It was worth fighting the opening weekend crowds at the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition, “Dali: Painting and Film” on Sunday.
The huge sixth floor space at MOMA showcases the work that Salvador Dali (1904-1989) did during his regular forays into the world of movies, from the experimental short films he did with Luis Bunuel in the 1920s through his work with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney.
Each gallery is devoted to an individual film, with one large wall displaying a continuous screening of the movie and the other walls filled with related drawings and paintings.
The 1928 collaboration with Bunuel, “Un Chien Andalou” (right), has lost none of its shock value in 80 years, particularly during the notorious sequence in which it appears a man is going to use his razor on a lover’s eye. Modern-day horror films such as “Hostel” and “Saw” have nothing on Dali and Bunuel when it comes to disturbing an audience.
At the time of the film’s first screenings, Bunuel and Dali provoked near-riots in theaters; college film classes and art-house audiences have been squirming their way through this odd-ball classic ever since.
Dali went on to do another film with Bunuel in 1930 — “L’Age d’or” — but it was his brief and tempestuous work with Alfred Hitchcock on the 1945 “Spellbound” that brought the Spanish artist his biggest movie audience.
Sadly, after Dali prepared many minutes’ worth of bizarre dream sequences (for the psychiatric patient played by Gregory Peck), the studio got cold feet and pressured Hitchcock to cut the material down to only a few minutes. The gallery space devoted to “Spellbound” is dominated by a huge painted backdrop that was used during the filming.
In conjunction with the exhibit, a series of screenings in the MOMA theaters will allow museumgoers to see “Un Chien Andalou” and the other Dali films without the gallery distractions, as well as examples of films that were inspired by Dali.
The exhibit runs through Sept. 15.
For more information, visit the museum’s Web site at www.moma.org.
