Microcinema DVDs - Dali in New York

2008-10-23 Art Blog By Bob

As the Dali: Painting and Film exhibition currently at the MoMA clearly proves, Salvador Dali loved the big screen, especially when he or his works appeared on it. Capitalizing on the renewed interest in Dali’s interest, Microcinema recently re-released Jack Bond’s 1966 documentary on the artist, Dali in New York (above). Bond shows Dali years after his pre-World War II Surrealist success, still riding high on that reputation and not yet descending into the slow dissolution of illness and exploitation by parasitic hangers on that marked his final years. Erasing the sad memory of the lion in winter, Bond’s film shows Dali’s Autumn in New York, when the art world and the world itself seemed to encroach upon Dali’s bizzarro plane of existence to the point that it could finally embrace him as mainstream. For Dali, however, that embrace he long wished for sometimes seemed like strangulation. Bond shows Dali straining against the bonds of acceptance and endlessly elbowing for more room to perform his trickery while simultaneously calling for the crowds to edge in closer.

Dali stages scene after scene for Bond’s camera. For Bond, Dali must have been both an ideal and difficult subject—always providing material yet never turning off the spigot. Signing books in a bookstore, Dali signs each succeeding book with greater and greater flourishes. Dali’s entourage (which includes a court philosopher, a court poet, a military advisor, and a young man claiming to be the reincarnation of Dali’s dead brother) all mug for the camera and echo their master’s eccentricities. Sadly, the effect is to diminish rather than amplify Dali’s outrageousness by their feeble copying. Later, Bond follows Dali to a photo shoot in which Dali lays in a coffin-like box covered in paper money and coins. One of his followers places an egg on Dali’s mouth. When the egg breaks, ants stream forth (above). The photographer keeps shooting as Dali rises from the box, maintaining his game face despite the insects. The egg and the ants allude to many familiar paintings of Dali’s containing those elements as part of the dreamlike surrealist landscape. In real life, Dali’s willingness to play his part to the hilt demonstrates his commitment to his art but also resembles a desperate plea for attention that goes beyond his attention-grabbing pranks of the past.

Bond balances the heavy dose of Dali with the supportive, often explanatory presence of writer Jane Arden (above, with Dali). Arden puts into (as much as possible) comprehensible language Dali’s work and his personal style. She plays the straight man to Dali’s comic mania. Arden leads Dali with questions into some standard golden Dali sound bites. Asked about his wife, Gala, Dali responds, “But for Gala I would be lying in a gutter somewhere covered with lice.” (Ants in a coffin, however, is perfectly acceptable.) When makeup people try to prepare Dali for an outside shot and he resists, Arden tries to place the artist only to have him rail diva-like, “You are my slave! I am not your slave. Everybody is my slave!” before tramping off in a huff. Bond’s documentary captures Dali in the round, from every direction rather than from the single point of view of blind fandom. The film begins with a New York City cabbie complaining that Dali doesn’t talk to ordinary people like him and even has the doorman pay for a ride. Bond shows an interview in which Dali is asked about his Fascism “problem” and continued support of Francisco Franco. “Do you still believe that poor people are happier with no freedom?” Dali is asked, to which he agrees. “The last relationship between two humans is Freud and Dali,” Dali says elsewhere, insinuating that only such elites can truly talk to one another. Such moments make up only a small part of Dali in New York, but they add a depth and nuance that a simple valentine never could.

Bond intersperses Dali the man with images of his works. Sometimes Bond even animates Dali’s paintings in an almost Monty Python-esque fashion, highlighting their unreality even more. When Gala stands beside a portrait of herself at an exhibition, you wish you could hear her speak but Bond wisely keeps her in the role of silent muse and partner. At that same exhibition, Bond eves drops on Dali’s critics and raises the specter of Dali’s repetition and self-parody at that point of his career. Bond, however, allows Dali to have the last word, not that he really had any choice. As a group of musicians frantically play Spanish flamenco music, Dali wildly marks a canvas and steps away to judge his work. He repeats these steps over and over, seemingly at random, but in the end a man on horseback emerges magically from the chaos, perhaps even Don Quixote. At the end of Dali in New York, we see Dali as a Quixotic figure tilting at the windmills of changing cultural taste and reminding everyone that he was Warhol, the darling of the 1960s American art scene, long before Warhol was Warhol. Despite what looks like chaos, in the drawing, the film, and Dali’s life, that final scene assures us that Dali knew what he was doing all along. Dali in New York reminds us that even after the peak of his powers, Dali could still put on a great show.

