Dali and Film

Surrealist painter Salvador Dali wasn't all about melting clocks. He was inspired by film and even collaborated with Walt Disney. Vera Brozzoni checks out a major new exhibition at the Tate.

It is well known that Surrealist painter Salvador Dalì, he with the most famous moustache in art history, has collaborated with directors like Luis Bunuel (his personal friend, director of Surrealist films Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or) and Alfred Hitchcock (the nightmarish eye-curtain in Spellbound).
What is often forgotten, though, are the references that his paintings (dating from the 1920s) make to the new media of cinema. This extensive exhibition underlines how the artist’s pictorial techniques, imagery and image composition are inspired by film.
Usually art is referred to as cinematic when it implies movement and dynamism, which doesn’t often happen with Dali.
But the painter focuses on two main aspects of cinema: depth of field and a framing that implies the existence of a mysterious “off-screen”.
So it becomes evident, for instance, that in the background of The Bleeding Roses Harold Lloyd’s comedies are evident; Shades Of Night Descending uses a cinematic shadow device and the landscape of The First Days Of Spring has a cinematic perspective (in hindsight, one notices that the stranded sketches figures in the same painting recall the opening shot of Alain Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad).
However, the most striking example of this is a minor painting called Morning Ossification in which a horse jumps out of an ossified cypress: there are so few explanatory elements that we are bound to believe that later the camera will move to show the off-screen.
Whereas the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to Dalì’s early paintings and the film collaborations that he achieved, the last few rooms focus on the second part of his life and the American film projects that were never developed.
These include a screenplay for the Marx Brothers called Giraffes On Horseback Salad, the aborted dream sequence in Moontide and cartoon Destino by Walt Disney.
Dalì had been impressed by Disney’s Fantasia and started collaborating with him in 1946; Destino was then stranded but completed in 2003 and will be shown for the first time during this exhibition.  

Dalì & Film is on until September 9th at the Tate Modern. All the films the artist collaborated on are shown in the exhibition. They will also be screened at the Starr Auditorium within a program of films that inspired the painter or were indirectly inspired by him. For more information, visit www.tate.org.uk. 

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