Dali & Film: DALIWOOD
Words: Shawn Kyle

Running February 8  - June 1, 2008
Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg

Perhaps no other artist has straddled the line of fine classicism and the scandalous avant-garde quite like Salvador Dali. A sensation in his meteoric rise to international fame – and equally regarded mad and brilliant – he was a man whose subtle calculating motives were as perplexing as his oil paintings and publicly outrageous social antics.
 
St. Petersburg is blessed to be the home of the Dali Museum, which has globally the largest collection of his masterworks as well as a rotating cast of sculpture, iconography and other assorted early works. Traditionally, the New Year brings with it a fresh showing of deliberately selected works within a particular theme, but when it is a gallery focused solely on the works of one artist, things can become predictable and a matter of simply shuffling a few paintings about and throwing some new cards on the walls and calling the exhibit by a different name.

This is not the case at the Dali, which recently unveiled its early 2008 offering, Dali & Film.

Featuring over one hundred works from collections spanning Europe and America – including rarely seen films, photographs, scripts, and set drawings – this is the first exhibit to examine the profound relationship between the paintings and the visually stunning cinematic creations of Salvador Dali. As an experimental artist, one can imagine the excitement of being present when a new stream of creative expression was cracking open into the mainstream. Like many other visionaries of the time, Dali found a fresh voice in the medium of film. The museum has made select excerpts from many of these films available for your viewing, projected tastefully on the walls and hedged in on either side with priceless works of oil painting.

In the legendary short film Un Chien Andalou (1929), the iris opens to a brief conflict in which a man calmly slits a woman’s eye with a straight razor. As the film progresses, we are treated to a mass of black ants swarming out of a hole in a man's palm; a woman run down by an automobile in the street; and finally, a lecherous man groping a lovely girl before irrationally grabbing some stray straps hanging out of the wall, dragging two grand pianos through a wall that are filled with the corpses of two dead donkeys, and trailing what appears to be the tablets of the Ten Commandments with two live priests bound by ropes at the end. This is only one of the many works on display. Also for your viewing pleasure are Dali's numerous surrealist studies in cinema, as well as his legendary collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock and previously banned collaboration with Walt Disney.

These shocking – yet essential – artistic productions, created and exercised parallel with the birth of a medium, still hold up to this day. I cannot urge you enough to visit this exhibition. Glamorous movie star dress is encouraged, but do not bring the popcorn. They do not allow food in the gallery.

In addition to the current exhibition on display until June 1st, 2008, the Museum is hosting Dalifest 2008 on March 15th.  Please view www.salvadordalimuseum.org for more info.