NEW YORK () - Eight decades have passed since Spanish surrealist creative person Salvador Dali and movie maker Luis Bunuel portrayed a man slicing a woman's eyeball with a razor -- yet viewers still wince, moan and cover their eyes.
The sequence opens the 16-minute film "Un chien andalou" (An Andalusian Dog), which is one several of films running in an infinite loop-the-loop at a new exposition called "Dali: Painting and Film" at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York City.
Based on the reactions of a crowd of viewers on Sunday, the scene has not lost its ability to make audiences shudder.
The exhibit, which can be see at MoMa through and through September 15, is a fascinating collection that brings together some of Dali's best-known industrial plant, usually unconnected across museums and individual collections close to the world, under a single roof.
His nightmarish images still appear fresh in the 21st century -- melting pin clover, swarms of ants creep out of an centre socket, bicyclists with baguettes on their heads, a woman whose belly is transformed into a bleeding bouquet of roses.
What is unique close to the exhibition is its emphasis on the key role that the new medium of the motion picture played in the aesthetic vision of a young Dali, born in 1904.
"Dali homed in on cinema's on the face of it contradictory ability to combine the real and the surreal, the actual and the complex quantity, the objective and the imaginative, the prosaic and the poetic," said MoMa drawings curator Jodi Hauptman.
"Whether still or moving, painted or shot, Dali's works are meant to wholly intoxicate their viewers, offering an experience provoked by an image just played out in the mind."�
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