HELLO DALI

I spent a fascinating evening wandering through an intriguing new exhibition at Tate Modern devoted to Dalí & Film.

Again and again, I found myself being enticed out of a series of clinically white-walled rooms hung with classic examples of Salvador Dalí's extraordinary Surrealist vista-visions and optical illusions only to be instantly plunged into pitch-dark spaces where I was confronted by the flickering screen images of such grossly disturbing paraphernalia as severed hands, razored eyeballs, scurrying ants and dead donkeys from the shocking collabortions between Dalí and his fellow Spanish enfant terrible, Luis Buñuel.

As well as providing a rare oppotunity to view those terrifying Buñuel-Dalí avant-garde masterpieces, L'Age d'Or and Un Chien Andalou...


...the exhibition traces Dalí's early fascination with cinema and his later, less likely, filmmaking forays in company with two of Holywood's Masters of daydreams and nightmares.

For Alfred Hitchcock, Dalí created the famous dream sequence in Spellbound (1945) , starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman...


...and the same year Dalí joined forces with Walt Disney (whom Dalí called "a great American Surrealist") to make a film, entitled Destino, which was later abandoned, but finally brought to the screen in 2003 through persistence of vision on the part of Walt's nephew, Roy E Disney.


A powerful and evocative exhibition I thought of still-and-moving pictures, but Dalí dreams are not, it seems, for everyone...

Pausing before a typical Dalíesque landscape scattered with crumbling arches, soft watches, skipping girls and phallic fingers of rock, I heard one tired-looking lady saying to to another...

"...Yes, well, I think I really like the kind of art I can understand..."