Friday, April 15, 2011
Hallucinogenic Celluloid: Salvador Dali's Soft Self-Portrait & Destino
“Nothing seems to be more suited to be devoured by the surrealist fire than those mysterious strips of 'hallucinatory celluloid' turned out so unconsciously in Hollywood, and in which we have already seen appear, stupified, so many images of authentic delirium, chance and dream.” -- Salvador Dali, 1937
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres near Barcelona in 1904, Salvador Dalí (1904—1989) was a gifted artist from an early age. As a teenager, he travelled to Madrid to attend the prestigious San Fernando Academy of Art (Picasso’s alma mater), and by the late 1920s he had already earned a reputation in Barcelona as an excellent draughtsman and scandalizing provocateur. Dalí’s first “big break” would come not through painting, however, but through film, when in 1929 he collaborated on a seventeen-minute short with his school friend, Luis Buñuel. The film, titled Un Chien Andalou ("The Andalusian Dog"), was intended as an “anti-art” film that would shock the establishment. It went so far as to even include scenes of putrescence – ants and rotting donkeys among them – to suggest the “cultural cadavers” that needed to swept aside to make way for the new art. Although Buñuel famously reported that at the first screening of Un Chien Andalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl in the event that the audience revolted, somewhat to his and Dalí’s disappointment the film was an immediate success when it premiered in Paris. Indeed, its disturbing opening, in which a razorblade slashes a young woman’s eyeball, remains one of the most celebrated sequences in all of cinema history.Dr. Elliott H. King
Born in the Catalan town of Figueres near Barcelona in 1904, Salvador Dalí (1904—1989) was a gifted artist from an early age. As a teenager, he travelled to Madrid to attend the prestigious San Fernando Academy of Art (Picasso’s alma mater), and by the late 1920s he had already earned a reputation in Barcelona as an excellent draughtsman and scandalizing provocateur. Dalí’s first “big break” would come not through painting, however, but through film, when in 1929 he collaborated on a seventeen-minute short with his school friend, Luis Buñuel. The film, titled Un Chien Andalou ("The Andalusian Dog"), was intended as an “anti-art” film that would shock the establishment. It went so far as to even include scenes of putrescence – ants and rotting donkeys among them – to suggest the “cultural cadavers” that needed to swept aside to make way for the new art. Although Buñuel famously reported that at the first screening of Un Chien Andalou, he carried stones in his pockets to hurl in the event that the audience revolted, somewhat to his and Dalí’s disappointment the film was an immediate success when it premiered in Paris. Indeed, its disturbing opening, in which a razorblade slashes a young woman’s eyeball, remains one of the most celebrated sequences in all of cinema history.Dr. Elliott H. King
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