All language subtitles for [English] Salvador Dalí_ In Search of Immortality [DownSub.com]

[film reel whirring]

[water burbling]

[water birds mewing]

[dramatic theme music playing]

Salvador Dalí: I made myself among these rocks,

I formed my personality here,

I discovered my love,

I painted my work,

I constructed my home.

I cannot separate myself from this sky, this sea,

these rocks, I am bound forever to Port Lligat,

where I have defined all my most sincere truths and my roots.

[theme music swells]

Montse Aguer: [speaking Spanish translated to English]

We are in front of the house at Port Lligat Bay,

the only home Dalí ever had,

and this is important because the whole house

can be thought of as a workshop.

It was a vital place for him.

He needed to soak up the landscape.

And this house represented the intimate Dalí,

the Dalí who could concentrate,

who could create, and above all else,

it is the one place in the world

where he decided to create a house to live in

and a studio in which to paint.

Narrator: Dalí's relationship with Cadaqués began early.

His father, the notary, who was born there,

had a house on the Es Llaner beach.

Dalí spent his holidays there

and had very fond memories of it,

since he associated the village with the summer and free time,

far from his school studies,

it was a time he could devote to painting.

In his childhood diaries,

Dalí, during the winter in Figueres,

often recalled Cadaqués wistfully.

[dramatic theme music playing ]

Salvador: I spent a delicious summer, as always,

in the ideal and dreamy village of Cadaqués.

There, beside the Latin sea,

I gorged myself on light and color.

I spent the torrid days of summer painting frenetically

and striving to capture the incomparable beauty

of the sea and the sundrenched beach.

Montse Aguer: [Spanish to English]

For Dalí, Cadaqués was light,

freedom, color, Impressionism.

And then Figueres was more functional,

the place where he went to school,

which he didn't like.

Anna Maria Dalí: Salvador, who doesn't take holidays as other children do,

works constantly, and thus makes the most of our summers in Cadaqués.

Many days, by sunrise he is all ready to start painting.

On other days he spends hours and hours in the studio,

from the break of dawn until sunset.

Narrator: His sister Anna Maria Dalí, four years younger than him,

was fascinated by her talented brother,

for whom she posed as a model

and for whom she felt a great affection and closeness.

Anna Maria: When he painted me, I was always near a window,

and so my eyes had time to fix on the smallest details

...the way Salvador's retinae captured the atmosphere of the village,

the luminosity that filtered into his body,

and then flowed from his fingers, which handled the brushes.

It's a process I have always marveled at

because it is the process that creates the work of art.

At home, it would take place very often

with the greatest simplicity and naturalness.

Salvador: I was going out with my brushes and my canvases,

painting the coast, and one day I discovered a hut.

From then on, I saved myself the trouble

of carrying my materials back and forth.

This hut was in a little bay, known as Port Lligat,

fifteen minutes walk from Cadaqués,

on the other side of the cemetery.

Narrator: From this moment on,

Dalí intensely explored this new landscape,

a setting from which he would never separate himself.

He even declared on at least one occasion

that he himself was Cap De Creus.

Montse: [Spanish to English] The identification was and is total.

So much so that Dalí's work cannot be understood

without having visited this landscape.

Salvador: Port Lligat is one of the most arid,

mineral and planetary places on Earth.

And in this modesty of nature,

I discerned the very principle of irony.

Observing how the forms of those motionless rocks moved,

I meditated on my own rocks,

those of my thoughts.

[quiet theme music playing]

Narrator: In the Bay of Port Lligat,

there are some huts by the sea.

These are ramshackle constructions,

in which the fishermen kept their tools.

One of these huts belonged to a fisherman's widow...

Lídia Noguer.

The friendship between the young Dalí

and Lídia continued until her death.

And she would come to play a fundamental role

in one of the most difficult moments in the artist's life.

