La Main (Les Remords de conscience), 1930.

The Surrealist and the Studio System
An interview with Sara Cochran

Q. Tell us about Dalí: Painting & Film.
A. Basically the show is premised on the idea that Dalí's relationship to modernism is deeply linked to his relationship to film, and that his relationship to film changes over time. He goes from being a fan and critic to being someone who works in cinema; from being involved in the filming with Luis Buñuel to working in Hollywood, working on his own scripts, and ultimately making his own films. We thought that to signal this you're going to come into the first gallery, and the first person you're going to see is a portrait of Dalí's father from 1925, which is a beautiful portrait. It shows Dalí is looking at Cubism, but there's also this sort of weight of the personality. And then you're going to come into this space which is much more angled, and it is sort of to invoke German expressionist film, because there are these early watercolors where I think you can really see he's looking at German expressionist film. There is another way of looking at Dalí, which is what film did for Dalí, especially early on. He was a huge fan, and film also helped him to develop the concept that was "anti-art": an art that was anarchistic, revolutionary and resolutely modern. That's really important, because even when Dalí leaves this very sheltered family life and goes to Madrid, which is where he does his studies, he's sort of pulled between the poles of Garcia Lorca [Federico Garcia Lorca, who would gain fame as a poet and dramatist] and Luis Buñuel [the future filmmaker]; and Garcia Lorca represents very much the historic, folkloric, steeped-in-the-weight-of-history Spain, and Buñuel is very much about everything that's modern. And I think there's almost a way that these two people sort of vie for his soul throughout his university.

Q. They were all contemporaries in university together?
A. Yes; they stayed at the place which is called the Residencia. Basically they were all very close friends, and then, obviously, Buñuel and Dalí go and make the film together [Un chien andalou, 1929], and there's a cooling of the relationship to Garcia Lorca.
 
Q. Dalí advocated an anti-artistic film and painting. What was artistic, in his view, that he was playing against?
A. Well, he's kicked out of university because he declares his professors inept to judge him; he graduates without a degree. And I think again it does come back to the father figure. Obviously Dalí is a consummate reader of Freud, and the interesting thing about Dalí's father—his father is this notary public, quite left wing, very progressive politics—but he does realize that he has this son who is obviously not going to be a notary public. And the only reason he lets Dalí go to university to study art is because he wants him to get a degree so he can go on to teach art in high school. So there is this idea I think of a safeness in art, of not rocking the boat, and I think that Dalí early on starts to become very excited about the fact that he can upset people though his art. Looking at cinema, thinking about the modern, allows him to be much more aggressive. And I think that this is part of his interest in some of his early great loves (and all of the early surrealists' great loves) of cinema, which are Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and also Harold Lloyd: the everyday man taking on the machine and usually winning. And even in early Mickey Mouse, you also get that very anarchistic, revolutionary sort of kicking-the-machine aspect to it, and I think that was something he liked. What's interesting about Dalí has to do with Dalí's technique; it is so precise, and he called it handmade photographs, which I think foregrounds his interest in new technology, in the new. But I think that he also realized very early on that if he paints in a hyperreal way, what ends up happening is that he can make almost anything seem realistic, no matter how fantastical and out of his own imagination. And I think that there's always that tension, because Dalí is someone who's a master craftsman in the way he paints, and yet he's known for this sort of exuberant imagination. Even when you look at how the studio did publicity shots for him in 1940, when he was working on the Alfred Hitchcock film [Spellbound, 1944], that's also how they portray him. He's either the mad genius or the careful craftsman, and I think it's interesting how this sort of dichotomy follows him and haunts him throughout his career.

Still from L'âge d'or, 1930.

“There is this idea I think of a safeness in art, of not rocking the boat, and I think that Dalí early on starts to become very excited about the fact that he can upset people though his art.”

Q. How does the show break down?
A. There are over a hundred and thirty objects: paintings, drawings, and scripts, for various projects that were made or weren't made. The main thing about our installation was that we thought that—if the show is making this argument about Dalí's understanding of modernism and its relationship to film—that we should not separate out the films from the paintings. So we are going to integrate the film so that hopefully the viewer can look from moving images back to still images and vice versa, and really be in this idea of a universe of Dalí's mind. There are seven films.* We will end with Andy Warhol's screen test of Salvador Dalí, in a room by itself, which is really a wonderful, meditative, and also monumental presence of Dalí in the room. The interest for me in the exhibition has to do certainly with Dalí and all of this relationship to film; I think a larger issue, that's sort of like a constellation around it, is the influence of Dalí. And I think we can draw a very interesting line that goes from Dalí to Warhol to someone like Jeff Koons and then on to Matthew Barney. I think there is a way of looking at Dalí's performance of the artistic persona, both on and off the screen, that is very, very contemporary, and really speaks to contemporary artists who are thinking about themselves but are also thinking about their relationship to different media.

