Surrealist FILM. Salvador Dali.

For this project it is imperil to be looking at how the surrealist used the camera and produced their work If me and my group want to put together a surrealist film.

I started by looking at Dali's work:

Spellbound.

Below is an extract from the dream sequence In the film...

Spellbound (1945), is a psychological mystery thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and it tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out to be not what he claims. Salvador Dali designed backdrops for a 20-minute dream sequence.

Spellbound was filmed in black and white except for one or two frames of bright red at the conclusion when a gun is fired. His job through producing this sequence was to conceive certain scenes of mental delusion. We have written the first bit of our treatment and the man it features at the beginning is in a weird state, almost passing out, so watching this scene of trying to communicate mental delusion in Spellbound is important in trying to gain ideas for our piece of work and understanding how to go about making the audience feel a certain way and understand how this man is feeling in our film.

The Surrealist.

Below is a piece by Dali, called the Surrealist, apart from being brilliantly weird, I think it shows how all these ideas in Dali's head were always about and I also think this is a good example if the sorts of ways to bring together sound and film in a surrealist way...

Un Chien Andalou

Below is a bit from Un Chien Andalou, it's a sixteen minute silent surrealist short film produced in France by Salvador Dali and the Spanish director Luis Bunuel. It was infact Dali's first film, and is one of the best known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920's.

The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial 'once upon a time' to 'eight years later' without the event or characters changing very much.

This idea of dis-jointedness is key in what we want to communicate to our audience through our piece and is really important in this idea of surrealism.

The piece below is he original film but someone has done their own music over the top of it, right at the end is the same look we are kind of going for in ours with the woman giving evil glances. The idea of the simplicity and special techniques they used is what got us really excited about the idea of making our own surrealist film, the eye cutting bit is true of this.

Below is another really famous bit from the film...