Unveiling the Enigma: Salvador Dali's Surrealist Legacy |Perspective

[Music] i'm dreaming of a white christmas with every christmas party [Music] christmases hello hello how are you i'm fine how are you thank you sorry i'm eating but it's all right soon christmas you know it is soon christmas so i love eat for me as well [Music] for years i'd wanted to make a film with salvador dali i was told this is an impossible dream and you can forget all about it he won't do it so i did forget about it and suddenly in the summer of 1965 i got a phone call at home from captain peter moore he told me he was the head of military intelligence for salvador dali's court and that i could come to the hotel mauricion paris and at least me during the war uh i was in the british army in an outfit called psychological warfare concerned with propaganda and softening the might say the mind of the enemy making him feel that they've lost the wall so whenever garli sort of uh for any reason either needs me always says bring in psychological warfare we walked along a thickly carpeted corridor until we reached darli's suite the door swung open and there he sat the divine dali himself in a high-backed throne-like chair his mustaches waxed imperiously reaching skywards like antennae i was impressed this tale of two cities began in new york in 1965 when i became the only living director to actually complete a film with the great surrealist salvador dali i'm now in stockholm working with the museum of modern art on an investigation into dali's startling legacy to the wider world and his influence on my own life and work you say that the poor people are happiest when they have no freedom and they are repressed now listen if poor people are happier when repressed does your work help them to become more repressed or to become more free your painting no no more contracted more contracted types like my myself bought this anchor one prison because can the people start obsession finally becoming completely they think in one dalinian it's 9 25 and i'm waiting for somebody from the darlenian prison to take me on the next stage of my journey [Music] um beautiful day well katrina lundqvist it was you that invited me to stockholm i'm so happy about that that i really invited you and that i got to learn to know you as well because the film darleen new york that i choose to show as the first one in the series of screenings that we made during this exhibition is an amazing film i really love it a lot [Music] [Applause] i can only think he saw me as an innocent a blank canvas that came to him with no opinions about art and actually no opinions about him other than a desire to work with him because he was so magnetic yes but what it did this invitation of yours has set me off on a course of personal investigation yeah to try to discover because i i've since come to realize that as a filmmaker i am very surreal in my own work and to try to find out actually what was the death was his influence upon me yeah and what do you have you come to any conclusions or is this film maybe about that in a way i did see surrealism then as the juxtaposition of unlikely images and fractured narrative i felt that fractured narrative came to me very easily but i think that that happened after working with dolly he influenced you with his surrealism what she really wanted to do with his art i mean in in a way i also find him didactic in a way because sometimes you can see him talk about the surrealism in a way that he really wants people to get into this kind of our art and to start thinking and acting and doing other things than we usually do you know one two three [Music] [Music] i think he's more powerful now than he was when he was alive he wanted he wanted life you know he wanted life to become more than life in a way larger than life larger than life today we seem to be suffused with surrealism in all branches of filmmaking commercials music videos that it's it's really has spread throughout the culture as uh yes it's a form of expression and this is due to the movement one of the reasons why dali liked film so much it was the possibility of superimposed pictures on each other because with his paranoia critical method that was really about getting in contact with the subconscious imagery in ourselves and combining that what we see around us today you know the real the so-called real world dali loved film he loved the cinema he was amazed by cinema from the very start he loved the brothers marks of course and he knew them also he got in contact with them became friendly with harper yes he did yes and he gave him an extraordinary gift because he he came to meet him and then he sent him for christmas gift um a harp but yes but the strings were made of i don't know what you call this in english but this strings of barbed wire yeah i bet he'd be amused if he could be watching us now definitely that little red car he's smiling in his heaven now you know the streets we're still talking about what are they doing they're talking about me [Laughter] that's true god bless him but you know you also work together with hitchcock i requested darley shellsnick the producer had the impression that i wanted darling for the publicity value yeah that wasn't it at all what i was after was again the thing we talked about earlier the vividness of dreams as you know all daley's work is very solid and very sharp with very long perspectives and black shadows actually i wanted the dream sequences to be shot on the