Stefano Roffi

In the macabre scenario orchestrated by his parents, Dalí, just born, is called upon to play the role of his little brother Salvador, who had recently died and who resembled him “like an image reflected in a mirror”; a substitution in the cradle and in the coffin that Dalí, emotionally traumatized, would agonizingly perceive in its absurd suspension, having to assume the identity of being alive while simultaneously being the deceased of another, who would become his artistic spirit guide.

Frequent were the parents’ reproaches: “Don’t go out without a scarf, otherwise you’ll die like your brother”. That critical period that leads children to discover their own image, essential for proper psychological development, proves dramatic for Dalí, who increasingly identifies with the “decomposing shadow” of his dead brother, approaching the sentiment of putrefaction, the state of softness and decay that would often characterize the figures in his paintings (and films) as a sign of the ambiguity and subjectivity of human perception, and showing a true obsession with worms and insects.

In one of his books, “Unconfessable Confessions”, Dalí will openly accuse his parents of having criminally and subconsciously caused him serious identity disorders by calling him by the same name as his dead brother, a threatening deity in that inviolable temple that was their bedroom, where a large photo loomed alongside a reproduction of Velazquez’s Crucified Christ, an icon of his own punishment that would reappear in the Corpus hypercubus of 1954 with Gala, his wife-mother-guardian, mourning the contemplation of suffering.

To counter his weak “putrefied self” and win attention and identity, he resorts to the weapon of narcissism, imposing an exponentially egotistical personality. He approaches André Breton who, in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), recognizes the fundamental contribution of psychoanalytic studies and, in open criticism of conscious rationality, declares that the Freudian method is the path to follow to allow the liberation of the unconscious’s imaginative potential and to reach, through “psychic automatism”, a state of knowledge “beyond” reality (sur-reality) where wakefulness and dream, though without logical connection, are both present and harmoniously and profoundly reconciled, without inhibitory brakes and predetermined purposes, outside of any aesthetic and moral concern.

Dalí defines his personal “psychic automatism” as the “paranoid-critical method”, explaining it through the evocation of images produced by the murky agitation of his unconscious (paranoia) that take shape only through the rationalization of delirium (critical moment), consequently transferring into pictorial representations scans of his personality in complete revelation and transfiguration of self. By mirroring himself in a self that has thus reunited all his peculiarities, he manages to bloom into a satisfying autodemiurgic recognition, of metapsychic mastery, proclaimed in Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937), where a figure folded in on itself, melancholically devoid of identity, looms like a rock on the mirroring surface of a lake and transforms into its own double that takes the form of a large petrified hand holding an egg cracked from which the narcissus flower is born. The phases of transformation are rendered in a consecutive narrative from left to right, so that the opaque colors and forms, initially evanescent, gradually acquire a realistic and concrete connotation, like a slow awakening after a terrible amorphous nightmare.

In his native Figueras, the first cinema hall was opened a few months before Dalí’s birth, so he is part of the generation of artists who first interact with cinema throughout their entire artistic journey. Film would become for him a medium that, although potentially antagonistic to painting, would allow him to develop to the maximum his verbal and visual intuitions, in a surrealist extension of his imagination. In an article published in 1927 in the “Gaceta Literaria”, Dalí writes: “The light of cinema is a light that is at the same time very spiritual and very physical. Cinema captures the most extraordinary beings and objects, even more invisible and ethereal than spiritistic apparitions. Every cinematographic image is the capture of an indisputable spirituality”.

In the two films written with Luis Buñuel, Dalí makes extensive use of Freudian theories on dreams and the unconscious, reprising some of the themes already explored in painting. Un chien andalou (1929) opens with a close-up of one of the first horror scenes in cinema history: a man cuts a woman’s eye with a razor (actually a bovine’s eye); alternately, a cloud cuts the moon in two. In the following scenes, a woman pushes an amputated hand in the street with a stick; a man drags two large pianos containing two putrefied donkeys, the tablets of the ten commandments, and two live priests; a man’s hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge; a woman’s armpit hair attaches to a man’s face like a sea urchin: a long series of mental associations, horrifying scenes, atmospheres saturated with anguish and inexplicable visions, capable of evoking the demons and fears of the collective unconscious, aimed at provoking a moral impact on the viewer through their aggressiveness.

The motif of dead animals was already present in many paintings of that period, and titles like Oiseau putréfié, L’âne pourri or La vache spectrale testify to how the theme of decay and putrefaction, of fraternal derivation, continued to obsess the artist. The two artists were guided by the principle of throwing wide open the doors to the irrational, discarding any image that could give rise to logical, cultural, or psychological explanations. By cutting the eye, the razor blade invalidates traditional optical perception, inviting the abandonment of usual intellectual tools to activate a new type of sensitivity that transcends the collection of real elements that the eye provides to mental processing, while the obscured moon frees the dreamlike mechanism. It is a delirium of absurdity, strangeness, creativity, used to narrate the elusiveness of existence and therefore its intrinsic wonderfulness, which would also seduce the chameleon David Bowie, who would open his 1976 tour with this film.

