UNTITLED

The LACMA exhibit “Dali: Painting and Film” positions the Spanish artist as nothing less than a significant filmmaker. “There is a way now to come back to Dali and reappraise him through the optics of film,” says assistant curator Sara Cochran.

The museum hopes that viewers will be able to draw direct comparisons between Dali’s spectacular, even campy, imagery and Hollywood’s use of lighting, movement and depth-of-field. Dali’s 1936 painting “Autumnal Cannibalism,” for instance, carries the viewer’s eye around the frame in a way that could only be called cinematic. He was also one of the first artists to use video.

Yet the real surprise of the show (through Jan. 6) is the inclusion of a half dozen treatments and scenarios for unrealized films. There’s the sexualized image of a woman pushing around her quadriplegic father in “Wheelbarrow of Flesh.” And in “The Hygienic Goat,” you can indulge in images of a self-propelled coffin and taboo affairs.

These works offer a glimpse into Dali’s “paranoiac method,” which was his term for pulling “double images” as he called them, from the subconscious.

As companion viewing, you may want to check out the writings and ideas of Gordon Matta-Clark at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location through Jan. 7. Matta-Clark was the son of another Latin surrealist, Roberto Matta. Yet rather than an indulgent approach, Matta-Clark calls for a socially conscious art form.

-- theguide@latimes.com