Breton also tended to attach inordinate importance to details that no one else ever noticed. When he returned from visiting Trotsky in Mexico City, I asked him what the great man is like.
“He’s got a dog he absolutely adores,” Breton replied. “One day the dog was standing next to Trotsky and staring at him, and Trotsky said to me, ‘He’s got a human look, wouldn’t you say?’ Can you imagine how someone like Trotsky could possibly say such a stupid thing?” Breton demanded. “A dog doesn’t have a human look! A dog has a dog’s look!”
Breton was genuinely angry when he told me that story.
luis bunuel’s autobiography is great
Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this pictorial grammar […] I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion.