After mentioning Salvador Dalí in the previous post, here’s the man himself in a UK TV profile from 1973. I wouldn’t usually return to something like this but for years the only copy of Hello Dali! on YouTube was spoiled by having been recorded with a ghosted signal. The new copy isn’t perfect either, the sound is rather dull but this can be improved if you download the thing and watch it using VLC with the equalizer boosting the top end.
Instead of writing a new description I’ll repost the one I wrote 15 years ago. Something I didn’t mention in the original post is that this may be the last time that Gala Dalí was seen on camera, at least by foreign TV crews. She appears briefly and at a distance, hovering in the doorway of her Dalí-free castle before turning up later on the roof of Dalí’s home.
Brits who are old enough may remember Aquarius, an ITV arts programme whose weekly slot was taken over in the late 1970s by The South Bank Show, episodes of which used the same format of a short studio introduction followed by a self-contained film. In place of the SBS’s Melvyn Bragg we have Humphrey Burton introducing a film directed by Bruce Gowers. Russell Harty is the front man, seen here in the days before he achieved greater fame as a gossipy chat-show host. I’d been wanting to see this for a long time, having lost a video tape of it years ago. I never saw the original broadcast but it was screened again after Dalí’s death in 1989, and I remembered it as being particularly good for showing a slightly more human side to the eccentric and occasionally annoying artist. So it is, giving us a brief portrait of Dalí in his 69th year, preoccupied at that time with the construction of his museum in Figueres. The value of Harty and Gowers coup in getting the artist to allow a film crew into his home can be found in subsequent UK documentaries, many of which use uncredited extracts from these interviews. It’s the brief moments of interview which make this even though they reveal little. It’s refreshing seeing Dalí talking conversationally in front of a camera instead of putting on a performance.
The early 70s saw the last flare of real interest in Dalí from the world at large. Dalí and Surrealism in general had a resurgence of popularity in the late 60s as a consequence of psychedelic culture. A number of books by or about the artist were published or reprinted, among them Peter Owen’s 1973 revival of Hidden Faces, a novel which Dalí had written in 1944. Alejandro Jodorowsky was circling the Dalí camp around the same time, trying to inveigle the artist into portraying the Emperor in his planned film adaptation of Dune. One detail worth noting in the conversation with Russell Harty is mention of a golden toilet, something which Jodorowsky says Dalí wanted as his throne if he was going to appear in the feature film. We never got to see Jodorowsky’s Dune but it’s good to find this documentary available once again.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Fame and shame of Salvador Dali
• Figures of Mortality: Lawrence versus Dalí
• Être Dieu: Dalí versus Wakhévitch
• Chance encounters on the dissecting table
• Salvador Dalí’s Maze
• Dalí in New York
• Dalí’s discography
• Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dalí
• Mongolian impressions
• Hello Dali!
• Dirty Dalí
• Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited
