I could make a ninety-minute film of people getting their limbs hacked off, but this would only be bad bad taste and not very stylish or original. As John Waters writes, ‘It’s easy to disgust someone. The value of shock is vital in jolting viewers out of complacent preconceptions, but not all shock has value.
Sensational imagery is not enough: it has to be part of a coherent worldview Its confrontational approach has spawned many heirs, who each in their own ways have continued its subversion of dominant views and codes. The cinematic shock of Un Chien Andalou dynamited the rules and opened up an unfettered mind space no longer encumbered by social norms and conventional morality. Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche.
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