back lot not in the studio at all i wanted them shot in the bright sunshine so the cameraman would be forced to what we call stop down and get a very hard image this was again the avoidance of the cliche all dreams in movies are blurred it isn't true dolly was the best man for me to do the dreams because that's what dream should be uh in our collection we have already anciendaloo and we have elijah dorr and he made these films together with luis bonneuer yeah and ancient alu of course it was necessary to have that in the program because i mean it was the first surrealist film ever made i am 20 years old is moving [Music] already the prophecy of the up r because you start the movie cutting one a you know why one black dragon and today the opal consists of create the maximum of violent disturbance in the human area [Music] when i questioned him about his politics i was quite shocked he thought franco was the brightest politician alive in the world at that time it was it was quite alarming and he told me a little anecdote that if you take a needle you take a song bird like a budgerigar what do you call them that little singing bird and you pluck its eyes out with a needle and put it back in its cage the sightless bird sings more beautifully than the sighting i i now did he mean this or did he say to provoke or did he say it to provo i've never been sure about that what do you think what is your gut feeling i don't think he was a cruel man particularly though some others have said he was cruel others have said he was heartless other has said he was mean in the extreme others have said that anybody that ever worked with him inevitably became corrupted after a circuitous drive we finally reached the darlenian prison now cited in a former high security military base [Music] i follow you so crowded so many people yesterday there were six houses on the museum maybe more today i don't know i never saw anything like it not even in new york italian police are looking for five italian americans charged with association to commit crime the five are all repeated to be members of the sicilian mafia [Applause] okay [Music] it's pretty hard to back out i mean once you get bitten by the dolly bug [Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] this spectacular baroque wall is the work of the young italian artist francesco vetsoli who shares this space with dali being strongly influenced by his use of celebrity culture and the mass media gemini 6 is closing in on germany 7 for their historic rendezvous in space they are estimated now to be less than 100 miles apart germany 6 is closing in on 7 at a rate estimated by the computers on the ground to be about two feet per second it is 15 miles below germany 7. they are in contact with with each other by radio they are talking to each other that is the two astronauts in seven are talking from abc space headquarters we now return you to your regularly scheduled program this little people is astronauts coming but this is like the people look only this section and now the camera uh coming back and discovers the dramatic and unwishing phase of my dead brother because myself i'm one artist sometimes but in rarity is not interested at all in painting and literature i'm interested exclusively in cybernetics and quantum physics on biology you just see full just the angle of your face not your eyes the camera that's good like that yep here we go darling suddenly popped a question what kind of a film did i have in mind he asked well i'd rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed exactly what i was going to say to him down to my interest in the dream world my profound affection for his work but suddenly it all went wrong and i don't know why i just blurted it out darli i said my film will almost certainly destroy the comfortable universe you inhabit that is an outrage he said i intend to bring a weightless flying camera i said that can penetrate all of your dreams no no no he said i don't want that i want a massive heaviest camera that can be found in hollywood and i want it bolted to the floor [Music] no no no no i said i don't want the vaulted camera approach you can shoot with your weightless flying camera if i can have five swans exploding in slow motion spilling their entrails all over the screen sounds good i say i like that the spawns will be followed by 2 000 priests on bicycles or i said look i have no affection for priests in any shape or form and i certainly don't want to be dealing with two thousand priests on bicycles all right he said if you supply me with a seven foot plaster cast of michelangelo's statue of david done i said the film was online one moment one moment when he tries to paint what is religious in the true sense of what is religious he makes a mistake because he has no conception of that he would like to he's like somebody chained to a dead animal that wants to fly he does not know anything about the exaltation of the spirit he does not know any and never can know anything like that [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the exhibition design seeks to create a dramatic setting along the lines of dali's own paranoia critical method [Music] according to dali this method involves entering a delirious state in which the unconscious dream world can appear in harmony with the surrounding waking world objects people and events have no straightforward meaning but time and space merge and undergo remarkable metamorphoses [Music] so [Music] yeah maybe time