It's said that what drew Alfred Hitchcock to employ Salvador Dali to create his animated dream sequence in his film 'Spellbound' was the artist's instinctive understanding of the precision of the dream image. Dreams are, by nature, crisply drawn renderings of a transformed world, grammatically correct nonsense. Before Hitchcock's film (the director himself claimed this, so watch out), cinematic dream sequences were identified by a kind of hazy wash-effect, quite different to the way we actually experience them. Of course, Hitchcock's great advantage is that he was working in a temporal medium (you'd never 'see' a dream all at once, after all). Dream images in the stilled language of paint suffer from the problem of simultaneity - their all-at-once crystalline precision is too clear, too quickly. Anyone who says Dali's paintings actually look like dreams is either lying or writing a press release (or both).
Read the whole thing here.
No comments:
Post a Comment