Salvador Dalí was one of the most famous and also one of the most notorious artists of the twentieth century, his flamboyant personal style establishing him as a showman in the popular imagination. While the centenary of Dalí's birth in 2004 was marked by a worldwide series of exhibitions, events and publications, no thorough investigation has taken place of the part played by film as a key influence on Dali's art, nor of his extensive involvement in film-based projects. Dali and Film redresses this omission, presenting both the major works that reflect Dali's preoccupation with film and material related to the key film projects on which he worked. Cinema contributed to Dali's understanding of both the power and the uses of illusion. In 1929 and 1930 he collaborated with Luis Bunuel on the startling and highly controversial films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or. Many years later, Dali worked with the Disney studios in Hollywood and with Alfred Hitchcock, devising a dream sequence for the psychological thriller Spellbound that remains one of the most innovative in cinema. Over the intervening years, Dali had come to reject the implicit elitism of modernist film and embrace instead the popularity of mainstream cinema, recognising its potential to bring his work to a vast audience. Dali and Film reveals the depth and persistence of Dali's fascination with the medium, bringing a new dimension to our understanding of one of the great masters of twentieth-century art.
