Review: Little Ashes
(Credit to its owner)
(Credit to robdreamer @ tumblr)
A month ago I watched Little Ashes (2010).
The title of the movie is named after Dali's painting Senicitas (meaning "little ashes" in Spanish).
The head on the lower left is Lorca, isn't it?
They kept appearing in each other's works for a period. Example:
Invisible Afghan with the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca
in the Form of a Fruit Dish With Three Figs (1938)
The movie mainly focues on the love affair between surrealist Salvador Dali (played by the famous Robert Pattinson) and poet Federico Garcia Lorca (played by spanish actor Javier Beltrán), and their jealous frined, filmmaker Luis Buñuel (played by Matthew McNulty), that is the reason why it is translated as "Dali and His Lover(s)" here.
(Credit to re-hella @ tumblr)
I particularily interested in Dali's personality 'cos it seems so messed-up.
He enjoyed "pain".
He was pleased to find that a wounded bat was devouring by a mass of ants.
He once pushed his friend off a bridge and calmly ate a bowl of cherries while watching his friend's mother carried bowl of his blood out of the room.
He was also known to constantly threw himself downstairs.
Dali: The pain was insignificant, the pleasure was immense. [1]
The Persistence of Memory
Now I notice the mass of ants crawling on the red fob watch on the left. *shiver*
He appreciated his wife Gala's love affairs with various men, and I heard that he even organized orgies for her in his house. Such behavior would be called "swinging" in modern term.
On the other hand, he did not seem to enjoy participate in sex as he quoted:
Dali: I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.
Why was he such obssesed with yet afraid of "penetration"?
Was he sexual phobic, impotence or asexual?
I guess the book Sebastian's Arrows: Letters and Mementos of Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca would provide me some sort-of answers, but I cannot find any copies in local libraries.
It's frustrating that I cannot find any online versions of the book, only dribbles of their letters.
The following is the only complete one I found:
Cadaqués, September 1928
Dear Federico,
...Federiquito, in your book, which I've carried off to read in the mineral places around here,
I have seen you, the little beastling that you are, an erotic beastling with your sex and the little eyes of your body, and your hair,
and your fear of death and your desire to let the gentleman know when you die,
and your mysterious spirit, made from foolish little enigmas in strict horoscopic correspondence,
and the strict horoscopic correspondence between your thumb and your dick, with the moisture of the lakes of saliva of certain species of hairy planets.
I love you for what your book reveals you to be, which is just the opposite of the reality the putrified of this world have made up about you-the dusky gypsy with black hair, childish heart, etc. etc.,
that whole decorative, non-existent Nestorian Lorca who could only have been invented by artistic swine who are far from little fish and bears and from the soft, hard, and liquid silhouettes that surround us.
I love and admire you.
You, a beast with your little fingernail-you who sometimes surrender more than half of your body to death,
or death comes up your arm, from fingernails to shoulder, in a sterile effort.
I have drunk death from your shoulder at those moments when you were absent from your own great arms, which were nothing but two slipcovers with flounces from the useless, unconscious tapestries at the Residencia.
I admire the Flounder-Tongue I see in your book, the fat flounder who will someday be unafraid to shit on the Salinases of this world and will abandon rhyme and all the other stuff that swine associate with art,
and who will do things that are more fun and revolting and curly and poetic than any poet has ever done.
Goodbye, I believe in your inspiration, in your sweat, in your astronomical fatality.
This winter I invite you to leap with me into the void.
I've already been there for days, and have never had such security,
and I now know something about Statuary and about real clarity, far from any aesthetic.
A big hug,
DALÍ
I like his choice of words :D
His letters built up with surreal content and graphic vocabulary. Similar structure to his art.
Dali and Lorca in Cadaques, 1927
Touchy-feely!
Dali and Lorca at amusement park, inscribed by Lorca and sent to his brother and sister.
The real Lorca was a fine-looking lad.
And real Dali was HOT in this pic.
However, in his later years he looked exactly like those patients I observed in the psychiatic hospital.
RPattz with the framboyant moustache does not even show half of the ridiculousness of the real person.
I like the scene where Salvador traps Federico to "out" themselves to their friend, Luis .
Salvador: Federico... Let's play the "putrescent" game.
[Federico stars at Salvador in horror]
Luis: The what?
Salvador: It's "putrescent". It's my new word.
Luis: Meaning?
Salvador: Outdated, outmoded.
Luis: Generally "out", then.
Salvador: Yes, generally. Come on, Feddie. You have to hear these putrescences Federico does... They're hysterical. They're...
Luis: Yes, come on, Feddie!
Federico: *scared* Look. Let's skip the tea, let's run out and have some dinner.
Salvador: What shall I wear?
Federico: *whisper* The blue.
Salvador: *whisper* I don't like the blue.
Federico: *whisper* What about the grey, then?
Salvador: *whisper* Oh, I love the grey, yeah.
[Luis stares at them sourly]
Credit to
Salvador Dali for the incidents
Lincoln Center Theater Review for the content of Dali's letter