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Dali Dimension: Decoding the Mind of a Genius

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REVIEW OF THE DALI DIMENSION

I am a thoughtful person with a deep interest in modern science. At the same time I love art, especially Dali's.

I often ask myself "What is this great artist trying to tell me? What possessed him to create these perplexing yet exhilarating images?"

I was elated to discover that this DVD "The Dali Dimension" definitively answers these questions that burn inside me. Its subtitle "Decoding the Mind of a Genius" told me exactly what this wonderful film actually did for me.

I learned that throughout his life Dali was caught up in the most advanced intellectual developments of his age. In the late 1920's and 1930's his passion to gain the higher understanding that I myself seek made him study psychoanalysis, the most revolutionary and liberating development of those decades.

As this DVD points out he even gained an audience with Sigmund Freud, the father and high priest of psychoanalysis. That Viennese genius recognized the artist as a quintessential Spaniard as well as a fanatic. Indeed Dali was a fanatic, as I hope I am, when it comes to the gaining of wisdom and tp immersing myself in the highest of high art!

By the 1940's, after the detonation of the atomic bomb, Dali transferred his intellectual allegiance from Freud to Einstein, Shroedinger, and Heisenberg. He came to see mathematics, nuclear and quantum physics as the gateways to our intellectual salvation -- with Dali himself as our artistic Savior.

What blew me away about "he Dali Dimension" was its showing exactly how Dali, one of the greatest modern artists, translated the most important scientific principles of our age into dazzlingly beautiful artistic images. Presenting painting after painting the film's expert narration introduced me to numerous geometric forms such as the tetrahedron which Dali had precisely depicted in order to uplift our intellects into the stratosphere of higher understanding.

I was especially struck by the narration here. This is provided by the film's star, Joseph Nuzzolo. His commentary is ultra accessible. It provides nothing less than oversight to the whole DVD, particularly to its dramatic nuances and keeps the film moving at a brisk and wonderfully compelling pace.

I found that another appealing aspect of the DVD is its using the artist himself as well as famous scientists such as James Watson, a friend of Dali's and co-discoverer of DNA, and preeminent art scholars like Dawn Ades, the world's leading academic expert on Dali, to help us understand and appreciate the dozens of paintings presented. Seeing so many Dali masterpieces at one time is in itself a transforming and uplifting experience.

I can only say that anyone who has an interest in Dali, modern art or 20th Century science --and even life-- owes it to him- or herself to watch this DVD. I have no doubt that if he'd live to see it, Dali himself would have loved "The Dali Dimension."

Most people know Salvador Dali as the peculiarly mustached surrealist painter of drooping clocks. "The Dali Dimension: Decoding The Mind Of A Genius" is an award-winning investigatory documentary that, through a series of rare film clips and interviews with the artist himself, delves into Dali's interest in psychoanalysis, relativity theory, and mathematics. Ably narrated by Joseph Nuzzolo, "The Dali Dimension" is the collaborative effort of documentarians Joan Ubeda, Susi Marques and Eli Pons. Of special note is the never previously available footage of Dali feverishly working on a series of drawings, using ink spread and splashed with a large a large palette knife. Students of Dali's work will find "The Dali Dimension" both informed and informative. Superbly produced and featuring leading experts in the fields of science talking about their personal experiences with Salvador Dali as a man of science as well as an artist, "The Dali Dimension: Decoding The Mind Of A Genius" is a compelling addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library DVD documentary collections.

This is truly a remarkable film that reveals so much about the genius of Salvador Dali. It introduces us to concepts that composed the thinking and art of this remarkable man.

While he was well-read, his tremendous knowledge of science and the working of the human mind was mainly intuitive, allowing him to create work never before seen by his critics. It was the inability of his contemporary art critics and historians to comprehend the meaning and importance of Dali's art that led them, in self-defense, to consider him to be an irreverent fool or buffoon.

This important documentary should help establish Dali's true contribution to art history, as we can better recognize his genius today, than could his contemporary critics.

Dr. Alex Rosenberg
Salvador Dali Research Center

I have always been fascinated by Dali's nightmare worlds. I wasn't aware though of his interest in atomic age, physics, chemistry, science. Others have written here more info on the DVD than I can, I will just highkly recommend it for anyone interested in Dali, Art in general, and those of you who also like Art and Science. It was a bit sad to see Dali here, not too long before he died, and so weak. This DVD may even go over some heads, so if you hate science, you might be bored.

This 50-odd minute documentary doesn't so much look at the life of this often misunderstood genius, but rather it looks closely at the Catalan painter's ties, affiliations, and inspirations from more scientific realms. Beyond being the most widely-recognized and famous of the surrealists, Dali's dalliances and friendships with leading scholars from all fields -- scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and quantum physicists -- inspired his own art as he searched for common threads between all of life's subjects, both scholarly and literally. From DNA to the subconscious mind, Dali was simultaneously student, fan, and visual accompaniment/co-conspirator.

'The Dali Dimension' is a fine portrait of the man who continually re-invented his work as he learned, grew, and metamorphosed though his storied and eccentric life. Films of Dali, as well as interviews with those close to him show a portrait of an artist consumed by his vision and guided by science like possibly no other artist since Da Vinci.

I was initially exposed to Dali way back in my teens, and was instantly drawn into his otherworldly, fantastic dreamscapes, and the way he created worlds never before seen, and with so many hidden layers just waiting to be unpeeled and deciphered. I believe he was truly one of the great minds/souls of this (last) century, and his paintings are still magickal in most profound ways, to me.

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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An insightful look at Dali's life including his later years as captured on video with details of his larger than life Dali Museum.

It started off very good describing how Salvador Dali was influenced by science and psychoanalysis. Then about half way through it lost its focus. The documentary did not show enough of Dali's work during the documentary. He did more than just paintings. He did theater sets and art movies.

This DVD discusses the art of Dali and the sources of his nspiration, such as psychoanalysis, relativity theory, DNA, mathematics and nuclear physics. For someone like myself who is not conversant in the field of modern art it was an eye-opener which allowed me to appreciate at least some of the art that this unusual man produced. Well worth watching.

I have seen all the movies about Dali and by Dali and this is the absolute best. This is the real key to this guy's genius. Rent, buy or steal it, but if you love Dali, you must see this movie.