In fact, Dalí felt a great fascination for Lídia,

to the extent of declaring that "Lídia possesses

"the most magnificent paranoiac brain,

aside from my own, that I have ever encountered."

[in French]

Jordi Artigues: [speaking Spanish interpreted to English]

Young Dalí must have been fascinated by Lídia,

who told stories to all the children--

stories that she quite often took out of the newspapers

she used to wrap the fish in she sold.

Federico García Lorca: Lídia's madness is a moist, soft madness,

full of seagulls and lobsters,

it is a plastic madness.

Don Quijote rides through the air

and Lídia through the air of the Mediterranean.

How wonderful Cadaqués is!

And how wonderful it is to draw a parallel

between Lídia and the last knight-errant.

[quiet theme music playing]

Narrator: During Dalí's early years,

the landscape, his family,

and he himself were the focus of his work,

which swung back and forth between tradition and avant garde.

For Dalí, his creative work was also a means of experimentation,

which allowed him to open up

and to discover the latest tendencies in art.

This experimentation led him to Surrealism,

a movement of which he became one of the outstanding figures.

Montse Aguer: [Spanish to English]

And this painting is a reflection of this new line,

of amputated bodies, severed hands,

arteries, veins.

Now time painted in an almost hyperrealist manner, isn't it?

Jordi Artigues: [Spanish to English]

And he feels the need to move on.

He feels rather trapped in the classical approach to art.

Anna Maria: My brother went to Paris with Luís Buñuel

to make the film "Un Chien Andalou,"

and there he made contact with various members

of the Surrealist group, who visited Cadaqués that summer.

It was the summer of '29.

He lost the spiritual peace and the well-being

that his work had reflected up until then.

The paintings he was making were horribly hallucinatory.

What he sculpted on his canvases were authentic nightmares,

and those disturbing figures that seemed

to want to explain something inexplicable were a torture.

Lugubrious Game is the most representative example

of the paintings of that period

and the one that most clearly reflects

the change in spirit he had undergone.

Montse Aguer: [Spanish to English]

But it seems to me, there were mixed emotions here.

It wasn't just Surrealism that Anna Maria didn't like.

It's rather a familial vision,

but it's where Dalí set about finding a style of his own

and was able to affirm himself with a specific current, isn't it?

Narrator: Miró introduced him to Paris society

and, most important, he made his first contact with the Surrealists,

among them, Paul Eluard and the Viscount Noailles,

who were to become Dalí's patrons

and would have a major role in financing the house in Port Lligat.

[quiet theme music playing]

1929 was a decisive year in Dalí's life.

He met Gala, who was to be his partner and muse.

Dalí spent the summer in Cadaqués,

where he was visited by the gallerist owner Goemans and his partner,

and also Luís Buñuel, René Magritte,

and Paul Eluard and his wife Gala,

with their daughter Cécile.

Salvador: Thus, in four days,

I found myself surrounded for the first time by Surrealists,

who were drawn there above all

by the remarkable personality they discovered in me

because Cadaqués could offer

none of the indispensable amenities of a leisure resort

if you didn't have a house of your own there.

Montse Aguer: [Spanish to English]

And then Dalí dramatized this gathering.

It was very important to him.

It represented everything he was looking for at that moment,

and, as he recounts in fantastical fashion in his autobiography,

he fell madly in love with Gala and was eager to impress her.

[in French]

Narrator: When the group returned to Paris in September,

Gala stayed on for a few weeks in Cadaqués,

and from that moment on she was always at the painter's side.

Salvador: She said to me, "My boy, we shall never separate."

She was destined to be my Godiva,

she who advances,

my victory, my wife.

But for this to happen, she had to heal me,

and she healed me.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

The morality of the Dalí house was far more conventional.

And so it was, quite clearly, a revolution,

a revolution in the family home,

which was difficult to swallow.

They were able to accept it, in due course, but not immediately.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

And Dalí found that while his sister struggled to understand

the painting "Lugubrious Game," for example, Gala readily understood it.

