanalytical theory, in order to function in our lives, we need to actively repress various desires, fears, memories, and fantasies. Hence beneath our conscious, daily social interaction there exists a dynamic, active realm of forces of desire that is inaccessible to our rational and logical selves"(Sturken/Carwright p.121)

I'm not sure I agree with the first part of this theory. What happens when we repress our feelings and desires? Is it wrong to be sexual and what is the normative rational? Is the male gaze a completely negative view or a feminist view? What if a woman feels empowered by her sexuality and is not a victim or is willingly the "victim" of the male gaze? When we look at images in a critical way inevitably we will come up with questions? Otherwise what's the point...

The Avante Garde film movement believed in pure psychic automatism, briefly described as the absence of all control of exercised reason or moral preoccupation. The conscious effort of expressing the unconscious as seen by director Luis Bunuel in L'age D'or (the golden age), is the subject of my blog.
(a film funded by aristocrats and censored under the pressure of the far right, not too mention very controversial).

In an act of rebellion against the return of the repressed, this film looks at the people in power, the church, the army, and the politicians who impose their morals in order to sustain power and reason to suppress organic creativity by extension. Luis Bunuel uses his imagination and the subconscious dreamlike possibility of the mind in a effort liberate the people. Symbolically and technically the film expresses the defiance against those powers in an attempt to reclaim and free themselves from shame and denial of primal animal instincts,untamed emotions, and desires.

I invite you to "gaze" upon this imagery and tell me if you think this film is relevant to day. Are we sexually repressed even though we seemingly live in an overtly sexual open society?

Is the woman a victim? Is the man a lech? Is it ambiguous?