Old Hollywood
Cinema
1900-1979
Nostalgia is a seductive liar - George Wildman Ball

Full Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

“Traditionally, up to that time, dream sequences in film were all swirling smoke, slightly out of focus with all the figures walking through the mist, made by dry ice with smoke pumped across the top. It was convention. I decided to do these hallucinatory dreams in this style, which was just the opposite of the swirling misty dreams. I could have chosen [Italian surrealist] de Chirico, Max Ernst - there are many who follow that pattern, but none as imaginative as Dalí.”

-Alfred Hitchcock

Stills from the Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Stills from the Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Stills from the Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) For Hitchcock, the primary allure of making Spellbound was the opportunity to give cinematic life to the dreams that help to unravel the amnesiac’s identity. From the outset, Hitchcock envisioned having the dream sequence designed by the famed surrealist Salvador Dalí.

Stills from the Salvador Dalí-designed dream sequence in Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

For Hitchcock, the primary allure of making Spellbound was the opportunity to give cinematic life to the dreams that help to unravel the amnesiac’s identity. From the outset, Hitchcock envisioned having the dream sequence designed by the famed surrealist Salvador Dalí.

Salvador Dali & Ingrid Bergman on the set of Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 

Bergman: “It was a wonderful sequence that really belonged in a museum. The idea for a major part was that I would become, in Gregory Peck’s mind, a statue. To do this, we shot the film in the reverse way in which it would appear onscreen…I was dressed in a draped, Grecian gown, with a crown on my head and an arrow through my neck.”

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Above: Salvador Dali’s design for the deleted ballroom scene in the dream sequence from Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 

Below: Gregory Peck & Ingrid Bergman in the ballroom scene

“In order to create this impression [of oppressiveness and unease], I will have to hang fifteen of the heaviest and most lavish pianos possible from the ceiling of the ballroom, swinging very low over the heads of the dancers. These would be in exalted dance poses, but they would not move at all, they would only be diminishing silhouettes in a very accelerated perspective, losing themselves in infinite darkness.”

[Spellbound producer David O. Selznick, worried about costs, decided to suspend miniature pianos from the ceiling. To correct the consequent problems with perspective, the studio employed forty dwarfs to dance in the scene]

“The miniature pianos didn’t at all give the impression of real pianos suspended from ropes ready to crack and casting sinister shadows on the ground…and the dwarfs, one saw, simply, that they were dwarfs. Neither Hitchcock nor I liked the result and we decided to eliminate this scene. In truth, the imagination of Hollywood experts will be the one thing that will ever have surpassed me.”

-Salvador Dali, Dali News, 20 Nov. 1945

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Miklós Rózsa - Ski Run (Spellbound: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

“It was the theremin that made the score a sensation. Here was an instrument that seemed magic, both in its sound and the way that sound was created. One plays the theremin without ever touching it: the performer moves his or her hands above the object exactly like a magician, producing otherworldly sonorities that theremin lovers call ether music.

The theremin was heard as a “primal scream”, the first “coming together of science & music”. It was therefore perfect for Spellbound, where it invokes the science of psychiatry in the guise of what seems like supernatural spookery (or, depending on one’s point of view, the reverse).

-Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music