The Cinematic Legacy of Salvador Dalí

Happy birthday, you beautiful weirdo.

On May 11, 1904, Salvador Dalí was born, and the world — or at least, the world of art — would never be the same. Best known for his paintings, which include such works as “The Persistence of Memory” and “The Burning Giraffe,” Dalí also dabbled in sculpture, writing, photography, and, of course, film. Regardless of the medium, his work is highly recognizable through his consistent style — detail-oriented, overwhelming, and inexplicable, often featuring misshapen and incomplete human forms — and his large repertoire of reoccurring images and symbols, from melting clocks and spindly-legged elephants to ant colonies.

Today he remains the most widely recognized member of the Surrealist movement, which is suitably ironic considering the official movement ultimately ousted him. Certain members, including André Breton — the Regina George of the Surrealist group, if you will — deemed Dalí a sell-out, going so far as to scornfully bestow upon him the pejorative appellation “Avida Dollars.” Of course, Dalí, who was more than happy to rent out his eccentric persona and mustache to such causes as Lanvin Chocolates and Alka Seltzer for the right price, did not mind the nickname at all. And the thing is, as J. G. Ballard pointed out in a 2007 article for The Guardian, by being “a genius and a show-off greedy for money,” Dalí actually was the one Surrealist who actually stayed faithful to one of the original commandments of Surrealism: “shock the bourgeoisie.”

While he was a generally fascinating and wonderfully weird human, this being FSR, let’s take a moment on his birthday to specifically celebrate the cinematic contributions and legacy of the one and only Salvador Dalí.

Dalí and Film

It is somewhat inaccurate to say Dalí ever made a film. The much more appropriate claim is that he contributed to a number of films over the many decades of his career, including several projects that were never completed. But before getting further into the films Dalí worked on, there’s a very important question that should be addressed: what did he actually think about movies, on the whole? And the answer to that, in typical Dalí fashion, depends on what quote you’re looking at. Because referring to different sources he either thought they were the best thing ever or the worst. In the poem “Sant Sebastià,” Dalí lists film as one of the “simple facts motivating new lyrical states” in modern popular culture (along with sports cars and gin cocktails).

Dalí showed the greatest admiration for the comedians of the silent era — Harry Langdon he called one of the “purest flowers of cinema,” Chaplin and Keaton he also admired. Oddly enough, a friend of Dalí’s as a young man claimed the artist resembled Buster Keaton, though I must admit, I really can’t see it. However, in 1932, Dalí went on to write that “contrary to current opinion, the cinema is infinitely poorer and more limited, as expression of the true functioning of thought, than writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture.” While that does seem a pretty hard criticism, Dalí must have still seen something redeeming in cinema, because he went on to pursue several other film projects in the future.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

This collaboration with Luis Buñuel is the big one, even though it’s only 16 minutes long. It’s easily Dalí’s most iconic film, from its infamous eye-slicing scene to its hand full of ants, and it’s one of the only films that all scholars generally agree qualifies as a bona fide Surrealist work. As Buñuel explained, talking about himself and Dalí in the third person, that the film was constructed “from a dream image[…] when an image or idea appeared the collaborators discarded it immediately if it was derived from remembrance, or from their cultural pattern or if, simply, it had a conscious association with an earlier idea. They accepted only those representations as valid which, though they moved them profoundly, had no possible explanation[…] The motivation of the images was or meant to be, purely irrational! They are as mysterious and inexplicable to the two collaborators as to the spectator. NOTHING, in this film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.”

L’age d’or (1930)

The jury is still out regarding how much Dalí actually contributed to this one. While everyone save the biggest Buñuel fanboys (whoops, sorry, I meant biographers) seems more or less in agreement that Un Chien Andalou was around a fifty-fifty split, L’age d’or is more contested territory. While Dalí’s contribution on this one was definitely less than it was on Un Chien Andalou — the two artists, who produced the earlier film at the height of their friendship, were now going through something of a falling out — some claim that Dalí’s contribution was restricted to one lone gag scene of a man walking with a stone on his head. Others vehemently disagree. Going off of the finished product alone, while there’s definitely more Buñuel than Dalí in this one, the latter’s presence still seems quite apparent when one compares L’age d’or to Un Chien Andalou versus Buñuel’s numerous independent projects.

Spellbound (1945)

In this 1945 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, psychoanalyst Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) seeks to unravel the mysteries surrounding her new coworker, Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck), who’s not who he says he is. Unfortunately, Edwardes can’t remember who he actually is. Cue Freudian0style dream analysis—which, of course, requires a suitably Freudian dream sequence. Hitchcock specifically sought out Dalí “because of the architectural sharpness of his work,” the filmmaker specified years later in an interview. He didn’t want the gauzy haze of the typical movie dream sequence, but the strange sharpness of a Dalí painting. And he got it.

While the full sequence Dalí designed was rumored to have originally been somewhere in the ballpark of twenty minutes long, it was deemed overly complicated and cut down in the editing room to around two minutes in the finished film. Unfortunately, the remaining footage has since been lost.

A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí (1970)

This 52-minute “documentary” on Dalí, directed by Jean-Christophe Averty and narrated by the Orson Welles has a smattering of the sort of cut-and-dry biographical information one would typically expect from such a documentary, and a whole lot of the absurdity one expects from Dalí.

Destino (1946, 2003)

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