“Every painter paints the cosmogony of himself… Raphael paints cosmogony of Raphael. Raphael is from the Renaissance period. Dali paints the atomic age and the Freudian age, nuclear things and psychoanalytic things.”

- Salvador Dali

Whereas most documentarians attempt a straightforward portrait of an artist from A (birth) to Z (death, and re-evaluation of the artist's work), The Dali Dimension is designed to break the prejudices and clichéd images probably held by the average person of the eccentric, highly influential surrealist painter whose surprised facial expression and abrupt command of English were immortalized by comedians in skits that pretty much made Dali look like a buffoon.

Unlike artists whose creative drive was tied to music, booze, women, or food, Dali curried relationships with scientists and physicists and mathematic theoreticians; he read their books, met with them and discussed theories, and often astonished that insular community when he drew or painted works derived from complex concepts. (Years later, Dali was asked to design and paint cover art for scientific journals.)

Like a scientific argument with an intro statement, and the use of simple examples to explain complex theories and relationships, filmmakers Joan Ubeda, Susi Marques and Eli Pons open their cinematic thesis (the validation of Dali, if you will) by stating Dali's fascination with science heavily influenced some of his greatest work

The painter's own creative brain was blazing with enough curiosity to discovery and draw images that sometimes predated scientific discoveries – the most notable being Thomas Banchoff's unfolded hypercube – or exploited the order and structure of DNA and the power of the atom, the latter influencing Dali's fascination with objects and figures that break apart in elegant layers of geometric or organic fragments.

Equally important to understanding Dali's art is his interest in psychology (primarily Freud's theories), and the mind's perception of multiple embedded figures in a painting, such as a mix of faces and bodies in one work that at first glance resembles a weird landscape with deconstructed heads, bodies, and torsos morphing from rock formations.

Dali Dimension is also a rich mix of visuals, but the filmmakers go beyond showing stills of famous works. The meaning of the famous warped clocks are discussed by several theoreticians, and the filmmakers frequently take archival black and white stills of Dali at work on a famous painting, combined it with a colour insertion, and hyper-focus on the work's most intriguing components, which are then tied to science through comments by several art historians and/or famous theoreticians.

The historical order of famous scientific and psychiatric advancements and discoveries determine the film's structure, through which we do get bio sketches of the artist from his young days to his eventual position as a fifties and sixties pop culture icon. The doc ultimately converges on his final days where he watched a scientific conference held in Spain 's Dali Museum , and the most prominent theoreticians who subsequently visited the severely aged artist who had been observing the debates through a live TV feed.

Dali Dimension isn't a revisionist work; it concisely explains the links between science and art by focusing on specific paintings, and the only disappointment for viewers is that it ends far too soon. While it compels one to seek out more samples of his paintings, it also forces a re-examination of his art by the average person, and convincingly validates his remarkable position as a painter reflecting the some of the most powerful events of the 20 th Century.

The DVD's extras are comprised of deleted interview segments covering Dali's vast library of scientific treatises; his posters for scientific conferences, dissected by Joan Oro; Dali's use of the Golden Mean, the ratio used by ancient Greeks for creating paintings with visually pleasing elements; painter Selwyn Lissack's collaboration with Dali to create holographic images; Dali's interest in antimatter; and Banchoff's surprise at Dali's knowledge of 12 th Century theorist Ramon Llull which led to Dali's own hypercube.

The DVD transfer is very crisp, and the sound mix is very robust, with Tullio Tonelli's score and the classical music extracts quite pronounced. Optional multi-lingual subtitles and captions cover Dali's French, Spanish, and English interviews, while separate French, Spanish, and English language narrators translate the words of some interview subjects.

An extremely engaging and accessible work. Other recommended documentaries on Dali include Dali / The Definitive Dali (1986), and Salvador Dali: A Soft Self-Portrait (1970).

© 2008 Mark R. Hasan