Anna Maria: That summer was all it took

to bring about in Salvador the change

that distanced him from his friends,

from us and even from himself.

The river of his life, so well channeled,

was diverted by the pressure from those complicated beings,

who were unable to understand anything

of the classic landscape of Cadaqués.

My father was seriously concerned.

He tugged at his white hair,

a sign that something was troubling him greatly,

and his usual smiling, optimistic face

betrayed a fear of some tragic event.

[quiet theme music playing]

Dalí's relationship with Gala,

begun that summer,

prompted his father, the notary, to change his will,

and practically disinherited his son.

The situation was made worse by the painting Dalí exhibited

at the Goemans gallery in Paris

an image of the Sacred Heart, on which Dalí had written,

"Sometimes I spit with pleasure on the portrait of my mother,"

which caused the family a lot of unhappiness.

Salvador: The fact that our subconscious impulses

are often felt as extremely cruel to our conscious mind

is yet another reason for not failing to manifest them

when they are the friends of truth.

The greater part of these manifestations were perfectly unjust.

But what I was trying to do

was to affirm my will to power and to prove myself

that I was still inaccessible to remorse.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

I think it was part of this process we have talked about,

of transformation, of a radical break,

and that it was a declaration to that effect.

What happened is that it was interpreted

as a particular moment and taken very literally,

in any case, it was a provocation

and he knew that, didn't he?

Narrator: His father let him go to Cadaqués with Luís Buñuel

because he thought a period of rest and separation

would help him rediscover his true self

and his love of everything he had loved up until then.

But his father's plan failed.

The young Dalí was more and more caught up in the Surrealist movement,

in which he had found a new means of expression

through the subconscious,

which revealed a whole world hidden by the conscious mind.

Salvador: A few days later, I received a letter from my father

informing me that he had banished me irrevocably from the family.

When I received this letter,

my first reaction was to cut off my hair.

But I went even further,

I shaved my whole head.

I went to bury my hair, so black,

in a hole I dug in the beach for this purpose.

And where I also buried the pile of shells

of the sea urchins I had eaten at midday.

After that, I climbed a small hill

that overlooks the village of Cadaqués.

And there, sitting under the olive trees,

I spent two interminable hours

contemplating the panorama of my childhood,

my adolescence and my present.

Narrator: The artist's father found out about his son's intention

of returning to Cadaqués.

Furious, he tried in every way possible

to keep Dalí and Gala out of Cadaqués.

A good example of this is the letter

Dalí's father sent to Luís Buñuel in Paris.

Salvador Sr.: If you still maintain your friendship with my son,

you could do me a favor.

I do not write to him as I am ignorant of his address.

He left yesterday evening for Paris,

where I believe he will remain for eight days.

You will know where madame resides,

and could advise my son not to seek to return to Cadaqués,

for the simple reason that he will not be able to stay in that village

for even two or three hours.

Then things will become so complicated for him

that he will be unable to return to France.

...Should this measure fail, I will resort to every means

at my disposal, including assault on his person.

My son will not go to Cadaqués,

he should not go, he cannot go.

Narrator: Dalí's father learned of his intention

of buying a house in or near Cadaqués.

Dalí wanted to buy the fisherman's hut owned by Lídia Noguer,

which he was using as a storeroom and studio.

His father did all he could to prevent this,

but Lídia, who felt a great affection for the young Dalí, took no notice.

With the money he gained from selling his painting

"The Old Age of William Tell" to the viscount of Noailles,

Dalí was able to buy the fisherman's hut.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

It was Dalí's triumph, that is to say,

he couldn't come to Cadaqués, he couldn't have a house,

but he had a house there, and at the very moment

that his father told him he couldn't.

So it's also a symbol of Dalí's triumph once again.

Salvador: I spent the whole evening looking at the check

and for the first time I began to suspect

that money was a very important thing...

