Surrealism and Film
Saturday 16th June 2007On the occasion of Tate Modern's major exhibition Dalí & Film, this study day explores the work of Salvador Dalí in relation to the wider links between surrealism and film. Dalí's own collaborations with Hollywood icons from the Marx Brothers to Hitchcock and his fascination with the great slapstick artists of early cinema are put in the context of both his own ventures into filmmaking with Luis Buñuel and the persistent lure of the surreal in contemporary art and film. Speakers include renowned Dalí expert Dawn Ades, Tate curator Matthew Gale, film expert Ian Christie and Elliott King, who researches Dalí's later work. Chaired by Gill Perry, Head of Art History at the Open University.
Watch the Surrealism and Film sessions on Tate Channel
Session 1: Dalí & Film Exhibition: An Introduction
Speaker: Matthew Gale, Head of Displays at Tate Modern
Matthew Gale gives an introduction to the Dalí & Film exhibition at Tate Modern. He discusses the curatorial issues concerning the show that arise from the juxtaposition of Dalí's paintings, photographs and drawings with his film imagery.
Further Reading
- Paul Hammond, The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, London 1978 and San Francisco 2000
- Paul Hammond, L'Age d'or, London 1997
- Haim Finkelstein ed., The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge 1998
- Fèlix Fanés, Salvador Dalí: La Costrucción de la imagen 1925-1930, Madrid 1999, revised as Salvador Dalí, The Construction of the Image 1925-1930, New Haven and London 2007
- Robert Short, The Age of Gold: Surrealist Cinema, London 2003
- Dawn Ades ed., Salvador Dalí: The Centenary Exhibition, exh. cat., Palazzo Grassi, Venice and Philadelphia Museum of Art 2004
- Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, Oxford and New York 2006
- And obviously: Matthew Gale ed., Dali & Film, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2007
Session 2: Why Film?
Speaker: Dawn Ades, Director of the AHRC Centre for Studies of Surrealism and Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex
Was there, for Dalí, a special appeal in film? Was it an alternative to his paintings, adaptable to certain effects beyond the reach of the canvas? Was it an extension of the pictorial image, or rather of his writings? Dawn Ades reviews Dalí's affair with film, a story of disappointments and optimism.
Further Reading
- Paul Hammond L'Age d'or BFI Film Classics 1997
- Dawn Ades "Morphologies of Desire" in Salvador Dali: The Early Years South Bank Centre 1994
- Salvador Dali "The Rotting Donkey" (1930) in Haim Finkelstein The Collected Writings of Salvador Dali CUP 1998 p.223
- Translation of Dali "Art Film, Anti-Artistic Film" (1927) in the Dali & Film, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London 2007
Session 3: Dalí, Fonzie, and what 'Late Dalí and Film' can tell us about Late Dalí and Everything Else
Speaker: Elliot King, a specialist in Dalí's post-war art and cosmogony. His first book, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (2007), is published by Kamera Books.
Critics have often identified Dalí's 1941 rejection of Surrealism in favour of 'classicism' as the 'tipping point' when his work began to decline. His activity with film offers a compelling challenge to that history. Dalí and Film has been less restricted by the chronological and thematic partitions that divide the artist's work in other media. Using the exhibition as a springboard, Elliott King suggests that the conventional categories used in classifying the artist's work – 'early', 'Surrealist', 'late', 'classic', 'atomic', etc. – are useful but also potentially limiting; as Dalí and Film shows, abandoning them can lead to a refreshing view of Dalí's complete – and continuous – oeuvre.
Further Reading
- Robert Cozzolino, 'Why Are Salvador Dalí's "Late Works" His Most Contentious?', in Hank Hine, William Jeffett and Kelly Reynolds (eds.), Persistence and Memory: New Critical Perspectives on Dalí at the Centennial (Milan: Bompiani Arte, 2004)
- Salvador Dalí, Open Letter to Salvador Dalí (New York: J.H. Heineman, 1967). Originally published in French as Lettre ouverte à Salvador Dalí (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966)
- Salvador Dalí, 'The Last Scandal of Salvador Dalí' (New York: Julien Levy Gallery [exh. cat.], 1941). Written under the pseudonym Felipe Jacinto.
- Reprinted in Haim Finkelstein (ed., trans.), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- Elliott H. King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (Herts: Kamera Books, 2007)
- George Stolz, 'The Late Great Salvador Dalí', ARTNews 104, no. 2, February 2005
Session 4: 'The marvellous is popular!' Dalí in the context of Hollywood surrealism
Speaker: Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, director of the London Screen Study Collection and vice-president of Europa-Cinemas
Surrealism started as a revolt against the idea of elite avant-gardism, and even if it eventually became a new avant-garde, its adherents maintained an enthusiasm for popular culture, including mainstream and genre cinema, becoming arbiters in this field. This presentation examines two strands in Hollywood cinema to which Dalí, like other Surrealists, was drawn – the carnivalesque and the erotic-romantic – and will also consider the Freudian morality drama, to which he eventually contributed.
Further Reading
- Paul Hammond, ed, The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2000.
- Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, Berg, Oxford, 2006
- Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968, Thames and Hudson, 2005
- Ado Kyrou, Le surrealisme au cinema, Editions Arcanes, Paris, 1953
- Ian Christie, 'French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From Specificity to Surrealism' in Philip Drummond et al, eds., Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975, Arts Council of Great Britain Exhibition Catalogue, 1979 pp.37-46
