'The Dali Dimension: Decoding The Mind Of A Genius'
Film review by
Paul Chimera
Publicity director for the original Salvador Dali Museum
This award-winning documentary is the Holy Grail for Dali aficionados who’ve long lamented that too many examinations of the Surrealist artist’s life and work focus on the clown and not the craftsman.
Salvador Dali carved out a reputation that was arguably as eclectic as his paintings: eccentric, exhibitionist, genius, showman, author, agent provocateur and – oh yes – the most successful surrealist painter in history.
But The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius (2004) brings into focus another appellation befitting the Catalan master: man of science.
Even the esteemed J.D. Watson – who together with Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA and assured themselves hallowed ground on the landscape of 20th century science – sent a letter to Dali, declaring, “The second brightest man in the world wishes to meet the brightest.”
It’s just one of a veritable feast of delectable morsels that make this 75-minute film by Joan Ubeda, Susi Marques and Eli Pons a refreshing change from the predictably linear biographical approaches other documentary makers have taken. And as the film’s subtitle hints, this treatment shines a light on the scientific underpinnings of Dali’s works and the innovative mind that created them.
Narrated by Joseph Nuzzolo, president of The Salvador Dali Society (www.dalinet.com), which has the film’s exclusive North American distribution rights, the story is wrapped in a kind of musical package, with the sound and sights of violins and cellos adding an appropriate metaphorical note to what is as much an auditory as a visual experience.
“The words and concepts used by scientists and the way they talked – it was like violin music to him,” a co-narrator declares, adding that musical notes have a direct relationship with numbers: the numbers are science, the sound is art.
Thus, the stage is set for a harmonious nexus of science and art – a fusion dating back at least to the time of Pythagoras – that is the raison d’etre of The Dali Dimension.
We learn, for example, how Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and theories of quantum mechanics, suggest that reality is determined by what the observer decides to observe. “Certain information always slips through our fingers, no matter how hard we seek it,” we’re told, and that realization must have greatly inspired Dali.
Surely when it comes to the artist’s famous double-images, what is there for you to see depends ultimately on you – how you see as the observer, possessing a point of view inexorably yours alone.
The Dali Dimension features fascinating, rare footage (much of which this reviewer has never seen before) of Dali in scientific contexts. We observe, for example, how Rumanian mathematician Matila Gyka’s principles correspond to the exacting preparatory work Dali undertook in creating his large “Sacrament of the Last Supper.” And we see both the artist and a knot of spectators, including the great art collector Chester Dale, gazing upon the large canvas when it was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Dali gestures toward the religious masterpiece while holding a Gyka-inspired compositional sketch.
Tim Phillips, who was a painter and Dali apprentice, appears on camera to explain that Dali believed the greatest exponent of the melding of art and metaphysics was DaVinci, and that Dali felt that he (Dali) could bring the two disciplines together again – “and Dali did!” Phillips confidently concludes.
In another scene, Thomas Bonchott – a mathematician friend of Dali and pioneer in computer-generated images – unravels and discusses a paper hypercube, which he had shown Dali when he first visited him at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. However, as narrator Nuzzolo reminds us, “Dali had already painted an unfolded hypercube twenty years before.”
Dali’s prescience was of course manifest in his 1954 “Corpus Hypercubus” (in New York’s Metropolitan Museum), tackling the concept of the fourth dimension in a three-dimensional world, and masterfully marrying contemporary discoveries in mathematics and science with traditional themes of Christianity. It’s all neatly tied together by Dali’s Nuclear-Mysticism and ultimately the grander quest for a higher dimension.
DNA double-helix discoverer Watson later appears in the film, discussing his meetings with Salvador Dali, as the camera hones in on Dali’s gigantic 1963 “Homage to Crick and Watson” (“Galacidalicideoxyribonucelicacid,”) canvas, displayed in its original home: the New England Merchants National Bank in Boston.
We also travel to the castle at Pubol in Spain, where Dali was shown a film about newly emerging mathematical discoveries and, in particular, his mathematician friend Rene Thom, who developed a new branch of mathematics known as the Catastrophe Theory. It’s clearly pointed out in The Dali Dimension that curves of Thom’s equations occur in Dali’s last paintings, most noticeably in “The Swallow’s Tail,” where a slightly askew “S” shape seen on Thom’s equation-cluttered blackboard is faithfully transcribed in Dali’s final oil painting.
A highlight of the documentary is an unprecedented congress of researchers who convened at the Teatru-Museu Dali in Figueres, Spain, in 1985 to discuss various scientific theories and discoveries. Dali – tethered to a feeding tube and sequestered in the Torre Galatea contiguous with his museum – observed the proceedings via closed-circuit TV.
The historic event was organized by a physicist from the University of Barcelona, and Nobel prize winners and other experts discuss Dali’s signature soft watches and the creative debt the painter owed Einstein and Freud, both of whom decisively influenced him. Science was indeed a lifelong obsession for Dali, as were the precepts of psychoanalysis and, more specifically, Freud’s seminal book, “The Interpretation of Dreams.”
Dawn Ades, art historian at the University of Essex in England and author of several books on Dali, notes that Surrealism was an arena for experimentation and an outlet for Dali’s sexual anxieties. “Dali once wrote, “Freud is my father,” we’re told. And, in discussing Dali’s breakthrough creative technique – the Paranoiac-Critical method – Ades describes it as “a systematic misreading of objects in the world.” That “misreading” theory may help us to better understand why Dali thought it perfectly reasonable, when ordering a lobster in a restaurant, to be served a grilled telephone!
For lovers of never-before-seen footage, including the Master at work, The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius doesn’t disappoint. You’ll find:
- Dali feverishly working on a series of drawings, using ink spread and splashed with a large palette knife
- Workers unwrapping the immense “Madonna of Port Lligat” canvas, with Dali then posing beside it
- Dali seated on a couch at a press conference, discussing new discoveries about the genetic code
- Part of an interview with legendary TV journalist Mike Wallace
- The breathtaking “Christ of St. John of the Cross” being dusted off by an assistant in preparation for an exhibition
- Color footage of Dali’s provocative pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair
- Unpublished photographs of Dali working on science-based paintings like “Napoleon’s Nose
- Dali and Gala relaxing at their Port Lligat villa, casually leafing through a large book
The film’s coda features Dali’s recorded reaction to the congress of gathered scientists, philosophers and artists at the Teatro-Museum Dali in the mid-‘80s (who mid-way through the unique event paid a visit to Dali in his private room). From a television screen, we see a black and white image of the artist, sadly aged yet riveted via his television monitor to the proceedings that had just concluded. He then remarks, with brevity uncommon for the normally loquacious Dali: “Thank you, my dear friends, for according me this great honor.”
It’s easy to see why The Dali Dimension (produced by Mediapro) garnered first prize in the Tele Film Festival in the Czech Republic in 2006, plus at least five other important industry honors. Rosa Diaz, a journalist with La Vanguardi, wrote, “The film is daring.”
Indeed, The Dali Dimension dares to go where no documentary on the Spanish painter has gone before: Salvador Dali – exhibitionist, philosopher, filmmaker, author, lithographer, TV personality, celebrity, painter – was also a true man of science.
We’d expect nothing less from the mind of a genius.
Price: $29.95
