Where Dalí Meets Disney

In 1945, after a chance encounter with Disney at a cocktail party in Hollywood, Salvador Dalí was invited to collaborate on a short animated film entitled Destino. The project was eventually terminated in its preparatory phase, but a whole array of conceptual paintings (executed by Dalí himself) remained in the Disney archive, and, in 2003, the Walt Disney Company hired a team of French animators to complete the film based on the surviving sketches. This was the version that toured in a number of highly publicised exhibitions, including the retrospective ‘Dalí and Film’ staged at the Tate in 2007, among other international venues. Read more →

Jul 01

2015

Alfred Hitchcock, Contemporary Visual Art, Popular Visual Culture, Silence, The Great Macguffin, The MacGuffin, Writing as Creative Practice

About ‘The Great Macguffin’

Laurence Figgis, The Great Macguffin (detail), 2005-12, ink, crayon, watercolour on paper, 160 x 350 cm

I first stumbled on the (great) MacGuffin in 2005, when I was searching for a title for a piece of work that was then in production, a large scale ink and watercolour drawing that had occupied my attention for some months. I was still in the throes of making this work when I read Alfred Hitchcock’s account of the term in his seminal interview with François Truffaut. And I knew straight away that I had found not only the title for the work but also the name for its protagonist, the imaginary character (part human, part animal, part machine) with whose fortunes the drawing is principally concerned. The word itself struck me with its amusing lyric – or rather non-lyric -quality; I liked the heavy, cumbersome, down-to-earth sound. But the explanation behind the word was just as captivating.

‘MacGuffin’ is Hitchcock’s term for a pretext or plot device that in its typical and most intellectually satisfying form must always be radically under-explained within the diegetic narrative. In many cases it would not hold up to rational scrutiny if the audience subjected it to any attention. Thus in Hitchcock’s film Notorious (1946) we are led to assume that particles of uranium (viable for atomic capability) can be stored in wine bottles in the form of a crystalline black dust, hidden in the chief antagonist’s cellar. Read more →

Apr 03

2015

Anachronism, Disney, Eyvind Earle, Fairy Tales, Mid-Century Modern

American Gothic

Chaos, Anachronism and Modernity in Eyvind Earle’s Sleeping Beauty

Gustave Doré, Illustration for Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant in Les Contes de Perrault, 1867

The philosopher of anachronism, Jeremy Tambling, has argued that what is ‘postponed’ appears as anachronistic. Drawing a metaphor from the world of modern travel, he writes that jet-lag (décalage horaire or ‘time-gap’ in French), ‘places one time (that of the body) inside another [time], literally postpones it’ (Tambling, 2010: 16). The Beauty in Charles Perrault’s famous story for children, published in 1697—The first of its kind to be called La Belle au Bois Dormant (‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’) —, is herself an anachronism, a body ‘postponed’—a figure from the ancient past recalled to life. And the Prince, who helps her to rise, is struck with embarrassment. For though she is fully dressed (and quite magnificently), she is dressed just like his great-grandmother – in the fashion of a century before – and wears a ‘point-band’ peeping over her collar (Perrault, 1992: 89). Read more →

Sep 07

2013

Contemporary Visual Art, The Expressive Fallacy, Writing as Creative Practice

By My Voice I Shall Be Known

According to the Hellenic mythology, the Sybil of Cumae attracted the attentions of Apollo a god of various jurisdictions, who offered to grant her anything she desired if only she would sleep with him. Holding up a fistful of sand, she asked for as many years as there were grains of sand running through her fingers. But the deity had the last laugh (as deities usually do). The Sybil of Cumae had failed to ask for eternal youth and was subject to extremes of degeneration in her later life. She eventually subsided into a wrinkled husk contained in a jar, but the Fates allowed her to retain her voice long after her body had disintegrated completely. As MarinaWarner writes, quoting the Sybil:

‘By my voice I shall be known’: that’s no bad epitaph for a storyteller. (Warner, 1994: 11).

Aug 30

2013

The Sentimental-Sublime

In the autumn of 1927, Salvador Dalí wrote to his friend Frederico Lorca denouncing the much-admired contemporary Spanish poet, Juan Jiménez. The latter, according to Dalí, is a ‘putrid marasmus’ who ‘has never ever seen anything, only receives mangy emotions from things’ (qtd. Ades, 1994: 139). Dalí was especially outraged by Jiménez’s famous story Platero y Yo (1914), an account of the poet’s beloved companion Platero, a donkey, and their bland sojourns through pastoral scenes. As Dawn Ades has speculated, Dalí’s violent dislike of this gentle, sentimental story may have contributed to the appearance of the rotting donkey as a visual image in such paintings as Honey Is Sweeter than Blood and as a verbal parody in written communication between Dalí and Lorca. In one such letter dated early December 1927, Dalí signs himself… ‘your ROTTING DONKEY’ and adds, ‘may…Platero…die’ (qtd. Ades, 1994: 139).

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