is melting he says maybe time is melting somehow you cannot really hold time here [Music] and his eyes has also melted and then it becomes green in his face because eyes have melted as well you cannot see his eyes here they are not there anymore we know that ali was very interested in dreams as such because he was so fascinated by freud the last relationship between two women's beings in the relationship of freud and ali and all the surrealists were fascinated by freud they had all read his the dream the book of dreams and we know that also that dali met with the freud in london and of course in his surrealistic paintings dreams and the subconsciousness of our minds are very essential so somehow in a way this might be partly dream partly partly reality or the mix between them in connection with the delhi exhibition will be screened in the movie theater on the second floor tickets can be purchased at the cashiers on the second or fourth floor welcome down excuse me just like to know what you think of salvador dali incredible i've i've seen him in exhibitions in spain before i've only just arrived at this one so what i've seen so far is amazing and to be able to see it's so so up close as well but i'm a little skeptical about the explanations of what's going on uh i think probably um dali was making fun of a lot of people when he when he made these paintings i'm surprised that he used so many methods for painting and film and he's a good writer too i'm surprised brilliant yes a genius it's he is a genius yes some kind of genius and his irony is uh he had a humor a lot of humor and i i appreciate that it's about about flying the people flying from the earth and we will leave our planet and the future is there the future is there yeah the first terrorist look real my life is two months before i am born inside of the uterus intrauterine dream of my matter because sigmund freud chemical operation of my arms might be bills create posts for the same cherries and for this reason they paint alpine cherries cherish cherished cherries and this is language the name is fosven means the residues of retinian hallucination the mostly promote in the moment if you press very strong your your edges just of the moment of appeal phosphorus and concentric circles represented letter by fry x floating and moving in the space the zenko and cosmic vision excuse me interrupting sir just like to ask you what you think about salvador dali i really like him yes yes yeah does it have any effect upon you oh yeah where else what kind of effect well i don't need to smoke so much grass no they didn't have to take drugs because he invented the paranoia critical method this is seeing the images that the people are now taking drugs apparently in this one he was making fun of lenin it seems like it but also it's got something to do with william tell i'm having trouble putting that together it's not easy to connect no it's no no no absolutely not no and that was the point i think yeah and i think the quotation at the end when he came to sweden here and he was interviewed on swedish television about this very painting um he apparently said well i hope that's clear but if it's not clear give me a call later and i'll try to make it more obscure for you i think that's a great comment it's the kind of thing bob dylan might have said in an interview as well i think their minds are very much alike i liking immerse an artist even though that perhaps his some of his paintings has been reproduced a little bit too much so they get a bit boring i suppose but you feel they've been cheapened because of that well some of it's more famous paintings and that's why i think that an exhibition like this is is rather interesting because then you see things that are not so reproduced excuse me miss i don't want to interrupt you would you mind telling us what you think of salvador dali no you can ask this man here what do you think of salvador da i don't know i've got a clue right right isn't it whatever [Music] we should never forget that salvador dali was a rogue who liked to tease the establishment he was a court jester and court painter in equal parts who could deliver unpleasant truths not least about the hybrid tensions of art from behind the mask of the clown artist [Music] i told you i wanted the fans marie i'm crazy about morning if there's any problem about anybody not being on a list and not i mean either on a list or a card invitation mr horn will be upstairs he knows that everybody can just get hold of him right away yes everyone right now the uh the spanish flank is a little bit larger than the american flag it was designed for me by salvador dali and it's made of the green peridot and diamonds and uh dolly says that they are everything comes from the from the sky the water comes from the sky and that comes to the fountain from the fountain to little springs and riverlets into the green sea and then back again to the sky i find myself in a secret garden a lost little garden at the back of the museum of modern art in stockholm it's created by pablo picasso in 1962 and he called it dejanes suleil and coming here i've come across her isn't she beautiful and you know she reminds me of a question i asked salvador dali and i asked him when did you first become aware that you had a truly unique perception of the universe uh that's easy he said i was out for a walk with my auntie a very beautiful woman and as we strolled along she suddenly wished to urinate so hoisting her skirts