Later Films
Although the title âSurrealistâ was more or less bestowed and revoked at AndrĂ© Bretonâs discretion, the aesthetic rupture between DalĂâs âSurrealistâ and âEx-Surrealistâ painting was largely delineated â and exaggerated â by DalĂ himself. The painter was not reticent to directly oppose his âclassicalâ outlook â heralded in the catalogue for his 1941 exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery, in his essay âThe Last Scandal of Salvador DalĂâ â with his 1930s production, which he belittled as merely âexperimentalâ.1 Over the next 40 years he declared his work was no longer âSurrealistâ, yet he abandoned neither the paranoiac-critical method nor identifying himself as the only true Surrealist. Certainly his 1941 partition provides a convenient means of identifying a turn in his work: Thinly-veiled Freudian symbols give way to geometrically-organised mythological subjects. But while esteemed commentators have emphasised the severity of the 1941 âclassicalâ shift, closer examination reveals as many continuities as differences between the artistâs âSurrealistâ and âclassicalâ styles. While the case can â and, in my opinion, should â be made that DalĂâs 40 years of pictorial output following his break with Surrealism in 1939 was neither the aesthetic chasm he pretended it to be nor the hollow commercialism critics have judged it, the evidence for continuity is all the more persuasive with regards to his film scripts â particularly those classified here as âlater filmsâ â due largely to his habit of taking from past projects. Impressions of Upper Mongolia â Homage to Raymond Roussel (1975) is perhaps the cinemaâs most exhaustive use of the close-up that DalĂ had lauded in the 1920s, launching its story from a microscopic zoom that focuses on the scratches and stains on a ballpoint pen. Also in the legacy of âanti-art filmâ, both The Wheelbarrow of Flesh (1948â1954) and The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros (1954â1962) were described as âexactly the opposite of an experimental avant-garde film, and especially of what is nowadays called âcreativeâ, which means nothing but a servile subordination to all the commonplaces of our wretched modern artâ.2 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that certain scenes in The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros bear a striking resemblance to Un Chien Andalou â indeed, as the ultimate in auto-pilfering, in 1959 DalĂ had his archivist Albert Field request permission from Buñuel for scenes from Un Chien Andalou to be recycled in The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros.3 Though this bid was unsuccessful, Un Chien Andalouâs famous opening would be resurrected in 1975 for the introduction to Impressions of Upper Mongolia â Homage to Raymond Roussel.
Such continuities confirm that the artificial partitions that have been constructed amongst DalĂâs early, Surrealist and long-censured âlateâ production have been unnecessarily exaggerated. What is perhaps more true, at least in terms of cinema, is that after LâĂge dâOr, DalĂ simply never again had access to a director as talented as Buñuel who could help bring his eccentric ideas to the screen; he was never able to single-handedly direct a picture. It is undoubtedly for this that over the years DalĂ repeatedly tried to persuade Buñuel to collaborate on another film, though he wouldnât receive a response until his last pitch in 1982, âThe Little Demonâ, by which time both were too aged to embark on any such venture.
In this last section I often employ the term âfilmâ in favour of âcinemaâ. Despite DalĂâs access to the top names in the industry â Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Samuel Goldwyn, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Jacques Tati, Shirley Maclaine, Warren Beatty, Yul Brynner, Mia Farrow, Ali MacGraw, Brigitte Bardot, Darryl Zanuck and Otto Preminger, to name only a few â of his ideas that did come to fruition after Father of the Bride, none was made expressly for the silver screen. The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros was, as weâll see, less a cinematic project than a visual sketchpad, Chaos and Creation (1960) pioneered video art rather than cinema and Impressions of Upper Mongolia â Homage to Raymond Roussel was made for television, raising the question of how DalĂ viewed TV â as a purely vulgar medium, as Amanda Lear suggests, or as a platform potentially on a par with cinema when the right eye is behind the camera. One may remember the 1956 CBS programme DalĂ directed at the height of his âatomic periodâ that superimposed a cauliflower onto a rhinoceros horn, Jean-Christophe Avertyâs television documentary Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador DalĂ (1967), the wonderfully amusing âHappeningsâ he shot for French television in the 1970s, his Emmy Award-winning 1972 interview with Russell Harty for the UK television programme Aquarius and his 1978 television special, 1001 Visions de Salvador DalĂ, in which he interviewed the Romanian philosopher StĂ©phane Lupasco and Professor AndrĂ© Robinet, an expert on Nicolas Malebranche; he is also said to have worked on a stereoscopic television channel with the American company Video Head. I touch on only a few of these projects here, but if Robert Descharnes is correct in saying, âFor DalĂ, a camera was a camera [âŠ] The important thing was the film when he intervenedâ, mightnât one be just in describing them all as mini-âfilmsâ? Further, how many of these actually survived? When Russell Harty asked DalĂ, âWhen was the last time you made a film like the one weâre doing?