The second film made by the Buñuel-Dalí duo, L’âge d’or from 1930, iconoclastic and irreligious, exalts the amour fou of a man and a woman against the bastions of bourgeois values – Church, State, Army – and argues that only the subversive force of desire and love is acceptable. It does so with visual inventions based on exasperation, unworthiness, and absurdity: psychoanalytic paranoias triumph among bishops’ skeletons, giraffes thrown out the window, burning pines, and a Christ emerging from the castle of the 120 Days of Sodom. Dalí, not satisfied with the film, would have wanted “a quantity of archbishops, bones, ostensories, sparkling tiaras” to present the Catholic religion in its most dazzling aspects, while Buñuel cultivated an anticlericalism that Dalí found elementary, very far from his idea of sacrilege, a blasphemous form of poetry.

Cinema, which almost all avant-gardes have experimented with, considering it a path towards total art, for Dalí is therefore a marvelous means of expressing dreams that can allow detachment from reality and exploration of the imaginary, connecting incoherent elements to each other but representing them realistically and thus achieving the same estrangement characteristic of his paintings.

Dalí’s relationship with cinema continues and, in a certain sense, reaches its peak at the beginning of the 1940s when, during wartime, he decides to go to the safety of the United States and, having become a famous personality, links his name to some major studios. For a surrealist, Hollywood must have appeared as the place of sublimation of the collective unconscious and the dimension closest to the surrealist ideal in its attempt to satisfy the audience’s irrational impulses. At this point, however, Breton, guardian against any commercial ambition that he saw in contradiction with true art, coins the anagram “Avida Dollars”, an anathema towards his former companion, expelled from the surrealist movement in 1939 for his excesses, who now seemed too sensitive to money and success, aimed also at striking his wife Gala, his muse and wife before Paul Éluard, often a utilitarian interface between Dalí’s genius and the real world, as well as keeper of his mental and emotional balance. Gala, painted as a highly sensual middle-aged woman, also appears in mythological and religious roles, such as Atomic Leda (1949) and The Madonna of Port Lligat (1950), which show the artist’s total subjugation to her (he indeed places her on a pedestal).

In 1941, Dalí develops the subject of a painting titled Face of War, a terrifying and ostentatious image of death derived from the memory of the Spanish Civil War, devising some nightmare sequences for Fritz Lang’s 1942 film Moontide, with Jean Gabin and Ida Lupino; the scenes invented by the artist, images of pure horror in which Dalí tells of a dockworker’s descent into hell who, in a state of drunkenness, kills a man, are not accepted because the technicians refuse to produce the horrible accessories that would have been required.

His collaboration with Hollywood is mainly linked to Hitchcock’s Spellbound from 1945, one of the first film works in which the psycho-love plot is closely concatenated with a true psychoanalytic “therapy”. The surrealist Dalí was entrusted with the task of creating the famous dream sequence, whose images are contiguous but disconnected from the rest of the film, making the sense of pictorial sentiment palpable. Analyzed in accordance with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the scene contains the solutions to the film’s enigmas, delegating the behavioral mystery of protagonist Gregory Peck, a character without memory and possible murderer who becomes catatonic when he sees parallel lines on a white background, to an oneiric interpretive tool. Ingrid Bergman, in the role of a psychiatrist assistant in love with him, helps him discover his true identity through the elements of a dream and unblock a childhood trauma linked to a skiing accident, exonerating him. In an atmosphere of disturbing penumbra and psychophysical instability, anthropomorphic rocks, “soft” wheels, enormous hallucinated eyes, and surreal card games follow one another. When an oversized pair of scissors cuts an eye painted on a curtain, the self-citation of the shocking razor-cutting-eye scene from Un chien andalou is evident.

In addition to numerous unfinished projects, Dalí’s interest in cinema also manifests through curious surreal-pop contaminations of movie star images, long before Andy Warhol did so. The Mae West room in the Dalí Museum in Figueras is named after the transgressive American actress of the 1930s: the living room that reproduces her face, in three dimensions and life-size, is formed by the famous lip-shaped sofa, a nose-shaped fireplace, and two paintings revealing the diva’s eyes, and is the realization of a collage-project conceived by the artist in 1934-35 titled The Face of Mae West Usable as a Surrealist Apartment. In Shirley Temple, the Youngest Sacred Monster of Cinema of Her Time (1939), he shows the sexualization of child stars operated by Hollywood, illustrating the head of child prodigy Shirley Temple, taken from a magazine, above the body of a red lioness with aggressive breasts and extended claws, with human skeletons lying around, the result of her last aggression; a label reads: “Shirley! finally in Technicolor”: awareness of the inexorable prevalence of commercial cinema over avant-garde cinema.