high and spreading her legs wide she proceeded to piss with the force of a cart horse the amber liquid struck the ground with such force that it exploded upwards in myriad droplets each one suffused with bakrat's son and each one carrying the divine secrets of the universe as he told me this story i became intensely jealous for nothing like that had ever happened to me but of course i still live in hope [Music] for my stay in stockholm i've made my base on this beautiful old steam ship the ss orion does uh do you think that man has any more understanding of his irrational self chaos fragmented dream world than he had say 30 years ago you are a part of the memory you know because you were one of the few directors who have access to salvador dali you are somebody [Music] you know who was so involved in an happening with salvador dali doing the film you did in 1965. dally was genetically spanish intellectually french aesthetically italian and an american businessman of course [Laughter] he loved the dollar and the green paper not the money in uh he doesn't love the dollar for the quantity but for the quality and the sample of the usd you see i've had this thing that whenever i walk down the street not all the time of course he's not in my brain all the time that he will my just i find him walking around the corner i still can't believe he's gone we got the dna of danny so for the future we never know what could happen you know george orwell said he's a magnificent artist and a disgusting human being i read recently all well fought with the artist's rifles against franco's divisions so he actually went to war right like laurie lee and a lot of cecil day-lewis who was the english poet laureate but what do you think about franco for example the uh intelligent man today in politics but he hasn't solved the acute problem of poverty in spain for example lack of foreign and poverty is necessarily for only the people is african is completely compressed by inquisition so you like it one night tingle song i couldn't work out how his closest friend is murdered by this regime and how he can appear to be aligned with it because it's not a banner life you know it has some it's theatrical you have you are dead and you are killed publicly i mean it's a theatrical death this is why it says bravo and it's the best death for spanish it's what he says it's what he wrote it's the best thing that can happen to a spanish person to die that way it's better than to die as he did with this tube in his nose in his bed he envied the kind of death that locker had because of a show it was a show that's why he says bravo what do you now i would say that he was probably a cool world we think he was a coward physically for that stuff probably intellectually absolutely not he was not a co-world but physically probably delhi was not an aficionado of franco he used to say well i'm living in spain with franco but the frontier is really close and remember that during the war in the civil war he was in france you know it wasn't in spain helping the republican or raping the franchise so i think he was apolitic you know well he wanted to be in peace so you have to deal with the regime but he's a monarchist he seemed to have a superhuman of course it declined his superhuman strength but when i knew him first it could blitz a town it could set everything alight it could set the street alight while i'm playing the role of the valet can you exactly everybody's mind is left yes no no no everybody's not trying to every vote no no no no no the people will like you becoming myself no more again i [Music] nobody is allowed to role other than a slave nobody can say that in 1965 he didn't talk to ordinary people like he got in the cab and he sort of uh let you know where he's gone and then even want to have anything to do with me you know what i mean and then when we got out i said hey you didn't pay me and he kept walking see yeah and he walked over to the doorman and he said something him the doorman came over and played he wouldn't not like even talk to me you know that's the type of guy oh he was awful with this woman he said to this woman you are my slave it's in that movie it's in that he is horrible i mean this incident that we just had shows his fantastic dependence i mean dependence on another person acting out his fantasies it was obvious that he was so disgusted as disgusting as a human being to say to this woman you are my slave or get out that's her fault that's absolutely right so that's why this made me distinguish the man from the work i mean because i don't see that in the work he threatened to walk out for good that night he's terribly uh terribly conservative here i mean even his of entourage the circus around him that's what they they look like props that are pretty tired now you know there's not there's no real magic in the act like suffering admires of sweet wilds and wounds petrified statues and monolithic tombs plus countless tears and smiles of magdalena mary that night more rang me he said no matter what dali said he will be back working with you in the morning and so right and jane harden walked in but he walked up to her and he did make peace he looked to me and he pointed at her and he said this gentleman is much improved since knowing dolly what is gentleman already becoming more intelligent only touching only touching and she says am i gentleman i don't think i'm a jewish mother tell me why have i changed sex why am i chained why am i a gentleman oh