With that and Gala's money we would go to Cadaqués

and build a house large enough for the two of us.

This would allow us to work

and get away to Paris from time to time.

The only landscape that I like is that of Cadaqués

and I didn't want to look at any other.

[dramatic theme music playing]

[in French]

Montse: [Spanish to English

So, this was the first hut, the one Lídia bought,

a very small hut of 22 square meters,

and this is where they made their life.

A really confined space, which they used for everything.

Jordi: [in Spanish to English]

And what he did was to reinvent the hut for himself,

to make it into a 22-square meter house,

which amounts to a bedroom,

a living room, a studio,

and a small service space,

which would be the one upstairs

where there was a shower, kitchen and bathroom,

and that was all.

Salvador [in French]:

Salvador: It was necessary to walk very carefully,

almost sideways, between things,

because it was an extremely small space.

I wanted it to be small.

The smaller, the more intrauterine.

Not being in a position to carry out

any of my delirious decorative ideas,

I just wanted the exact proportions required for the two of us

and only the two of us.

Jordi: [in Spanish to English]

But as an artist's studio it didn't work.

So Dalí did the whole conversion

to transform it into his first studio at Port Lligat.

Montse: [in Spanish to English]

And there was no electricity,

there was no water. It was, he said,

an aesthetic life.

"Here I learned to hone myself down

and live with the bare necessities."

Salvador: It was here in Port Lligat

that I learned to impoverish myself,

to limit and hone my thinking

so it would be as efficient as an axe,

where blood tasted like blood

and honey tasted like honey.

A life that was hard, without metaphor or wine,

a life with the light of eternity

The idle chip chap of Paris,

the lights of the city and of the jewels of "Rue de la Paix"

could not resist this other light,

total, age-old, poor,

as serene and intrepid as the concise brow of Minerva.

Montse: [in Spanish to English]

And then, of course, a month later

he was able to buy this second hut

and he made this opening,

and at once he had more space and more light.

Jordi: [in Spanish to English]

So now we're in what would become the dining room,

but was initially the second studio,

the second cell of this cellular growth of the house.

What did he do with this space?

His aim was to turn it into a space to work and paint in.

So what he needed, first and foremost,

was to let light in,

and what did he do to let light in?

Well, basically, make a window to let in overhead light from the north,

which was very important to him,

and convert what was a little window in a little fisherman's hut

into a splendid panoramic window,

which let the landscape into his house.

Narrator: Six years had gone by since the family rift,

and Salvador Dalí hadn't seen his father since 1929.

During that time he had worked tirelessly,

while moving between Paris, New York, and the house in Port Lligat.

Montse: [Spanish to English] He was combining Paris with occasional trips to New York,

and he set himself apart in Paris.

He had two very important individual exhibitions.

He was acquiring ever-greater importance within the Surrealist group,

and at the same time, getting to know Americans

who would open doors for him in the United States,

which was to be a new phase for him,

and he combined this house in Port Lligat

with two outstanding centers of art, one being Paris,

and the other, the future, New York.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

At the very beginning of the two huts,

the upper one was a terrace,

a terrace which must have been splendid

from the pictures we have of it.

Here we see Gala and Dalí

and the friends who came to visit them,

with a sunshade, the terrace furniture, etc...

What happened is, in due course,

these two terraces ended up becoming a new studio

and a new living space.

Narrator: His relationship with Gala was stable

and they formed a tandem,

strengthened by the ever- increasing number of commissions.

The time had come to close old wounds.

On March 3rd, 1935,

the meeting and reconciliation with his family took place.

That same year,

the Dalís considered extending their home again,

and they contacted Emili Puignau,

the man who was to take charge of all the work

that would be done on the house.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

And he always knew how to get it done,

however difficult it may have been,

and he explains in his book that at times

it was very difficult to achieve what Dalí was asking for,

but nevertheless he did his utmost and the house took shape,

because Dalí was the architect on this house.

