Dalí & Film (review)

Exhibits are often an excellent means to bring together the reflections and perspectives of leading scholars on a specific topic. This was certainly the case of the itinerant exhibit on Dalí and Film, initially showcased in London's Tate Modern (June 1-September 9, 2007), which brought about the first comprehensive monograph on the subject. Profusely illustrated, the book offers a complete, almost encyclopedic picture of Dalí's work, projects and writings on film. In the opening chapter ("Why Film?") Dawn Ades sets up the tone of the different contributions by emphasizing the triangular interdependency among film, painting and writing in the artist's oeuvre. The various authors highlight the cinematic perspectives and techniques the painter utilized on his canvases to create multiple images, strange atmospheres and destabilizing perspectives, and reveal the presence of his paintings in his films as well as the existence of symbols, motives and subjects from his films in his pictorial work. Féix Fanés underlines how Dalí accumulated in space elements in a form reminiscent of "the sharp, intermittent and, at the same time, rhythmic and dynamic expression of cinematographic montage" (37), while Matthew Gale points out the artist's pictorial use of cinematic techniques such as the panoramic view that embrace the spectator or his provocation of anticipation generated by casting a shadow from the foreground, commonly utilized in the films of suspense. The essays dedicated to Dalí's experimental films are perhaps one of the most interesting contributions of this monograph, revealing the painter's use of film as a projection of his pictorial techniques and aesthetic ideas. A film such as Impressions de la Haute Mongolie-Hommage à Raymond Roussel (1974), dealing with a fantastic expedition to the upper-Mongolia, relies on extrapolated images from the microscopic stains and scratches on a ballpoint pen and illustrates how Dalí recycled old aesthetic practices from his anti-artistic period of the twenties, such as his focus on common objects to produce images "that were rooted in reality but pushed beyond it into an adjacent, highly charged sphere" (56). The artist also added a typical element of showmanship to create "painting performances" such as Chaos and Creation (1960) and L'Histoire prodigieuse de la dentellière et du rhinoceros (Prodigious History of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, 1954-62). The first one, made in collaboration with Philippe Halsman, is a documentary that became an art work in the style of John Cage, Georges Mathieu or Yves Kelin. As Helen Sainsbury explains, Chaos and Creation was an exploration of Dalí's well-known attitude to modernism and is credited with being the first artist's video. The Prodigious History of The Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, filmed in collaboration with the photographer Robert Descharnes, shows Dalí's work on Vermeer's famous painting, which he related to the mathematical logarithmic proportions found in the horn of the rhinoceros and other natural shapes. The work has also great documentary value and parallels art-performances such as Hans Namuth's films of Jackson Pollock.

In addition to the articles of Matthew Gale on Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and on L'Age D'Or (The Golden Age, 1930) and to other essays on Dalí's cinematic productions, the book provides a wealth of information on many of his other projects for the silver screen that were never carried out or even known by the public. As Elliott H. King points out in the final chapter of the volume, "the Catalan artist's cinematic experiments went well beyond those that have entered popular consciousness or even for which we have acknowledged scenarios." This was the case of La Chèvre sanitaire (The Hygienic Goat) (1930-1), a script he wrote immediately after L'Age D'Or, that echoes his ideas on film already expressed in an article of the same title, and where the artist advocated the break up of the principles of synchronicity, continuity and correspondence in film language, and aimed to translate to the screen his pictorial paranoiac-critical method of discrediting reality. From...