Surreal cinema

Dali & Film

Edited by Matthew Gale

Tate Publishing: 238 pp., $60 paper

IN the winter of 1929, two young Spaniards, Luis Bunel and Salvador Dali, spent several weeks together hammering out the screenplay for the short film eventually titled “Un chien andalou,” which Bunel then shot and which had a riotous premiere in Paris in June of that year. By the following fall, the two artists were at it again, collaborating on a longer (and I think better) movie, released as “L’Age d’Or” in 1930. These two exercises in cinematic surrealism constitute all of Dali’s significant work in the medium, although they are not by any means all he had to say about it or all he hoped to do in it, as this catalog of the exhibition “Dali & Film” (which opens today at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) makes clear.

Judging by this volume, the exhibit is mostly an excuse to gather a large number of Dali’s works and perhaps encourage an upward reevaluation of his reputation, in decline for decades, in part because of his clownish, indefatigable self-promotion. The catalog contains many drawings and paintings that Dali made for the numerous, mostly failed attempts to insinuate himself into the commercial movie world after 1930, but most of the work it reproduces are paintings and other art objects that he either created coincidentally with his film projects or that take up themes and symbols he proposed to use in aborted movie work. “Dali & Film” thus becomes a curious enterprise -- one is tempted to call it a celebration of nothingness. Or, if not that, an excuse to contemplate frustration and failure on a grand scale.

In his famous essay on Dali (not once cited herein), George Orwell wrote that the artist’s gift was for “a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing,” his true metier perhaps being “an illustrator of scientific textbooks.” Or maybe a movie production designer, which also requires a lot of technical facility. These are not thoughts that the high-toned essayists of “Dali & Film” entertain. The painter intermittently and inconsequentially piddled about with the movies, and because he is alleged to be a major artist, we are asked to take these piddlings seriously -- but there aren’t enough of them to mount a major show, so out comes “The Persistence of Memory” for the umpty-umpth time.

The catalog and the exhibition thus match the artist; they are essentially hollow at the center. Except for this: Dali raised interesting theoretical questions about the nature of cinema that some of the book’s contributors worry rather interestingly. Dali was of the generation, born in the earliest days of the 20th century, that took a proprietary interest in movies. They were a new generation and this was a new medium, their own, with which they could challenge the conventions and convictions of their elders. In the years immediately after World War I, movies had not yet fully embraced the bourgeois narrative manner, borrowed from novels and plays of the past. Eisenstein’s epic cinema, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” the documentary experiments of Dziga Vertov (“Man With a Movie Camera”) and Walter Ruttman (“Berlin: Symphony of a Great City”) -- all these hinted at delirious expressive possibilities, to which Dali responded with woozy enthusiasm.

He proposed a dialectic between what he called (in 1927) the artistic and the anti-artistic film. The former was essentially a movie made in full awareness of a long cultural tradition, a shapely narrative that took into account long-held ideas of beauty, history, romantic convention, “reality” as we had been taught to perceive it by the artists of the past. By contrast, the anti-artistic film was “remote from any concept of grandiose sublimity” and “rather than showing us the emotion exemplifying artistic delirium, reveals, indeed, all the most humble and immediate facts, which were impossible to imagine or foresee before cinema.” There was a spirituality in the ordinary that allowed the camera’s eye, like the sleeper’s brain, to “transubstantiate a tree, a street, a game of rugby,” which is one reason the style of the Bunel films is so documentary-like.

What may be most interesting in Dali’s theoretical writings are his enthusiasms for the passing strangenesses that commercial filmmakers embedded (mostly unconsciously) in their movies -- “the quintessence of Buster Keaton’s hat,” as he put it. Or Adolphe Menjou’s mustache. Or the anti-narrative anarchy that Harpo brought to the Marx brothers’ films. Dali identified Walt Disney, especially the Disney of the “Silly Symphonies,” as an embryonic surrealist, and he saw something of the same spirit in Cecil B. DeMille, especially when Claudette Colbert took her asses’-milk bath in “The Sign of the Cross” (1932). What any of these gentlemen thought of being drafted into the surrealist army we cannot know. But we are entitled to think Dali more right than wrong in his enthusiasm for anything that interrupts the smooth progress of our narrative expectations, shakes us out of our voyeuristic passivity before the screen.

It is this quality that makes “L’Age d’Or” so entrancing today, nearly 80 years after its release. I’m not certain how much Dali contributed to it, but he surely approved what Bunel wrought. The film tells a story of sorts -- about the misanthropic adventures of a representative of the “International Goodwill Society,” whom we meet as he attempts to rape a woman in a mud hole (or is that gunk actually excrement?). Subsequently, he kicks a dog, knocks over a blind man and slaps his hostess silly at a grand establishment party. Mostly, he is smitten by her daughter, which involves a good deal of finger sucking. A cow is found in a woman’s bed; a gamekeeper shoots his son for knocking the cigarette out of his mouth. Without these diversions from the customary -- and there are many more of them -- the film might have been some sort of espionage thriller; instead, it is a grand, often hilarious subversion of genre cliches and behavioral politesse, all managed with deadpan aplomb.

“L’Age d’Or” was the great signpost on Bunel’s road. He became the sly (and, by some of us, beloved) master of placing surrealist absurdity in conventional narratives. That road was not open to Dali; he had no gift for narrative. At best, he could concoct only an image or a fleeting succession of them to insert into someone else’s film, most famously managing this in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945) -- although even that sequence was re-edited by other hands. Hitch himself rather liked it, if only because it was hard-edged, as dreams are, instead of blurry, as movies like to represent them.

That’s how it went with Dali’s attempts to “break into” Hollywood and his even more forlorn attempts to make noncommercial avant-garde films. This book shows him to be a good-natured collaborator (he even put in some time at Disney, where he had his champions) who left a thin trail of drawings and ideas that never came to fruition in their intended form. This is too bad, I suppose, but not a matter that need trouble us for very long.