2008-09-19 Pop Matters
By Barbara Herman

“It was like he didn’t talk to ordinary people,” says a cabdriver of his passenger Salvador Dali, “and he didn’t want to have anything to do with me. That’s the kind of guy he is.” So begins Dali in New York, underground filmmaker Jack Bond’s chaotic and fun 1965 documentary about the Spanish surrealist artist’s Christmas-time trip to New York to prepare an art exhibit and to sign his new book.

Sporting his trademark waxed and upturned mustache, carrying a staff and staging happenings on the streets and in art galleries of New York City, 61-year-old Dali hams it up like a pro. Whether part of his “crazy artist” act or a true expression of his personality, he is at least democratic in his haughtiness: we see him treat everyone he encounters either with regal indifference or benevolence, or as a prop for his grandiose happenings. After receiving another rebuke from the dour and self-important writer Jane Arden, his primary interlocutor in the film, Dali proclaims, “Modesty is not my specialty.”

This immodesty serves the viewer well, at least. By turns entertaining as an actor and thoughtful as a philosopher, Dali is a great subject for a filmmaker. Bond appears to just let Dali do his thing. In between filming the artist perform such antics as kissing a sculpture, or lying inside a coffin covered in gold coins and money while an egg filled with live ants is cracked open on his mouth, Bond’s camera ranges over his seminal paintings and etchings while soulful Flamenco music plays on the soundtrack.

He even captures Dali answering questions earnestly, in a thick and almost impenetrable Spanish accent, as he does when talking about how death and eroticism drive his work, or why cybernetics is more important than art. (This film would benefit greatly from subtitles, however; if it weren’t for the rewind button, I would never have understood what this man was saying.)

Bond’s way of zeroing in on details of Dali’s work and the random nature of what he shows (along with the distracting, albeit beautiful, Flamenco music) makes Dali in New York more of a drive-by documentary about Dali and his work than a substantive art documentary. (It is a brisk 57 minutes.) The real student of art is not going to get much out of the film. If anything, the film’s real subject is the cult of personality and the art world intelligentsia’s uneasy feeling about it. “I feel depressed at this concept of genius,” says the world-weary Arden after Dali insists that she, like everyone else in the world, is his slave.

Shortly after Dali in New York was made, Dali began to parlay his eccentric exhibitionistic tendencies into commercial success. Having already been a guest on the American game show What’s My Line in the ‘50s, by the late ‘60s he had designed the logo for Chupa Chups candy and starred in a number of deliberately kooky television commercials for Lanvin chocolates. No wonder Andy Warhol said of Dali in New York that it was “A truly terrific film.” While his Dadaist and Surrealist counterparts in Europe remained political, repudiating all ties with him for his alleged pro-fascist leanings, Dali was entering the age of Pop Art and laughing all the way to the bank.

2008-08-09

Salvador Dalí first arrived in New York in 1934 and immediately became a flamboyant part of the city's life and art scene. Engaging with the artists and celebrities who helped create the spirit of the city at the time, Dalí pursued his interests in art and commerce, the urban streets, and friendships with members of polite society and those in the rebellious underground. This program brings together scholars and filmmakers who address the impact of Dalí's diverse activities on his work and on the New York artistic community. Participants include Callie Angell, Adjunct Curator, The Andy Warhol Film Project, The Whitney Museum of American Art, who discusses the relationship between Dalí and Andy Warhol; filmmaker Jack Bond, who presents clips of his own film, Dalí in New York, and reflections on his friendship with the artist; Jonas Mekas, filmmaker and Director, Anthology Film Archives, who shares the films he made of Dalí; and Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, who explores Dalí and the 1939 World's Fair. Anne Morra, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, and co-organizer of the exhibition Dalí: Painting and Film, moderates a discussion.

2008-08-25 Film Threat
By Phil Hall

During December 1965, underground filmmaker Jack Bond latched on to Salvador Dali when the Spanish artist breezed into New York to prepare for an exhibition at the Huntington Gallery of Modern Art and a book signing event. The result of their encounter, “Dali in New York,” is an amusing filmed record of the outlandish surrealist’s ability to baffle, bemuse and enchant an allegedly jaded Gotham population.

If anything, Dali was the ultimate publicity hog, with zany stunts ranging from transporting a Michelangelo statue through the New York streets (he pauses to give the statue mouth-to-mouth resuscitation) and lying a coffin packed with million in cash while ants crawl over him. While his disdain for linear conversation and cerebral debate perplexes too-serious feminist writer Jane Arden, who trails him throughout the film, Dali is clearly at ease with the less-pretentious Art Students League classes who recognize his vibe.