He designed it, it was in his head,

he even had them cut back the rock to make this fireplace,

which he sketched, and which became a constant.

He sketched many of the fireplaces,

not only here, but later for Púbol too.

The painter's interest in the house was aesthetic--

for example, that the roofs should form a series of steps leading down to the sea.

Emili Puignaue: Dalí was always in a hurry to get things done,

so when he was asked when he wanted something for,

he would answer, "Yesterday."

So it didn't take us long to do the bodies of the buildings.

That was in the autumn of '35

and they had to be finished for the coming summer.

The construction was completed,

apart from some details, in July of 1936.

A fateful date, coinciding as it did

with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

[explosion rumbles]

[flames crackle]

Narrator: The peaceful, contemplative life

Dalí and Gala led in Port Lligat

was cut short by the imminent Spanish Civil War

that divided the country

and plunged it into misery and uncertainty,

an uncertainty which the Dalís had sensed for some time,

especially Gala, who went through the Russian Revolution.

Salvador: The Civil War had begun!

I knew it, I was certain of it.

I had predicted it!

And Spain, with another war,

was to be the first country called to resolve

with the stark reality of violence and blood

all of the insoluble ideological dramas of post-war Europe,

all of the aesthetic anxiety of the isms

polarized in two words,

revolution and tradition.

Emili: When I went to Port Lligat the next day,

the Dalís told me they were alarmed and uneasy.

I tried to reassure them, saying that nothing could happen,

but they at once said that they weren't so sure.

Gala said to me

"Mon petit, we cannot take any risks."

Who could have known then that it would be 12 years before I saw them again

and before they could live in the house that meant so much to them?

Narrator: During the years of the Spanish Civil War,

the Dalís moved from place to place around Europe,

waiting for their return to Port Lligat.

They were mostly in Italy and France,

interspersed with sporadic trips to the United States,

where Dalí had begun to take his place in the public eye

and where he saw the opportunity

to make his fortune through his work.

[violins playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

In fact, we can say that Dalí hardly saw Port Lligat

from 1936 until 1948-- a long time.

The reasons for this were the Civil War,

which kept him from returning to his country,

and then the Second World War,

which he spent in the United States.

[melodic theme music playing]

Salvador: I could feel the rise of the blind forces of fury,

of destruction and death that would dislocate Europe.

When three days later, war was officially declared,

Gala, always alert,

immediately thought of our escape.

Gala left for Lisbon in 1940

and waited for Dalí to join her a few days later

to make the definitive move to the United States.

Before leaving, Dalí visited his family,

who had suffered the consequences of the war.

He traveled for 24 hours to get to his father's house in Cadaqués.

Salvador: I had to pass through 10 villages in ruins,

their walls, like ghosts,

were silhouetted in the moonlight

like Goya's drawings of the horrors of battle,

and my heart shrank in traversing that labyrinth

of the miseries of war.

In people's memory, the wounds of martyrdom had not yet healed,

and my coming there at that time was met with mistrust.

"Papa!" "Who's there? What do you want?"

"It's me." "Who?"

"Me, Salvador Dalí, your son."

So I knocked on my father's door,

in Cadaqués, at two o'clock in the morning.

I embraced my family. They gave me anchovies,

sausages, and tomatoes dressed with olive oil.

I chewed the food, astonished and terrified!

The morning following my return to Cadaqués.

I hugged the heroic Lídia, who had survived everything.

I went with her to visit our house in Port Lligat.

I opened the door of my home.

Everything was gone.

There was nothing left of my library,

absolutely nothing--

only walls covered with obscene drawings

and conflicting political emblems.

I pushed aside the waste with my foot

and went outside, to the sun.

[dramatic theme music playing]

New skin, new land!

And a land of freedom, if that is possible!

I have chosen the geology of a country that was new to me

and was young, virgin, and free from drama.

That of America.