* Un chien andalou, 1929; L'âge d'or, 1930; dream sequence from Spellbound, 1944; Destino, planned by Dalí, animator John Hench and Walt Disney in 1946, made into a film in 2003 under the direction of Roy Disney; Chaos and Creation, 1960; Impressions of Upper Mongolia, 1975; and Dalí's screen test for Andy Warhol, 1966.

Q. Almost everybody has some sense, right or wrong, of who Dali is. Will they be surprised by the Dalí of this exhibition?
A. I think that people will be surprised by how much Dalí was excited by American culture and wanted to influence it. There's a wonderful quotation out of Harper's Bazaar in 1937 where he says something like, you know, "Hollywood is ready to be consumed by the flames of surrealism." Dalí gets it, very early on, that the way to get to the mass audience is cinema, and I think he was very clearheaded about that. So people coming to the show will see extraordinary paintings—we have had a number of extraordinary loans, notably The Persistence of Memory from MoMA—but there are also things such as his relationship to the Marx Brothers, and especially Harpo Marx, that we're able to bring out.

Design for a film with the Marx Brothers (Diner dans le désert éclair par les giraffes en feu), 1937.

“I think that people will be surprised by how much Dalí was excited by American culture and wanted to influence it. There's a wonderful quotation out of Harper's Bazaar in 1937 where he says something like, ‘Hollywood is ready to be consumed by the flames of surrealism.’”

Q. What was it, particularly, about film that excited Dali so much? It was a new medium when he was young.
A. It was a very new medium. We know that Dalí watched a lot of the pre-cinemagraphic devices, such as stereoscopes. And there were certainly people, itinerant people who literally would have a camera, and they would go from village to village showing a film, and they would charge a little bit of money. They would show it on a white wall or on a sheet, and that was the excitement of early film. There was a very interesting exhibition in New York this spring, which was called Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism. Pace Wildenstein did it. That was about two artists who were of a generation before Dalí—who realized the excitement that was embodied in the moving image, but were too old to actually take up the camera. I think what's so exciting for Dalí is that Dalí is really of the first generation who can pick up the camera and make something of it.

Q. Should we consider the two films directed by Buñuel the high point of Dalí's cinematic achievement? And a related point: I read somewhere that Dalí would have been well served if he'd had a Buñuel to work with his whole life.
A. I think that Buñuel is a special case. They were very, very close, they had gone through university together, and I think that their collaboration, the way they were working, probably could not have continued. They were both far too strong individuals to allow that to continue . . . I think it was probably impossible to work with Dalí for all of your life. There was only one person who did it, her name was Gala, she was married to him, and she had very specific interests in doing it. I think that Un chien andalou and L'âge d'or are certainly the most revolutionary films in our exhibition. However, I think that it is very interesting to see what Dalí does when he is confronted with the studio system, and I think that the original plan for Spellbound would've been a really beautiful sequence. It is a beautiful sequence as it is, but it would have been a lot more powerful had he been able to do it. Destino is a very interesting collaboration; again it shows Dalí's fascination with American culture. There is this wonderful bit where the two turtles come together, they form the body of a ballerina, who, as she twirls, her head becomes a baseball, which rolls along one of her arms and she lobs it for the baseballer to hit. So there is an incredible fantasy and lightness. And the other thing that's interesting is how these obsessions of Dalí just keep coming back: the obsession with the ants, the obsession with the men on bicycles—how they do come back and how different they look in different films. So without being an apologist for the late Dalí, one of my personal interests is what great modernists did when they went quote-unquote wrong. I think that we are much less dogmatic than perhaps the middle twentieth century and I think that it is interesting to look at the imperfections of Dalí in this later work, and to see how he's thinking about early work, and how these images come back and haunt him, and through him come back and haunt us.

Q. You say "when they go wrong." Was it perceived that way at the time?
A. Oh, very much so. I mean the surrealists hated Spellbound. Breton came up with the most damning of nicknames for Salvador Dalí, which was "Avida Dolares," because he felt that Dalí was just commercializing surrealism. Which I think he was, but I think that he also had this idea of reaching a mass audience. Dalí would probably like to have seen us all infected with a certain degree of madness, and if cinema could help him do that, he was more than willing to embrace it. Hitchcock's really interesting when he talks about why he wanted to work with Dalí. David Selznick wanted the name Dalí—and he says this in his correspondence—because it's a name with a draw, but Hitchcock says it's the sharpness of the image that's really exciting. He felt it was closer to our own experiences of dreams, rather than this very fluid, very effervescent way dreams were depicted at the time where it was all quite hazy. He wanted that ultra sharpness of the nightmare that was coming to get you.

Q. And it seems like at that time, and maybe because of Dalí, the dream scene was on everybody's mind.
A. It dovetails and intersects with this huge interest in Freud. I think Freud was really coming to the forefront. And in the 1930s you've got some wonderful screwball comedies where you have references to Freud, but it's always very tongue-in-cheek. Spellbound sold itself as the first film to seriously take on psychoanalysis, and it does mention that psychoanalysis is the way that we treat the mind of the sane; it's about that the mind can become troubled. And so this interest in dreams, and this idea that dreams can tell us what we are not allowing ourselves to tell us, becomes a really popular trope.

