This summer the Tate Museum in London is hosting the Dali and Film exhibition. The show articulates the effect of Salvador Dali’s film had on his early Surrealist creation.

By showing the film in a gallery setting next to his Surrealist oil paintings it is apparent the influence film had on Salvador Dali, and how he shifted images and themes from the big screen to the canvas.

It is easy to associate images of masturbation, castration and bodily corruption that you find in Dali’s films from that era with the early Surrealist works such as The First Days of Spring, The Great Masturbator, Illumined Pleasures and The Accommodations of Desire – all painted in the year his 1929 silent film, Un Chien andalou, was made.

Dali continued to make films all the way through 1946. He collaborated with greats such Hitchcock and Disney. I find his later films hard to view and lack the impact of his early works. The same is true for his Surrealist works on canvas.