The Museum of Modern Art: Dali: Painting and Film

Combining film, painting, and drawings the “Dali: Painting and Film” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art examines the influence of film on Salvador Dali. With the inclusion of gems such as the artist’s most recognized work, Persistence of Memory and Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusian Dog), the show was congested with museum-goers all struggling to catch a glimpse at the surreal and perplexing work of Dali. Seeing every piece was impossible. I found myself peering over heads and looking through crowded bodies, which in a way was fitting for Dali.

Oddly enough Dali’s work Persistence of Memory was not drawing the crowds I expected. I was able to decipher the famous symbolism I learned in my art history classes. It was much smaller than I thought, which was disappointing. I imagined it as big as my college roommate’s poster version.

The first film on view was Un Chien Andalou surrounded by paintings the semi-darkened room was less then appropriate for either medium. The film directed collaboratively by Luis Buñuel and Dali is probably one of the best-known surrealist films of its time. Un Chien Andalou is based on two separate and unrelated dreams of Buñuel and Dali and explains why the chronology of the film is fragmented. The bizarre film features two central characters that appear to be having a love affair that ends in tragedy. The imagery of the man widening the eyelid of his lover’s left eye with one hand and preceding to draw a straight razor across her eye with the other still makes me flinch even after seeing it numerous times. Not to mention the chills that run over my body during the ant scene. The absence of a narrative leaves the viewer with many questions much like Dali’s painting.

Dali and Walt Disney’s shared film, Destino, was certainly the showstopper. The animated film encompasses the alluring appeal of Disney classics combined with the strange hypnotic whimsy of Dali. Ben Walters speaks of the delightful film saying it was like “walking a weird fault line where Disney's dream world meets Dalí's precise surreality”. The exhibition includes storyboards and letters between the producers mapping how step-by-step the film came to fruition. The distraction of the chattering crowd was lost as soon as the looped film began. The room silenced and people gathered around as if in a trance completely mesmerized by the film’s flowing love story. The wall postings and storyboards allude to the ill-fated love Chronos, an all-powerful god, has for a mortal woman. The long-haired hour glass shaped woman looks like any other Disney princess but Dali’s surrealist backgrounds prevent it from being cliché.

In 1966 Dali sat for some screen-tests produced by Andy Warhol who flipped the film upside down to distort the image in honor of the Spanish Surrealist. Warhol stated, "it's like being with royalty or circus people". Dali’s work has a sort of awe that is unexplainable. He truly was the first artist to be seen as a celebrity. A notion perfected by Andy Warhol and carried on by Damien Hurst.

The alluring and very comprehensive exhibition not only shows the influence of film on Dali’s work but his impact on the cinematography. It was really wonderful to see the artist’s iconic representation of melting clocks and ants set in motion in his films. It is as if his paintings come alive in these films.