This weekend, Ninja and I went to the MoMA to see the Dali: Film and Art exhibit. We had the opportunity to see one of the shorts he had done for Disney (of all places). It was originally supposed to be included in Fantasia, but it was deemed too risque for the film.
Finally, in 2003, some Disney animators resurrected the short and put Destino together. If you can’t make it to the MoMA, you’ll be able to see it on Oct 3. Unfortunately, you’ll have to catch Beverly Hills Chihuahua as it’s attached to it. I would recommend watching Destino and then going home to watch Spellbound the Hitchcock film which features 3 dream sequences as painted by Dali.
The show tracks the traffic of images, themes and ideas between Dalí’s films, both realized and not, and his more static efforts, including paintings, drawings, letters, illustrated notes, scenarios and other ephemera.
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Dalí grasped that film’s capacities — for depicting irrationality in action; for dissolving, continually mutating images; and for an intensely real unreality — were all ready-made for his sensibility and his desire to reach a mass audience.
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“Destino,” the sprightly animated short of love and loss that Dalí worked on energetically for Walt Disney in 1946 [runs continuously].
To celebrate [Russo and Gerstman's] ongoing success, MoMA presents a selection of works by critical figures in the company’s history and catalog—from artists they embraced at early stages of their film careers, including Bruce Weber, Todd Haynes, Deepa Mehta, François Ozon, Olivier Assayas, and Guy Maddin, to established masters like Agnes Varda, Yvonne Rainer, Derek Jarman, and Jacques Demy. This monthlong series includes several introductions and post-screening Q&A sessions with some of the filmmakers, along with appearances by Gerstman and Russo.
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
Saint Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4″
Now, after studying some 45 works by van Gogh that are linked to the painting and scores of letters and drawings from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Mr. Pissarro has ended up with something far bigger than he had envisioned: a sweeping show charting the artist’s obsession with the nocturnal world.
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Van Gogh would often hand-copy pages from novels he was reading that referred to both the physical and mystical aspects of the night. “As an imaginative force the night was a very big catalyst in his mind,” Mr. Pissarro said. “He lived his life by the night.”
