![\"hellodali.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/hellodali.jpg\")
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Russell Harty and Salvador Dal\u00ed, 1973.<\/em><\/p>\n This would have been a real find if the quality wasn’t so poor. Hello Dali!<\/em> was a 50-minute documentary film about Salvador Dal\u00ed broadcast in the UK in 1973 as part of the Aquarius<\/em> arts strand. The whole thing is on YouTube chopped into five parts and is unfortunately blighted by severe ghosting throughout. Apart from that it’s perfectly watchable.<\/p>\n Some conversations are subtitled so viewers are better able to make sense of Dal\u00ed’s English\/Spanish\/French dialect.<\/em><\/p>\n Brits who are old enough may remember Aquarius<\/em>, an ITV arts programme whose weekly slot was taken over in the late 1970s by The South Bank Show<\/em>, episodes of which used the same format of a short studio introduction followed by a self-contained film. In place of the SBS\u2019<\/em>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 Dal\u00ed’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 Dal\u00ed in his 69th year, preoccupied at that time with the construction of his museum in Figueres<\/a>. 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 Dal\u00ed talking conversationally in front of a camera instead of putting on a performance.<\/p>\n The early 70s saw the last flare of real interest in Dal\u00ed from the world at large. Dal\u00ed 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<\/em>, a novel which Dal\u00ed had written in 1944. Alejandro Jodorowsky was circling the Dal\u00ed camp around the same time, trying to inveigle the artist into portraying the Emperor in his planned film adaptation of Dune<\/em>. One detail worth noting in the conversation with Russell Harty is mention of a golden toilet, something which Jodorowsky says Dal\u00ed wanted as his throne if he was going to appear in the feature film. We never got to see Jodorowsky’s Dune<\/em> but it’s good to find this documentary available once again. Here’s hoping a better copy turns up eventually.<\/p>\n \u2022 Hello Dali!<\/em> Pt 1<\/a> | Pt 2<\/a> | Pt 3<\/a> | Pt 4<\/a> | Pt 5<\/a><\/p>\n Previously on { feuilleton } Russell Harty and Salvador Dal\u00ed, 1973. This would have been a real find if the quality wasn’t so poor. Hello Dali! was a 50-minute documentary film about Salvador Dal\u00ed broadcast in the UK in 1973 as part of the Aquarius arts strand. The whole thing is on YouTube chopped into five parts and is unfortunately … Continue reading “Hello Dali!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,42,7,44,20,18,19],"tags":[718,2745,2744,2743,2696,2713,87],"class_list":["post-9700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-books","category-film","category-painting","category-science-fiction","category-surrealism","category-television","tag-alejandro-jodorowsky","tag-bruce-gowers","tag-humphrey-burton","tag-melvyn-bragg","tag-peter-owen","tag-russell-harty","tag-salvador-dali"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-2ws","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9700"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30068,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700\/revisions\/30068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"hellodali2.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/hellodali2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"hellodali3.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/hellodali3.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed and the City<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed\u2019s Elephant<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed in Wonderland<\/a>
\n\u2022 Alejandro Jodorowsky\u2019s Dune<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dirty Dal\u00ed<\/a>
\n\u2022 Impressions de la Haute Mongolie revisited<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed and Film<\/a>
\n\u2022 Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s apocalyptic happening<\/a>
\n\u2022 Dal\u00ed Atomicus<\/a>
\n\u2022 Impressions de la Haute Mongolie<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"