no no no no no as an arjun provocateur for sure it was provoking the people to check if they were ready to work with him was a test yeah of course and then the two girls at the end are sitting in bed and they're reading the reviews of the exhibition and they do a demolition job on his reputation his public personality has been so offensive as to be blinding and his hijinks were so childish as to suggest his own doubts my personality is thousand times much more important my painting his picture is often so vulgarous to confirm ours as well none of it matters darling can no longer be questioned is one of the most extraordinary painters who ever lived and surely one of the handful who will survive our century as never never he'll never survive the century moment you're anti-darli or anti-irrational they think you're against any exploration of the unconscious and that you're the rationalist he used to stand very much on the psychoanalytical platform he doesn't at all psychoanalysis died at the meeting of darley and freud he killed it but against themselves a meticulously traditional female figure what is a meticulously traditional someone on a pedestal that you knock it down later immediately after they demolish him and say his reputation will not even survive the century we're in i cut straight to him on that stage with a big blank piece of paper six foot by four foot i think and on comes monitors the platter [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the troubadours the singer and the monitors play with fantastic energy and crescendo to force them to get out of the chair to draw on this piece of paper [Music] and he waits until their energy has risen to a sufficiently high level jamaican drawback and it goes on and on and then he stops again and they play some more [Music] and finally the horse is standing today is a last chance to visit dali's exhibition which closes this evening it's been their most successful show since picasso over 20 years ago john peter nielsen was he a genius he was or he was not i think he was a genius in the sense that he gave up his life to become dali that is taking lots of guts you know like that's a huge risk you're playing with your life itself yeah yeah so i mean that question that we try to you know search for an answer was there another dali behind the mask no i don't think so i think he became he became the person he wanted to be and that i think is quite remarkable it's like that what does what what does it say to all of us well life is so fantastic you can take it in your hands and you can mold it exactly whatever way you want i remember him saying to me i love every single second of my life every single second of my life is erotic i enjoyed tremendously every single moment of my life because like that all time is very close watch me and that like it catch me and every five minutes let that no catch me i enjoy tremendous catch a little piece of fishy water you send me little tea or something everything becoming one tremendous pleasure fantastic but to live it on that level on that precipice where if you fall there is no one there's no one to save no it's like but i think this is also very very interested in a little bit of an ironic way because it's like dali hated modern art he wrote this incredible book you know like you know and he made his fun about jackson pollock and we have this video he he shot together with philip halsmann from the late 50s chaos and creation where he makes fun out of mondrian possibly becoming one real sublime creation where we saw an eye the paranoia critical method of dali saw a mouth we see now a drawing by pietnet mondrian badali sisa pixtai these these are pennsylvania pigs the new jersey pigs are not inoculated and are forbidden to enter the new york state and this is mrs leslie crane this is not her usual address and this is a slightly debauched motorcycle it's a very 5 under motorcycle there is a great affinity between corn and television look how the tv camera attracts corn it explodes how true to life and it says the only modern artist i like is picasso you know like but but if you think about dali's ideas about how you can take your life in your own hands and you can create it the way that you want this is a very modern idea i think there is a gap between the actual you know piece of art a piece of work of art and the author you know and and i was thinking many many times it's like when i go and see a jack nicholson movie it's like do i see jack nicholson or do i see the uh who is playing you know uh is it the the model you know or is it the real figure i think it may be the real figure in the same sense as darleen exactly i can't think of another nicholson behind the nicholson no no i mean it's like a and i think this this is also very how do you say today is like maybe not tragic but it's a little bit of a sad it's a difficult thing for many people to deal with i can't be myself i mean you're trapped in the you know see look at all the rock stars you know like and especially today the young girls 16 17 years old you know like thrown out on the global scene you know like eaten up by the image of themselves what does it take in the in the human personality or the being to defend against this kind of consumption of the self i think you have to be a very very strong very strong very strong human being tell and my spiritual life star tremendously good and enjoy every single moment of my life in the prison time has caught up to to delhi that today