In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, published in Paris on October 14, 1924, we read of a “pure psychic automatism, through which one proposes to express in words or writing or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Command of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral concerns.”
One hundred years later, the Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum joins the 20th Day of the Contemporary of the Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums, choosing the Catalan artist Salvador Dali to investigate a particular aspect of his production, namely that conceived for cinema and animated drawings.
Together with Luis Buñuel, Dali signed two masterpieces of Surrealist cinema, Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L'âge d'or (The Age of Gold, 1930), showing how celluloid lent itself well, indeed appeared ideal, to shape the dreams and nightmares of Surrealism.
The films offered here were made by Salvador Dali upon his arrival in Los Angeles: “I came to Hollywood and met three great American Surrealists: the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. De Mille and Walt Disney.” It was from this last meeting, which took place in '45, that Dali began the drafting of Destiny, the animated drawing that took nearly half a century to take shape. Disney invited Dali to move to the studios, to make a work he had never seen, an impossible love story conceived as “a magical exposition of life in the labyrinth of time”: the story of two lovers united by sentiment but divided by fate, moving between typically lysergic, surrealist iconographies. But crisis and war interrupted the project, which would remain unfinished in the archives until Roy, Walt Disney's nephew, retrieved it by chance, deciding to finish it with the help of some illustrators who finished it in 2003, mixing the original drawings with computer graphics. The original music by Armando Domínguez and the voice of Dora Luz, who sings Destino, which gives this extraordinary surrealist work its title, remain intact.
In Hollywood, Dali had arrived at the invitation of director Alfred Hitchcock, for the 1944 film on psychoanalysis Spellbound (translated in Italy as Io ti salverò): to materialize the images of the dream narrated by actor Gregory Peck on the couch of analyst Ingrid Bergman, the director thought of the Surrealist artist to give substance to the dreamlike visions that so troubled the protagonist. The filming had difficulties precisely because of Dali's work. By choice of producer David O. Selznick, a large part of the sequence was deleted forever: 17 minutes out of 20.
Among the images that remain are a passage in which Ingrid Bergman was transformed into a statue of the goddess Diana, and a scene set in a ballroom, furnished with suspended pianos and motionless figures pretending to dance.