Set design for the film Spellbound, c. 1945.

“Apart from Destino—and even Destino was supposed to be a short film—Hollywood wasn't ready to make a Dalí feature film, because nobody would sit through it. But they liked the uncontrollability of him in small doses; hence, the hallucination, the scene of the drunk, something like that: a moment where the character is off. ”

Q. There's an almost naive belief in the transparency of the process in those early films.
A. Yes, there is a certain naiveté about it, but I think that the other thing about dreams, in relationship to Dalí, is that this is how Hollywood could use Dalí. Apart from Destino—and even Destino was supposed to be a short film—Hollywood wasn't ready to make a Dalí feature film, because nobody would sit through it. But the idea was that they liked the uncontrollability of him in small doses; hence, the hallucination, the scene of the drunk, something like that: a moment where the character is off. And I mean I argue in my essay [in the exhibition catalogue Dalí & Film ] that quite quickly Hollywood comes up with the idea that they can actually do Dalí without Dalí, and I think that they end up doing this.

Q. It's been said that much of Dali's involvement with film is a story of intriguing ideas that never quite materialize. What does that tell us about Hollywood, and what does it tell us about Dalí?
A. I think what it tells us about Dalí is that his own universe, in some ways, was too strong, that he needed enablers. He never found the enabler who was allowing him to work in Hollywood the way that he would have liked. I think it also says that Hollywood is really an institute that toes the line; and that it's willing to transgress in certain areas but it cannot just always transgress. Hollywood needs its rules, its codes, its organization, and Dalí could not provide that. He needed a very creative sense of chaotic engagement, he needed that to function, and so they could only sort of come together for very short moments.

Q. Narrating A Soft Self Portrait, Orson Welles describes the Dalí persona as "not only a wizard in command of real mysteries but a charlatan." How do we reconcile these two aspects?
A. I think the idea of the wizard and the idea of the charlatan are very close. Dalí always played with sincerity and insincerity, and I think again it's this idea of not being pinned down. He enjoyed always being in that constant state of flux, of being able to turn the tables on you and keeping you both the viewer of his paintings but then also somebody who sees him in all sort of different performances, who never knows how sincere and how insincere he is. I think that was something that he cultivated and something that he enjoyed cultivating. The other thing I would say as a caveat to the question is the fact that Dalí could recognize, I don't want to say genius, but talent, in other people. He obviously recognized in Harpo Marx a very kindred spirit, and he obviously felt very, very close to Harpo Marx. I think that in Alfred Hitchcock he recognized someone who was also a kindred spirit; and in John Hench, who was the animator who worked with him [on Destino ]; and I think also in Walt Disney. Roy Disney said some interesting things about how in some ways Disney and Dalí were both such optimists they really got on. They were people who were not interested in the barriers that were put in their way.

Q. What were the Disney works that Dalí and the surrealists found so compelling?
A. We're definitely talking about the Silly Symphonies, when Walt is really getting the studio up to speed and they do these marvelous little short films. I mean, one of my favorites I think is the 1929 Hell's Bells. It's these little mice who actually end up killing Satan. And I think some of magic of Steamboat Willie (1928), and also just the idea of this universe where the beautiful and the grotesque cohabit in very normal ways. I mean, we're talking, I think, Snow White (1937) . . . . There is a polish that you get when you get to Sleeping Beauty (1959), that perhaps isn't there when it's Snow White.

Q. I think so.
A. You can see still a very new, burgeoning medium and I think that that must have also excited them.

Q. There's something anarchistic about it.
A. There is something anarchistic. And also that beautiful woman, who can transform herself into something very ugly; and the fact that all of that can be made completely normal. I think that's also something that links them up—the fact that Walt Disney can make irreality seem real, because of the way he focuses on a type of realism, a realistic representation. Which obviously also harkens back to what Dalí was doing, in this use of hyperrealism to create disturbing universes.

Artworks from top:
Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–1989), La Main (Les Remords de conscience), 1930, oil and collage on canvas, 41/3 x 66 cm, Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida, © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2007, Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida.

Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, L'âge d'or (The Golden Age), 1930, film, 63 minutes, Kino International,© Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2007, photo © BFI Stills.

Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–1989), Design for the film with the Marx Brothers (Diner dans le désert éclair par les giraffes en feu), 1937, charcoal and gouache on paper; 60 x 46 cm, Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida,  © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2007, Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida.

Salvador Dalí (Spain, 1904–1989), Set design for the film Spellbound, c. 1945, oil on masonite, 88.8 x 113.1 cm, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Spain, © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala–Salvador Dalí (Artists Rights Society), 2007.

Sara Cochran, assistant curator of modern art, took time recently to give her thoughts on Dalí: Painting & Film; she and Ilene Fort, curator of American art, were co-curators at LACMA for the exhibition.