is like you you don't only write the book you have to promote it as well you know like and where is the difference between yeah you know and and this is also why parenthesis you know i invited francesco with solely francesca was only burst upon the nac to bring us touch the memory perhaps [Music] yes we need the ballerinas can you have the ballet come out i mean he's been you know making perfume but the scent doesn't exist he does yes trailers for films for films that doesn't exist but only with trailers etc [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh [Music] greed one of many things that i must say that i i can say i admire taliban was that he was an independent soul you know he loved money but he never used money you know in the bank walls you know like or he loved to be in this well you might love money to grease the wheels of everyday living more than anything else yeah it was like a working-class attitude but with more money thrown about that's all there is to bigger rooms but that's a fantastic story about this portray on jack warner that we have on this place yes yes so uh he did some society portrays dali you know to get some cash you know like but daley never liked jack warner and so he painted jack warner if you look very carefully in that painting the hands look like a dead man's hand he's standing against the marble coffin and the chapel uh that in in the in the back is a chapel in which michael jackson will be buried in the los angeles cemetery is that right this is right so jack warner saw this when the and his why i mean i don't want this painting i said i don't want it now he depicted me on the other cemetery on los angeles it's like but then the one of his lawyers said to jack waller well jack it's better that you buy this portray than anyone else is yes let's get down with it touch your nose and your nose becoming gone everything touch becoming gone in the morning transmutation of material things in goals is the ideal [Music] i'm crazy about morning he was a independent soul you know like and i think we need more of those you know my first meeting with him yeah your film was it's fantastic by the way that's very kind of you to say so i bet i had him and he was like a bomb you know going off [Music] he was one of those characters that refused to be controlled but he was very narcissistic he wanted to be in the center of attention all the time we can laugh with him but not at not this man was a huge influence upon me and i never really understood it or acknowledged it because i went on to make movies that were getting more and more surreal by the minute not the time have you pardoned fine funny thing time there are two ingredients to time one is the notion of time as a logical space the other is the notion of it being a logical space used by us to represent relations between events but this just does not reflect the content of our concept of time however one might wish to hold that a full grasp of our concept of time involves grasping the possibility of using certain mathematical structures in representing the temporal aspect of things someone who fails to see this has failed to grasp something about the full concept of time [Music] chef seven clear seven dali once wrote of himself since my first childhood i've had a vicious turn of mind that makes me consider myself different from the common run of mortals [Music] either i am growing or else the universe is shrinking unless both are happening at the same [Music] time much more than this i did it my [Music] way regrets i've had a few [Music] but then again too few to mention i did what i had to do and saw it through without exemption i planned each charted course each careful step along the byway more much more than this i did my way [Music] you are a part of the memory you know because it was one of the few directors who have access to salvador berlin have you come to any conclusions i think his influence on me was profound jack jack can you stop there let the bus pass jack [Music] [Applause] hey for years i'd wanted to make a film with salvador dali i wanted the vividness of dreams [Music] the film was on he does not know anything about the exultation of the spirit he does not know any and [Music] maybe time to smell things it's like somebody chained to a dead animal that wants to fly [Music] enjoy every single moment of my life we know that ali was very interested in dreams he was so fascinated by fraud he became intensely jealous nothing like that had ever happened to but of course i still live in hope he was a genius in the sense that he gave up his life to become he wanted life to become more than life larger than that larger than life dolly always said he'd never die and in a way he hasn't and never will [Music] what does it say to all of us life is so fantastic you can take it in your hands and you can mold it whatever way you want [Music] um [Music] uh

Channel: Perspective

Views: 93,005

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, luis buñuel documental, surrealism art, surrealism documentary, art documentary, art history documentary, dali surrealismo, la edad de oro, surrealism bunuel, spanish surrealism, un chien andalou explained, un chien andalou analysis, un perro andaluz, an andalusian dog, an andalusian dog explained, salvador dali documentary, salvador dali interview, salvador dali paintings, salvador dali entrevista

Id: BH7xxDLexvw

Length: 54min 37sec (3277 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021