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Serious Dali for the Serious Dali Connoisseur, August 6, 2008
By Paul Chimera

The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius

By Paul Chimera


One of the benefits of the passage of time, especially when it comes to as controversial and flamboyant a personality as Spanish Surrealist Master Salvador Dali, is that it allows us to gain perspective, jettison trivial side-show nonsense, and focus more appropriately on the serious body of work the artist has left behind.

If, therefore, you're looking for a lot of crazy, zany, performance-art antics from the madcap limp watchman of Surrealism, you're going to be a little disappointed. Refreshingly, this 75-minute documentary brilliantly shines a light on the more serious side of the Catalan painter, whose thoughts and creative expressions were deeply steeped in science.

Don't misunderstand, however. It would be impossible to have Salvador Dali the scientifically minded genius and painter, without also having Salvador Dali the eccentric showman. Each side of his personality fed the other, and what's that they say about the oh-so-fine line between madness and genius?

But The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius is a long overdue treatment of Dali's career as it set out to harness, in a serious and inventive way, the various discoveries and phenomenon we've gained from the scientific community.

Personally, I think this is the best documentary ever made about Dali, and credit goes to filmmakers Joan Ubeda, Susi Marques, and Eli Pons, plus narrator Joseph Nuzzolo, president of The Salvador Dali Society, Inc. (www.dali.com), whose organization holds exclusive North American distribution rights to the film.

The video is heavy on classical music, making the presentation nearly as impressive on an auditory level as on a visual one. "The words and concepts used by scientists and the way they talked - it was like violin music to him," a co-narrator declares, adding that musical notes have a direct relationship with numbers: the numbers are science, the sound is art. You'll get more insights about that metaphor when you watch the film.

There are appearances from the likes of J.D. Watson, who together with Frederick Crick unraveled the double-helix genetic structure of the DNA molecule, and discusses the concept before Dali's monumental canvas, Galacidalicidesoxyribonucleicacid - a jaw-breaker of a moniker and the longest single-word title of any Dali painting. A delightful anecdote informs us that Watson once sent a letter to Dali, announcing, "The second brightest man in the world wishes to meet the brightest."

Great stuff!

We also learn how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and theories of quantum mechanics suggest that relativity is determined by what the observer decides to observe. "Certain information always slips through our fingers, no matter how hard we seek it," we're told, and that realization must have greatly inspired Dali.

Rare footage abounds in this documentary, which - while intelligently focused on the serious scientific nexus between the laboratory and the studio - is smartly entertaining. This is not a college lecture hall with microphone and camera turned on, but rather a fast-paced, richly nuanced production that paints a picture of Dali as a man of science, while never losing the importance of pacing and drama that keep viewers wide awake in their seats.

If it were a book, it would not only be profoundly informative but simply a darn good read!

I was positively enthralled to see Dali in front of his breathtaking painting, The Sacrament of the Last Supper - one of his most famous works - explaining how he applied Rumanian mathematician Matila Gyka's principles of the Golden Section to the construction of this uber-precise oil on canvas. Standing with him is a man immortalized in a portrait by Dali: Chester Dale, the great collector of French Impressionist paintings, who donated Dali's Crucifixion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Speaking of Crucifixion, which incorporates a hypercube fusing with the body of Christ, there's one scene in The Dali Dimension where Thomas Bonchott - a mathematician friend of Dali's and a pioneer in computer-generated images - discusses a paper hypercube. Narrator Nuzzolo reminds us, with a distinct passion and measured sense of drama in his voice, that "Dali had already painted a hypercube" 20 years earlier - suggesting how far ahead of his time the artist had always been.

The documentary transports us to Pubol, a town near Dali's Port Lligat home and of which he was officially named Marquis, and we're exposed to a brief explanation of Rene Thom's Catastrophe Theory. The curves of Thom's equation were depicted in what is considered Dali's last painting: The Swallow's Tail.

It's truly fascinating to observe, often for the first time, how this film shows us the direct connections between Dali's works and the scientific findings that influenced them.

One eye-opening highlight of The Dali Dimension is a congress of researchers who convened at the Teatru-Museu Dali (Dali-Theatre Museum) in Figueres, Spain, in 1985 - an important event Dali observed intently via closed-circuit TV, as he sat in his special room contiguous with the museum's grand foyer. The milestone event - which I had never known about or seen prior to the screening of this documentary - was organized by physicists from the University of Barcelona. The experts discussed Dali's immortal soft watches and the painter's creative debt to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.

Sprinkled throughout The Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius are such scenes as workers unwrapping Dali's immense The Madonna of Port Lligat, which had to be hoisted through an upper floor window of the Carstairs Gallery when it arrived in New York from Europe; Dali discussing his thoughts about the genetic code; part of a revealing and amusing interview with journalist Mike Wallace; a glimpse of Dali's iconic Christ of St. John of the Cross being dusted off prior to an exhibition; and various views of Dali and the enigmatic Gala Dali, his wife, muse and leading model.

Little wonder this film took first prize in the Tele Film Festival in the Czech Republic in 2006, among a handful of other important industry honors. At the end, we see the Maestro himself - old, weak, but deeply grateful, who, over a TV screen, declares to the congress of physicists, artists and others at his Teatru-Museu Dali: "Thank you, my dear friends, for according me this great honor."

I've seen most every documentary film on Salvador Dali. This one, in my considered judgment, is the best.

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