Luis Buñuel the surrealist was more interested in artistic than political revolution, yet he mocked purely aesthetic responses to his early experiments. Of the audience reaction to his first collaboration with Salvador Dali, “Un Chien Andalou” (1928), in which disturbing erotic and violent images are arrayed in non-sequential order, he remarked, “The crowd of idiots found beauty and poetry in what was basically just a desperate, impassioned call to murder.” More than forty years later, Buñuel was still placing stink bombs under cinema seats...
Sources
New Yorker, March 5, 2007