[slow jazz music playing]

Upon arriving in America,

I went almost immediately to Hampton Manor,

the residence of Caresse Crosby,

our friend from the time at Moulin du Soleil.

We were all going to try to make the sun shine again,

a little, that sun of France, which had set.

As soon as we arrived, I set up my easel

with two large canvases

and I painted "Spider of the Evening,"

"Hope," and Resurrection of the Flesh.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

He also saw how the center of the art world

was shifting from Paris to New York,

so he was where he needed to be,

despite the fact that he was exiled against his will,

but I think he knew how to read the situation well

and positively, insofar as it wasn't a pleasant experience,

and took the opportunity to find out

how the United States worked,

to consecrate himself once and for all.

[big band music playing]

Dizzy Dinner: Mr. Salvador Dalí gives a party.

The Spanish painter of surrealism

dresses Mrs. Dalí in a unicorn's head,

just to start things off.

As hostess, she presides from a red velvet bed.

Soldier Jackie Coogan and the still dapper Mr. Hope serve the main course.

The party is surrealism,

but them frogs is real!

Narrator: And though his work evolves in tandem with his experiences,

both personal and artistic, in the United States,

the references to the landscape of Cadaqués

and Port Lligat are still there.

He remembered with melancholy the lights and colors.

And in his portraits of members of American high society,

the presence of the landscape is a constant.

...or in the animated short "Destino,"

with Walt Disney in 1946,

where the landscapes and reminiscences of Port Lligat are ever present.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

In the United States, he sought the life he had here,

and that's why he combined New York,

the exhibition season,

the art season in New York,

and then the move to Monterrey, California,

where he always looked for landscapes like those of Port Lligat

or which evoked Port Lligat for him.

[dramatic theme music playing]

During this long period of absence,

the Dalí family took care of the house.

In 1944, Dalí's father wrote to his son

to say that a close friend of Anna Maria, Dalí's sister,

would live in and look after the house in Port Lligat

until he came back from the United States.

Salvador Sr.: Anna Maria has let them have the house

so they may live there without paying rent,

but with the condition, which they have fulfilled,

of repairing it at their expense,

and have left it as good as new

so that the cession of the house in no way disadvantages you,

whereas left unoccupied, it would have deteriorated

and you would have lost almost everything.

We go on as before, with no news,

and calmly await your return,

which I am sure you wish for after four years of absence.

[ slow music playing]

[gusting]

[rumbling]

Salvador: The bomb in Hiroshima exploded in an immaculate sky.

Pikado, "Light and noise,"

the Japanese who managed to escape said.

I was painting Gala naked from behind

when I felt the seismic shock of the explosion.

It filled me with terror.

What horrified me was the thought of the possibility

of a chain of explosions

that could have reached the whole world

before I finished the perfect breast of my Galarina.

No one was safe, wherever they may have been.

I decided to study, without delay,

the best means of preserving my precious existence

from the clutches of death,

and I began to occupy myself in earnest

with the formulas of immortality.

"Atomic Melancholy," which I painted at the time,

expresses the doubts and certainties

that were born in me on the 6th of August, 1945.

[slow melodic music playing]

Narrator: The war was over,

but it would take Dalí and Gala

another three years to get back to Port Lligat.

Acclaimed as an international artist,

he had achieved what he had dreamed of.

His popularity in the United States

can only be compared to that of movie stars,

stars whom he knew and socialized with.

His work was on show in the leading museums and salons.

Anna Maria: Papa has a great desire for you to come home.

You cannot imagine it.

Everything he does shows how eager he is for your return.

Auntie and I are also looking forward enormously

to the day we shall all be reunited in our little house in Cadaqués,

our little house from when we were small.

Narrator: 1948 came, and with it

the long-awaited return of the Dalís to Spain,

and to the center of his Universe, Port Lligat.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Salvador: From the bridge of the ship,

I looked at New York with satisfaction.

