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.

Enrique Rivero in The Blood of a Poet (1930, dir. Jean Cocteau)

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.”

-Man Ray (via)

Kiki of Montparnasse, queen of 1920s Parisian bohemia, in Emak Bakia (aka Leave Me Alone, 1926, dir. Man Ray)

Though best known for his avant-garde photography, Man Ray directed several influential short films in 1920s (several of which can be seen here), which reflected his involvement in the Dada & Surrealist movements.

Of Emak Bakia, Man Ray wrote: “A series of fragments, a cinepoem with certain optical sequences making a whole that remains a fragment. Just as one can much better appreciate the abstract beauty in a fragment of a classic work than its entirety, so this film tries to indicate the essentials in contemporary cinematography.”

(via)

via Un Chien Andalou (1929, dir. Luis Buñuel) (online here)

“Amusingly enough, a great many psychiatrists and analysts (i.e., film critics) have had a great deal to say about my movies. I’m grateful for their interest, but I never read their articles, because when all is said and done, psychoanalysis (i.e., film criticism), as a therapy, is strictly an upper-class privilege.

Some analysts - in despair, I suppose - have declared me ‘unanalyzable,’ as if I belonged to some other species or had come from another planet (which is always possible, of course). At my age, I let them say whatever they want. I still have my imagination, and in its impregnable innocence it will keep me going until the end of my days.

All this compulsion to ‘understand’ everything fills me with horror.”

-Luis Buñuel, in his autobiography My Last Sigh

Dinner in the desert lit by giraffes on fire, Salvador Dalí’s design for Giraffes on Horseback Salad, his proposed Marx Brothers film (1937)

Salvador Dalí sketching Harpo Marx (1937, via).

Dalí, a huge Marx Brothers fan with a particular admiration for Harpo, whom he viewed as “the most surrealist figure in Hollywood”, sent him a harp with barbed wire for strings and forks & spoons for tuning knobs as a Christmas present in 1936. Delighted, Harpo wrote Dalí that he would be “happy to be smeared by you” if the artist ever found himself in Hollywood. The next month Dalí arrived, brushes and easel in hand. The resultant painting is lost, but a monochrome pencil-and-ink study has survived (here).

Dalí wrote an entertaining, if rather implausible, account of this meeting in a 1937 Harper’s Bazaar article:

“I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest. In Harpo’s pupils glows the same spectral light to be observed in Picasso’s.”

Dalí later wrote a script for a Marx Brothers movie, Giraffes on Horseback Salad, which included, among other things, burning giraffes wearing gas masks & Harpo catching dwarves with a butterfly net. The film was never made. Groucho Marx, that killjoy, claimed to have scuttled the project: “It wouldn’t play.”

The Pearl (1929, dir. Henri d’Ursel)

The Midnight Party (1938, dir. Joseph Cornell)

“Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally occur passages to remind one again of the profound and suggestive power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to release unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human countenance in its prism of silver light.”

-Joseph Cornell, Enchanted Wanderer

“Joseph Cornell holding an Untitled Bottle Object” (photographer: Duane Michals, c. 1969) (via Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema)

Rose Hobart & the erupting Mt. Bombalai in Rose Hobart (1936, arranged/edited by Joseph Cornell)

“Salvador Dali was beside himself with envy. He had always been prone to jealous rages, and Rose Hobart provoked his full malevolence. Halfway through the movie, there was a loud crash as the projector was overturned. ‘Salaud (Bastard)!’ came from Dali. Dali’s wife, Gala, pushed her way toward him and pleaded, ‘Calme-toi.’ But Dali could not be placated. ‘Salaud and encore salaud!,’ he shouted again and again, while members of the audience rose to restrain him.

Dali had good reason for envy. As critics would later remark, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart ranks with Dali’s Un Chien Andalou as a masterwork of Surrealism - and in some ways it is a more radical work.

Dali lamented: ‘My idea for a film is exactly this, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made….I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had stolen it.’ (Dali would later accuse Cornell of being “a plagiarist of my unconscious mind.”)

Cornell was deeply aggrieved by the incident. It had never occurred to him that someone as marginal as he could excite the envy of a world famous Surrealist. Thus Cornell was instructed firsthand in the unkindness of fellow artists. To the end of his life, he would recount the story whenever he was asked to screen his films, usually as a way of explaining why he must decline.”

-excerpted from Utopia Parkway:The Life & Work of Joseph Cornell