"Moral"

I'm riding to Dave's defense with irrefutable proof that the surrealists in general (including Buñuel) were "moral". According to Miriam Webster, the word in the first instance means:

1 a: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior : ethical "moral judgments" b: expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior "a moral poem" c: conforming to a standard of right behavior d: sanctioned by or operative on one's conscience or ethical judgment "a moral obligation" e: capable of right and wrong action "a moral agent"

Keep in mind that Surrealism emerged directly from Dadaism. The main surrealists were dadaists-come-lately in the very early twenties before the 1924 founding of the movement, and they always revered certain people associated with Dadaism such as Tristan Tzara and Francois Picabia, conscientiously making space for them in the new movement. Dada was the performance of overpowering moral revulsion at the values (including bourgeois values of art and beauty) that had senselessly led to senseless slaughter in WWI. Remember that people like Appolinaire and even some of the surrealist themeselves had served in the medical corps. I see them as incredibly moral, and incredibly serious about their adolescent stunts, precisely because everything they did was driven by a conviction that if the human mind wasn't fixed--that is, if the patterns of thinking that led to WWI weren't eradicated through a sort of shock treatment provided by art--it all could be repeated. This is why so many fell away during WWII, and why it signaled the end of the movement: art had failed to stop the carnage a second time. In any case, the definition above doesn't suggest any particular right and wrong as necessary for 'moral' behavior.