Hello, Dalí: Painting and Film by the Master Surrealist at MoMA

The artist whom people best know for his melting clocks, baguette-crowned bicyclists and crawling ants, not only painted and drew, but also had an avid interest in film. This Sunday, the Museum of Modern Art will open the exhibit [Dalí: Painting and Film], the first retrospective of Salvador Dalí’s work in-house since 1941.  Focusing on his films, the show has six galleries dedicated to single projects and important time periods in Dalí’s film career.

The exhibit aptly displays a side of Dalí that is less talked about, and it does it well.  The rooms of the exhibit are easy to navigate and the rich content sticks with the theme while enhancing the films.  As an avid Dalí fan, I have been to dozens of museums and shows highlighting his career, and it was nice to go to a show that I felt I hadn’t been to before.

Arranged in chronological order, the exhibit starts with the 1929 film, Un Chien Andalou. This film, on which Dalí collaborated with Luis Buñuel, was meant to induce the feeling of dreaming, or more, “nightmaring.” It not only shows unsavory images like a decaying donkey and piles of ants, but also has the cult-classic scene of an eyeball being sliced by a razor blade.

Paired with this film is the painting, “Apparatus and Hand” (1927), which has images from the film but centers on a large figure made of geometric shapes propped up by sticks.  Protruding from the top of the figure is a cartoonish red hand laced with green veins.  To the side, a donkey and the torso of a woman engage the center object with phantom limbs reaching out.

The next room showed the second film by Dalí and Buñuel, L'ˆge d'Or.  On display were letters between the two men about what the film should contain as well as Dalí’s sketches.  The characters in the film are like Dalí’s paintings, from afar they appeared attractive but the closer you get, the more it becomes clear they aren’t.  This can also be seen in “La Main (Les Remords de Conscience),” Dalí’s 1930 painting of a giant gray hand on a cobalt blue background.  Pretty from a distance, but as you near the picture you see the hand is made of smoke and the man attached to the hand sits in a pile of feces while his eyes drip blood.

Aside from films by Dalí, the show highlights works that stimulated him.  One of Dalí’s greatest inspirations came from the Marx Brothers, whose 1930 film, Animal Crackers, he evaluated in a 1932 essay called, “A Short Critical History of Cinema.”  Dalí especially was drawn to Harpo Marx whom he felt embodied the spirit of madness.  He liked him so much that he sent him a special harp stringed with barbed wire for Christmas in 1936.  Harpo responded by sending him pictures of his bandaged fingers playing the harp—these pictures, along with letters from their collaboration are on display.  Despite all the work Dalí did with the Marx Brothers, the film never reached production.

The show also has films Dalí worked on, like Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 Spellbound where he did the “Dream Sequence,” which features large eyeballs in various states of staring.  Showing a clip from the movie, this part of the exhibition also has one of the actual painted backdrops and some set designs.  One in particular, “The Lost Ballroom Scene,” was as beautiful as it was eerie with ghost couples dancing around a piano that looked like it was morphing into a lion that soon would be ready to eat, or maybe it had, and those where the devoured souls.  Seeing this image made me yearn to witness Dalí’s vision live, which unfortunately was never made.

The best, and most suprising part of the exhibit turned out to be Dalí’s 1946 collaboration with Disney and animator John Hench, in Destino. The fluid momentum of this six-minute film proved that Dalí’s visions work well animated. Based on his images and set to Armando Domínguez’s ballad “Destino,” the short moves beautifully as a woman, who looks like a character from Aeon Flux, dances around Dalíesqe creatures.  Though Dalí basically designed the scenes, the only animation he actually did can be seen near the end when two human-headed tortoises meet. 

Aside from the films shown in the exhibit, MoMA will also screen six films about Dalí in their movie theaters. One of the films, "The Death of Salvador Dalí,” features Dita Von Tesse as Gala and an exaggerated Dalí expressing, “Dalí is only happy in the sun and covered with flies!”  He says this on a visit to Sigmund Freud who then puts Dalí through a regiment of tests.  All the while people continually try and kill Dalí as he insists to Freud that it’s all part of a dream sequence.  The whole thing loops around so that by the end of the short, you are back at the beginning not sure what really just happened.

By the last gallery, you feel that you may have just been in a bizarre dream for the last few hours, but you come out knowing the end is the end.