I just came across this article in The New York Times about Dali films and paintings. At the moment at Museum of Modern Art in New York is a special exhibition about Dali "Dali: Painting and Film” continues through Sept. 15;
Reflections Through a Surrealistic Eye: Dalí and the Camera
Published: June 27, 200
Published: June 27, 2008
Nearly 80 years on, the famous image from “Un Chien Andalou,” which Salvador Dali and his art-school friend
Luis Buñuel cobbled together in Paris in April 1929, remains one of the most shocking in all cinema. A woman’s face fills the screen. A man’s left hand widens the lids of her left eye; his right begins to draw a straight razor across it. Then there is, as it were, a jump cut. The razor slices through the eye of a dead cow and gelatinous ooze tumbles forth. Yick, and whew. Such special effects are crude by today’s digital standards. But the high point of the first genuinely Surrealist film can still be churning no matter how often you see it.
At the moment that can be as often you please, thanks to “Dalí: Painting and Film,” a strangely piecemeal, open-ended and inspiring exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Organized by the Tate Modern in London in cooperation with the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí in Figueres, Spain, it has been overseen by Jodi Hauptman, a curator of drawings at
MoMA, and is accompanied by an extensive film program selected by Anne Morra, an assistant curator in film. The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí’s films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera.
“Un Chien Andalou” is projected continuously in the show’s first gallery, following a batch of paintings, collages and ink drawings that Dalí made from 1922 through 1931. They include a stately portrait of Buñuel from 1924 done in
Picasso’s neo-Classical style, and hints of things to come. A painting and drawing from 1927 feature a severed hand, like the one seen in “Un Chien Andalou” lying on a busy Parisian street being poked with a stick by a moody young woman.
The penchant for decaying flesh so present in Dalí’s art is literalized quite bluntly in “Un Chien Andalou.” It takes the form of two dead donkeys laid out on the strings of grand pianos. Those are harnessed to a young man trying to force his attentions on the young woman who earlier dodged the straight razor, holding him back like a combination of guilt, social constraint and fear. The cluster of scurrying ants — like that stream from the stigmatalike wound in another hand in the film — recur throughout the exhibition, migrating across faces, gathering in corners, exploring bodily orifices. (Also on view is a detailed letter from Buñuel about how to transport ants from Spain to Paris and have them lively enough for purposes of filming.)
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres in 1904, Dalí was endowed with a litany of textbook neuroses. He was named for an older brother who died the year before he was born, and he never lived down the notion that he was a poor substitute; he learned early on to use outrageous behavior to mask his shyness, inferiority complex and sexual ambivalence.
At an early age he recognized painting as his salvation, demonstrating a gift for rendering that suggested Van Eyck’s exacting skill softened by the subtle lusciousness of
Vermeer. He read Freud word for word, devoured avant-garde magazines. Inspired by Bosch, de Chirico and Miro, he began to paint Surrealism’s most optically precise and psychologically disturbing images almost before he ever went to Paris. His vast pristine plains interrupted by jagged mountains, architectural ruins and variously grotesque, fraught and sexual signs of life are among painting’s most convincing portraits of the mind and its discontents.
But Dalí’s devotion to painting was not exclusive. There was the continuing performance that was Dalí himself, with his gift for publicity and controversy, his relentless narcissism and frenetic imagination. There is his enormous body of writing: a novel, poetry, an autobiography and numerous theoretical essays. There were set designs, beginning in 1927 with those for “Mariana Pineda,” a play by another close art-school friend, the poet
Federico García Lorca, and later for ballets by Massine and Balanchine.
He gravitated to film as soon as movies began to be shown regularly in theaters throughout Europe (including Figueres) in the late 1910s and early ’20s. Like many avant-garde artists in both Europe and America, he admired the work of
Buster Keaton,
Harold Lloyd and the
Marx Brothers, especially Harpo, the silent and, for him, most Surreal sibling. (
Groucho Marx noted that Dalí “is in love with my brother — in a nice way.”)
But mainly Dalí grasped that film’s capacities — for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving, continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality — were all ready-made for his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience. Dalí’s pristine, limitless plains were lifted almost verbatim from the implicitly surreal landscape of his beloved Catalonia, but they also had the artificiality of a Hollywood soundstage.
Nicely, the show at MoMA doesn’t sequester the films in pitch-black rooms. Their grainy or silvery grisailles flicker in full sight of Dalí’s often small, intensely colored paintings, which sit on the walls like brilliant boxed jewels.
As the exhibition ebbs and flows, the drawings and films gradually supersede the paintings. Subsequent galleries display nonstop projections of “L’Age d’Or,” which Buñuel and Dalí made in 1930, and the somewhat questionable “Destino,” the sprightly animated short of love and loss that Dalí worked on energetically for Walt Disney in 1946, only to have Disney pull the plug. It was resuscitated and completed in consultation with John Hench, one of Dalí’s original collaborators at Disney, in 2003, but a large batch of Dalí’s original sketches attest to the attempt to remain true to his ideas.
In the final gallery “Chaos and Creation,” a 1960 video of a Happening that Dalí staged with the photographer Philippe Halsman, involves some nearly naked women, a few very clean pigs and an intense dislike of Mondrian. It is both a period piece and a testament to an artist striving to keep up with his times.
“Adventures in Upper Mongolia — Homage to Raymond Roussel,” a largely abstract film conceived by Dalí and made by the Spanish director José Montes-Baquer in 1975 is more original. The narration of the film’s veil-like layers and suspended patches of rusts, golds and blues concerns a journey in search of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The label informs us that the motifs are microscopic images, much enlarged, of the oxidation on the brass details of some fountain pens, and moreover that Dalí urinated on them every day to accelerate the oxidation process. The film could have been made by a young Pictures appropriation artist in the 1980s.
The show’s drop-dead gallery is dominated by an enormous projection of the dream sequence Dalí designed for “Spellbound,”
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 suspense classic starring
Ingrid Bergman and
Gregory Peck. One scene of a man with a giant pair of scissors cutting a huge curtain painted with multiple eyes echoes “Un Chien Andalou.” (In fact it had been planned before Dali signed on.) In her catalog essay about the film, Sara Cochran rightly considers this an indication of how completely contemporary culture and especially Hollywood had assimilated the style and motifs of Surrealism. For all its violence, the razor scene in “Un Chien Andalou” announced an intention not only to shock but to “open” the eye to a new way of seeing. MoMA’s fragmentary yet haunting show provides a fresh view of how Dalí, for all his outrageousness, never stopped trying to live according to the ambition he so brutally visualized.
