It’s always a little bit strange at the Dalí Museum in St Pete — that’s its raison d’être, after all — but it’s rarely been stranger than it was from Feb. 8 through June 1 of this year. That’s when The Dalí presented a truly mind-blowing exhibit called Dalí & Film, which showed us that all that eyeball-slicing business in Un Chien Andalou was only the tip of the iceberg as far as this flamboyant artist’s relationship with the film world and, more specifically and bizarrely, with Hollywood. Dalí’s flirtation with Tinseltown ranged from designing dream sequences for Alfred Hitchcock to an aborted animation project with Walt Disney, and it was all there on display in this stunning show (that made stops at London’s Tate Modern and New York’s MoMA) featuring scads of films, photographs, scripts and more than a hundred works from collections from all over Europe and America. The Dalí Museum went all out for this show, supplementing it with a visit from Hollywood’s master provocateur John Waters and an eclectic series of lectures on surrealist cinema delivered by assorted homegrown specialists. The Salvador Dalí Museum, 1000 Third St. S., St. Petersburg, 727-823-3767, salvadordalimuseum.org
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.