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Watch Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou

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While Salvador DalÍ is celebrated as the great painter-show-man of Surrealism, he was fascinated through his life by another medium – film.

Now, for the first time, an exhibition at Tate Modern will demonstrate, through paintings, drawings, storyboards, letters, film treatments and much else, the extent of his interest – featuring cinematic projects, many of which were either aborted or unrealised, from throughout his life.

DalÍ was born in 1904 in Figueres, a small Catalonian town near the French border. In those days it had three cinemas and one vaudeville theatre. (Now there is a lone edge-of-town multiplex.) As a young cinemagoer, DalÍ became tremendously excited by the kinds of things that the motion picture could do, and which painting had perhaps so far failed to do. Within the smoky darkness of the movie theatre, he saw how objects could merge, and be transformed, into other objects. He saw the illusion of the three-dimensional. He saw how images could be doubled, quadrupled, bent and torn. He saw size; he saw the potential for immediate visual impact; and he saw the overwhelming power to enthral and deceive and manipulate audiences. He experienced an entire battery of optical trickery that would be of service throughout his life. Painting, at a certain point in his early life, seemed so mute and so small and so whispery by comparison.

By the 1920s DalÍ had met and become fast friends with the great director-in-the-mak-ing Luis Buñuel, with whom he made the two films – Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’Or(1930) – that so endeared him to the Surrealist movement. These films will be shown at Tate Modern.

DalÍ and Buñuel had first met in Madrid in 1922, when they were students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

They wrote Un Chien Andalou in a burst of creativity in a café in Figueres in January 1929. It is a short film – just 17 minutes – whose restrained violence, sexual tensions, and abrupt shifts of scene can still shock. The opening sequence, in which Buñuel, playing himself, lacerates a woman’s eye (in fact, it was a cow’s), throws down a gauntlet to those who believed that rational exposition should be the aim of cinema. Like the Futurists before them, the two fervent young cineastes believed that the link with the past must be severed. Buñuel later stated in an interview that the goal of the film had been to “make visible certain subconscious states which we believe can only be expressed by the cinema”. The cinema – like the entire Surrealist movement – would help to celebrate the human psyche.

It is impossible to disentangle quite how the two collaborators worked. What is known is that Buñuel prepared the shooting script, chose the actors, and organised the crew and the studio time. In the pallor of his make-up and his powerful sense of vulnerability, the principal male actor, Pierre Batcheff, resembles a great and subversive comic whom DalÍ and Buñuel revered: Buster Keaton. Late in 1929, the shooting script itself would be published in a collection called The Surrealist Revolution.

The rocky landscape we see in the early scenes of their second and much longer film collaboration, L’Âge d’Or, is DalÍ’s beloved Cap de Creus, a mountainous peninsula at the northeast tip of Spain.

L’Âge d’Or, which was filmed in March 1930, proved much more controversial than Un Chien Andalou. The directors’ aim, according to DalÍ, was “to present the pure straight line of the conduct of one who pursued love in spite of the ignoble humanitarian and patriotic ideals and other mechanisms of reality”. The film is a defence of the rights of the individual against the hypocritical institutions of a society that cows and represses and is a no-holds-barred attack upon symbols of authority. It lampoons the Church and politicians mercilessly. One famous scene shows bishops on a rocky outcrop at Cap de Creus. In a later scene, they are reduced to skeletons. It parodies Italian fascism. It presents a Christlike figure as a debauchee. Scenes of violence alternate with scenes of unbridled lust.

One of its early screenings was disrupted by neo-fascist thugs. Ink was thrown at the screen, smoke bombs let off, and Surrealist canvases slashed. Unsurprisingly, it was banned by the official censor, a ruling that held good for half a century.

To travel through Cap de Creus, to negotiate its hairpin bends, to see the prospect from the lighthouse at its tip, is to experience the kind of landscape that DalÍ incorporated into all his films and his paintings. The rock formations here are ghoulishly zoomorphic – you don’t need to have the extravagant imaginative reach of a DalÍ to see phantoms and dragons in the shapes of these cruelly jagged, teetering rocks.

How did DalÍ bring this heady mix of local landscape and filmic experience together? The Tate curator Matthew Gale refers to DalÍ’s sense of space and foreboding atmosphere; his fondness for long, raking shadows; and how shadow, both in his paintings and in his visual treatments for films, seems to rise up from the bottom of the picture frame, and almost to engulf the entire space. It is almost always this local landscape that serves as the backdrop to DalÍ’s most extravagantly eroticised visual fantasies. DalÍ takes flight – but he is also rooted in a landscape that, when he was living as an exile in America in the 1940s, he could always recall.

The exhibition will include about 100 works from collections around the world, of which 60 will be paintings. Among the film-related items will be an early portrait of Buñuel, and a collage entitled The Marriage of Buster Keaton, both dating from 1925; letters, scripts and set designs; his two great surrealist films, and a video work of 1960, Chaos and Creation, which reveals him as a pioneer of artists’ videos.

By the 1940s DalÍ’s friendship with Buñuel had dissolved, never to be repaired, and Hollywood had come knocking. DalÍ the Surrealist film-maker was no more, but the idea of the magically transformative powers of the cinema was never to lose its appeal.

To read about DalÍ’s Hollywood years and to watch Un Chien Andalou and L’Âge d’Or and other DalÍ clips, go to timesonline.co.uk/visualarts; DalÍ & Film, Tate Modern,

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