By Kathy A. McDonald
(Moving Pictures Global issue, Fall 2007)
"The best cinema is the kind that can be perceived with your eyes closed." -Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
Painter, poet, screenwriter, production designer, costume and jewelry designer, Time magazine cover boy at age 32 and one-time game show contestant - are all equally true labels for the Spanish-born, 20th-century surrealist artist and provocateur Salvador Dalí. He was one of the first celebrity artists to have his own life's drama eclipse his art; today, Dalí's talents as painter are being reconsidered favorably by scholars and his contribution to the cinematic arts is exposed in the exhibition "Dalí & Film."
Film students instantly recognize his film debut made in collaboration with Luis Buñuel: Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929). Its most infamous scene, a woman's eye slashed open with a straight-edge razor, still sickens almost 80 years later. That power of cinema to shock, to absorb and to provoke the audience's imagination was at the core of the surrealists' fascination with the cinematic medium.
Dalí's interest in film began in his student days in Madrid and continued throughout his lifetime. The landmark, 16-minute Un Chien andalou was based on an exchange of fantasies and dreams between Dalí and his friend Buñuel. In general, the surrealists believed films had the potential to be visionary, waking dreams. "What the surrealists said was there's something called pure cinema," explains Ian Birnie, film program director for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He continues, "It's not about the story. It's about how sitting in the dark releases your own fantasies." The short's absurd, non-linear, purposefully unrelated scenes are nightmarish and consistent only in their shock value. Motifs appear to which Dalí returned quite often in his art. A severed hand, crawling ants, doors that open to unrelated locations and a bicyclist making his rounds are among them.
Chronicling that evolving interplay of artist and medium is the exhibition "Dalí & Film" organized by the Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation of Figueres, Spain, (Dalí's hometown) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "[Dalí's] relationship to film changes as he goes from being a fan to being a screenwriter to being an art director in Hollywood to, later on, making films," explains Sara Cochran, assistant curator of modern art and one of the co-organizers of LACMA's presentation. "The exhibition is about this dual dialogue of film to his art, and then back to his art," says Cochran.
More than 100 works are Included in "Dalí & Film," from the instantly recognizable melting timepiece and widely reproduced The Persistence of Memory (from New York's MOMA) to early gouaches to later works such as the truly weird Portrait of Colonel Jack Warner. Alongside will be video installations showcasing Dalí's film oeuvre, including Un Chien andalou, L'Âge d'or (Age of Gold, 1930; his second and final collaboration with Buñuel), the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1945 Spellbound and the animated short Destino, which was commissioned by Walt Disney himself.
The mass audience potential of films lured Dalí to California. In 1937, Dalí wrote to his friend, the surrealist poet André Breton, "I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists - the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney." The surrealists admired the Marx brothers tremendously, regarding them as genuine anarchists. Dalí and Harpo Marx became friends, and a number of the works in the exhibition are on loan from the Marx family. Although no contract was ever signed, Dalí wrote an un-produced film script for the brothers entitled Giraffes on Horseback Salad.
The artist worked briefly in 1941 on the feature Moontide, starring legendary French actor Jean Gabin, imagining dream sequences that didn't make the film's final cut. Like many European artists of the time, Dalí sought refuge in the U.S. during WWII. He spent many years, on and off, in Carmel, California, painting. Ever the showman, he threw an infamous "Night in the Surrealists' Forest" party there that welcomed Bob Hope and featured fish served in shoes, and domed silver platters, that when opened, revealed live frogs.
Dalí's most remarkable paintings are infused with an atmosphere of hyper-reality and an almost photographic reproduction of detail often paired with dream-like images. The subconscious can be seen as key to his art. One can only imagine that, when director Alfred Hitchcock presented his script for Spellbound to producer David O. Selznick, the producer roared, "Get me that painter Dalí - the dream guy!"
Spellbound was revolutionary for its time as it was the first studio production to earnestly and somewhat accurately demonstrate psychoanalysis. Dalí was the perfect choice to design sets and backdrops that would "realistically" allow the audience to experience dreams. In the mid-1940s, "Hollywood was coming around to idea of psychoanalysis," explains Cochran. "Spellbound takes itself seriously as a film about psychoanalysis - this idea of the unconscious, the idea of dark qualities that differentiate and complicate human beings," she adds. In an all-too-familiar Hollywood scenario, Selznick ordered the original dream sequence of 15 minutes cut down to the two-and-a-half minutes that exist today. Both a scenic backdrop and the existing footage are part of the exhibition.
Dalí's final studio project also had a truncated finish. For eight months in 1946, Dalí actually punched a time clock at the Disney Studios in Burbank, sketching and painting cells for an animated short, Destino, which explored a favorite theme of Dalí's (and Disney's) transformation. The project was shelved due to budgetary reasons and remained in the Disney Animation Research Library for more than 50 years until completed by Roy Disney in 2003. Pen-and-ink sketches, watercolors and storyboards, as well as the now-finished animated short, make an appearance in "Dalí & Film."
Dalí's lasting influence on film is a complex equation. Spellbound greatly impacted the American avant-garde cinema from 1945 to1965, contends LACMA's Birnie. When it was first released, the surrealists panned the film, declaring that Dalí had cheapened their ideals. Dream sequences as dramatic moments in features peaked by the mid-1950s. Certainly film production designers have co-opted visuals from the artist, but music videos and television are where the non-linear reigns. Pop surrealist directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry got their start in the fractured genre where weird juxtapositions and suspension of disbelief are the norm. TV's hit shows "Grey's Anatomy" and "Scrubs" revel in the alternate universe that dreams provide.
Throughout his lifetime, Dalí stayed connected to filmmakers and was the subject of several documentaries. His appearance on TVs "What's My Line?" Is now a youtube.com favorite. Andy Warhol studied his rise to fame carefully; Dalí s Warhol screen tests and his efforts at early video art are also part of the exhibition. Filmmaker José Montes Baquer, of 1975's Impressions of Upper Mongolia, collaborated with Dalí on the surreal piece that, in part, explores patterns made by urine on a knife. Baquer describes Dalí in an interview in Tate Etc., published by the Tate Modern, as a consummate professional who was interested in the craft but had a seasoned take on the film biz. Per Baquer, Dalí's quotes include this memorable advice: "The most decisive moment in the production of a film is when you need the force of will to convince your producers that if this film is not made, the world, as we know it, will come to an end." Spoken like a true Hollywood realist. -MPM
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