Throughout the 57-minute film, Dali is clearly aware of the camera’s presence, and at one point he directs Bond’s cinematographer on how a sequence should be composed. The film is laced with glimpses of Dali’s paintings (which are at a disadvantage in this black-and-white production) while Manitas de Plata performs Flamenco tunes on the soundtrack (another disadvantage, as the distracting music has little connection to Dali’s distinctive work).

Anyone seeking a serious art documentary will be disappointed, but those who enjoy iconoclastic eccentricity with appreciate Dali’s cheerful celebration of the absurd – not to mention the celebration of himself.

2008-08-25 Curled up with a Good DVD
By Trent Daniel

Filmmaker Jack Bond filmed legendary artist Salvador Dali during a two-week visit to New York around Christmas 1965. The film is a document of the truly eccentric and unique Dali intermingling, and sometimes clashing, with New York’s cultural elite during this era. While I think a document of such an important and influential artist as Dali is invaluable, it does not guarantee that such a film will be particularly entertaining. I would recommend this DVD only to fans of Dali, as the casual viewer will likely be somewhat confused and bored.

During the film, Dali is presented with a huge sculpture by the NYU art department, participates in a bizarre photo shoot (in which Dali is covered with money then has an egg filled with ants placed on his mouth as an ocelot circles him), and has a gallery showing. All the while, he meets and greets with members of the New York art scene, most memorably with feminist writer Jane Arden.

There are often passionate debates over the meaning behind and value of Dali’s work. However, spending an hour listening to these debates painfully reveals that for many of these people, their primary passion is hearing themselves talk. In particular, the rather abrasive Arden has rather long discussions with a female companion, over many cigarettes, concerning the crudeness and lack of profundity in Dali’s work. In truth, she comes off as a snob - and a hypocritical one at that, since for most of the film she seems to follow Dali around like a star-struck member of his entourage.

My major criticism of the film, however, is with the soundtrack, particularly when Dali speaks. This DVD clearly needed subtitles, as the dialogue is often muddy. When Dali himself tries to speak, his thick Spanish accent makes understanding him nearly impossible. Since many of those listening to him are nodding along as if he is saying something profound, it becomes quite frustrating to try to make out what he is saying.

However, there are some invaluable moments in the film for Dali fans. For one, some sections of the film examine in detail parts of some of his most famous work and the surreal, illusionary power of his finest work comes alive, even in a black-and-white film.

The highlight of this film, however, comes at the very end, when Dali is on stage at an unnamed location. As a live mariachi band plays beside him. Dali gets out of a chair, makes some loud, dramatic scribbles on a blank canvas with a marker, then sits back down. At first the scene seems extremely pretentious; Dali’s work seems to be nothing but a jumbled mass of black scribbles, yet the crowd continues to clap as if applauding an emperor with no clothes. At the end, however, Dali goes back to the canvas, makes a few broad strokes and, remarkably, the seeming incoherent mess of lines becomes a knight riding a stallion. The knight was being created all along yet seemingly appeared out of nowhere as if by magic. The scene is a fascinating display of Dali’s artistic brilliance.

Again, this DVD is invaluable for Dali fans, particularly the final scene. However, I would not recommend it to anyone who is not interested in Dali, unless their idea of fun is to spend an hour with some rather pretentious people (and hard-to-understand ones at that).

2008-07-22 Detroit Metro Times
By Jason Ferguson

This 1965 film by Jack Bond comes across as the height of casual salon-borne iconography. Brimming with proto-psychedelic flourishes and post-Beat Generation cool, Dalí in New York is a portrait of the surrealist at the peak of his popularity, not to mention self-assuredness. Dalí is supremely aware of his image as an artistic provocateur and seems determined in the film's several "interview" sessions (which are more like charged roundtables where the artist swats down various criticisms and misinterpretations of his work) to make good on his reputation as a weirdo. The painter's canvases during this period shared this self-aware sense of "weirdness," and it's interesting that most of the works Bond chooses to show throughout Dalí in New York are from the previous decades. Dalí by this point is much more concerned with a sort of postmodern presentation of himself, and the various pieces of performance art he undertakes in the film — lip-kissing Michaelangelo's David, covering himself in dollar bills and ants — are more the actions of an aging huckster than a paradigm-smashing visionary. It's never clear if Bond himself was in on the joke, or simply enraptured by proximity to Dalí, but the film that he created with Dalí's cooperation does as much to lionize its subject as it does to ridicule it. Which is probably something Dalí would have heartily approved of.

2008-06-19 The Guardain
By Nance Banks Smith

Dali off the cuff is outrageous and the exceedingly stylish film moves like an express train.

2008-06-19
By Andy Warhol

A truly terrific film.