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DVD: Dali / The Definitive Dali (1986)
 
Film:  Very Good    
DVD Transfer:  Good  
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Region:
1 (NTSC)
         
Released:

January 18, 2000

 

 

 
Genre: Documentary / Art History  
Synopsis:
Broad but informative examination of artist Salvador Dali.  

 

 

Directed by:

Adam Low
Screenplay by: n/a
Music by: various
Produced by: Adam Low
Cast:

Salvador Dali (archival), Dawn Ades, Prince Jean Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge, Mrs. & Mrs. A Reynolds Morse, Amanda Lear, and Albert Field.

Film Length: 75 mins
Process/Ratio: 1.33:1
Colour
Anamorphic DVD: No
Languages:  Dolby 2.0
Subtitles:
 
Special Features :  

n/a

 
 
Comments :

“I’ve always said I’m a very bad painter because I’m too intelligent to be a good painter” - Salvador Dali

 

Adam Low’s BBC documentary is a fairly straightforward portrait of an iconic artist who became almost the figurehead of the surrealist movement. This, in spite of being kicked out by its tightly-knitted members back in France, when he painted Lenin with a severely elongated posterior.

The rudeness seemed too much for his surrealist compatriots (which included filmmaker Luis Bunel), but that hardly affected Dali; the painter just continued to seek commissions and ultimately moved to the U.S., where he became an identifiable pop culture icon and seemed to cultivate a persona of a crazy, unintelligible loon who happened to make great, eye-catching art.

A telling moment is an interview with a British TV journalist who discusses with Dali the atomic visual elements in his current paintings. Dali’s English is, quite frankly bizarre, and it’s something he seems to play up as part of an eccentric loveable oddball, but when the meaning of Dali’s further reply becomes too murky for the journalist, the two exchange comments in perfectly intelligible French.

The same is prevalent in one of the painter’s later interviews with a young Spanish journalist. Dali’s wit is omnipresent, but his thoughts are complete and easily digestible. So why did he play up the persona of a nutter, if not a wavering buffoon in films like Salvador Dali: A Soft Self-Portrait (1970)?

It’s something Low doesn’t address in the doc, but the film has a unique position in being made soon after a fire in Dali’s home, which further transformed him into a deep recluse, prior to his death in 1989.

After a opening that sets up Dali as a kind of Charles Foster Kane, all locked up in his museum quarters, the narrative becomes fairly linear in terms of following a fairly chronological examination of Dali, using quotations from his autobiography (The Secret Life of Salvador Dali) and a melange of film clips (Un Chien Andalou, Spellbound with decent interviews covering his involvement with those films) as well as newsreels, documentary extracts, and stills of his famous works.

It’s a fairly light and mildly engaging journey peppered with Dalinian witticisms by the painter himself, occasionally seen at work, sketching or painting murals for one of the Dali museums in Spain.

The most novel components are archival interviews with former members of his surrealist clique (Man Ray, Bunuel, Max Ernst), as well as Isidoro Bea, Dali’s assistant who followed the master’s instructions when Dali moved from more standard-sized paintings to gigantic canvases and murals that needed to be completed in weeks, and not months.

There’s also nice segments on one Dali’s benefactors (Prince Jean Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge) who supported the artist during his leaner years; Americans Mrs. & Mrs. A Reynolds Morse, who own and run a Dali museum in Florida that contains 25% of the artist’s total (known) output; and archivist Albert Field and forgery expert Jean-Paul Coffre, who separately address claims that Dali signed blank sheets of paper onto which others painted, and sold off as genuine Dali art.
 
Low also spends time on Dali’s lifelong romance with Gala; the castle they ‘restored’ in the seaside village where the artist would paint so many rocky seascapes; and the artist’s major periods, from surrealist pictures to Hollywood portraits (as for Laurence Olivier). The religious paintings are dissected by Author Dawn Ades (Dada and Surrealism), who provides a soft overview of Dali’s use of striking perspectives, colours, fine details, and elements mimicking dispersed nuclear atoms. (A much sharper examination of Dali's interest in atomic power is done in the superb 2004 documentary Dali Dimension.)

It’s a bit dry at times, but as an intro primer to the artist, it breaks up some of the cartoonish images we have of a master who, for better or worse, also allowed himself to become a pop icon, and appear in chocolate commercials and Alka-Selzer ads.

 

© 2008 Mark R. Hasan

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