â DalĂ quickly answered, âOne everyday.â This must be an exaggeration, but certainly he had the equipment and means to make a short documentary of himself as often as he liked. Pushing the boundaries yet further, what about the TV advertisements he made for Braniff Airlines and Lanvin Chocolates â who can forget his expression when he declares himself âfou de chocolat Lanvinâ? One of the agents who worked with DalĂ on his 1974 commercial for Alka-Seltzer, in which he painted the medicineâs effect (literally) on the Spanish model Natividad Abascal, remembers that the artist âhad no understanding of the 30-second time frame. He assumed that the commercial would start when he did and end when he was finished. Four minutes, five minutes, whateverâ;4 it sounds like DalĂ had more of a film in mind than a short advert, doesnât it? While I have tried to make this introductory guide to DalĂ and the cinema as complete as possible, the subject is potentially far-reaching, encompassing his work with television, photography, stereoscopy and even holography. Plainly all this is beyond my scope, but to gain a true appreciation for DalĂâs film work, one would be well-advised to explore these other relevant areas, too.
Wheelbarrow of Flesh, 1948â1954
I have positioned DalĂâs unrealised script Wheelbarrow of Flesh here to launch his âlater filmsâ, though the script touches on many areas of his cinematic development and might equally have been inserted into one of the other sections: Its themes are perhaps most closely aligned with his âSurrealistâ scripts â the symbol of the wheelbarrow was directly derived from his writings of the early 1930s; at the same time, it was conceived in California and was originally to star Paulette Goddard, one of Paramountâs top actresses, and thus might have capped DalĂâs âHollywoodâ period, though this wouldnât be fully accurate as it almost immediately became a chiefly European venture, perhaps due to DalĂâs inability to interest the Hollywood establishment with his scenario. Justifying its presence in this section, DalĂ touted Wheelbarrow of Flesh as the first âNeo-mysticalâ film, by which he meant that it would âintegrate in realism [âŠ] the tradition which is typical to the spirit of Spainâ.5 This suggests that the film should foster a fecund rapport with his âlater filmsâ conceived under the rubric of âNuclear Mysticismâ â specifically The Prodigious Story of the Lacemaker and the Rhinoceros, with which Wheelbarrow of Flesh seems to have had some cross-over.
As DalĂ tended to elaborate on his projects the longer he worked on them, the first version of Wheelbarrow of Flesh, a script in English preserved at the FundaciĂł Gala-Salvador DalĂ, is the most straightforward. It features only four unnamed principal characters: a shepherdess and young man, a hunter and a convict. The film opens with the young man working alone on the stone wall of his vineyard far from the village. He is approached by the shepherdess, who flirts with him and uses the wheelbarrow as a table for meals between them. At one point the young man is overcome by desire and lunges at the shepherdess. A nearby hunter witness to the manâs attack shoots and kills him, then escapes into the forest. The shepherdess puts the young manâs body in the wheelbarrow and takes it to the village, where the hunter confesses his crime, explaining that he was only preserving the shepherdessâs honour; he is sentenced to three years in prison. The shepherdess then joins a band of gypsies, during which time she becomes deliriously attached to the wheelbarrow, which she fills with all her small possessions. When the caravan makes plans to leave and the gypsies tell her that she must leave the wheelbarrow behind, she refuses, opting instead for a solitary life completely centred on the wheelbarrow. After various hallucinations of her lover and the hunter, the shepherdess visits the hunter in prison, where he promises to marry her. She accepts, but soon after she is admitted to a mental hospital. Upon leaving the hospital, she finds her wheelbarrow again, which has now inexplicably become flesh â as DalĂ notes, âit breathes and bleedsâ.6 The hunterâs friend, a convict, meanwhile seeks out the shepherdess to tell her that her fiancĂ© is soon to be released. The hunter is released a day early, however, and when he goes to the shepherdessâs house to surprise her, he finds her with hi...