What joy in finding once again

the transcendent beauty of Port Lligat,

my kingdom, my Platonic cave.

I am in transit.

I forget the pride of the skyscrapers and the agitation,

the noise, the American frenzy.

From the point of hypersnobbism at which I have arrived,

I have no alternative, but to feel I am a mystic.

[music swells]

Narrator: The newspapers took an interest in Dalí and Gala's return.

On August 1st, 1948,

the daily "La Vanguardia" published an article

recounting a meeting with the artist

on the very day he arrived in Port Lligat.

I am not the man who stole a landscape,

the landscape stole me.

I want to get back to painting my mythology

with the precise places seen in a new way.

In keeping with the new physics,

it is no longer Freudian psychology that attracts me,

but the geography of the places where mythologies live on.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

"Salvador Dalí has returned..."

The press take up the story,

the family reunion continues,

it's a very sweet moment,

and of course he returned to his home

and carried on with his project of extending it.

Narrator: In the summer of 1948,

Dalí and Gala, after twelve years absence,

had already decided to make Port Lligat

their place of permanent residence.

Dalí needed a space to work in,

but also to sort out

and accumulate everything his life

as a hotel nomad hadn't let him store away.

His financial situation was comfortable.

They could extend the house with a new cell and furnish it.

They bought another hut, also of 22 square meters,

and a piece of land, which is an olive grove,

enabling them to add to the house

what are now the living room and the library.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Their builder, Puignau,

also undertook this second extension,

and since they worked without an architect,

he followed the artist's indications

in the form of letters, plans, designs and sketches.

Emili: With his departure for Paris in 1948,

we started the work of rebuilding the hut

so that it would be ready for his return the year after,

just as we always did.

Narrator: In the spring of 1949,

the house was ready to be lived in.

Gala took charge of the decorating

and bought pieces of furniture

from various antique shops in the area.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

And he even had this mirror placed in a special way.

He took care care, you know, in positioning the mirrors

because she said that in this way, from the room, from the bedroom,

he would be the first man in Spain to see the sun rise.

[dramatic theme music continues]

Salvador: As I was having breakfast,

I watched the sun rise and it struck me that Port Lligat

being geographically the most easterly point of Spain,

every morning, I am the first Spaniard to feel the sun's caress.

Even in Cadaqués, which is ten minutes from here,

the sun arrives later.

Narrator: The home that Dalí had had to abandon for years,

on account of the war, had now been recovered

and his inner peace and his landscapes were reestablished.

But a new conflict emerged with the publication

of his sister Anna Maria's autobiography,

in which she declared her aversion to Surrealism

and rejection of Gala.

With this book, old wounds were reopened

and the family was divided once again.

Anna Maria: Salvador had said that far from the family,

when he saw our little house in Cadaqués,

the scene of all of his childhood and adolescence,

it made him think of a lump of sugar

covered in bitterness.

This image could not be more real,

though it must be remembered that the bitterness he saw

was bitterness that he, thanks to the Surrealist group,

had put there, making us victims

of the decadent world, which he unfortunately suggested,

but from which all of us have always kept our distance.

Narrator: His father found himself in a difficult situation,

but he took his daughter's side,

as the foreword he wrote for Anna Maria's book clearly shows.

At the same time, the decision by Dalí's father and sister

to sell some early paintings without his consent,

deeply offended Dalí.

The break had become definitive.

The artist closed the doors of his home in Port Lligat

to his family and only opened them again

a few days before his father's death.

[dramatic music continues]

Emili: In the two previous seasons he spent in Port Lligat,

Dalí had used the so-called yellow room as his studio--

the room off the stairway leading to the first floor.

However, this room was really too small

for painting in reasonable comfort,

so that same year, taking advantage

of the neighbors' decision to sell their hut,

which was next to the Dalí's house,

they bought it without so much as discussing the price,

since it was a unique opportunity to make another extension.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

And Dalí had already begun to explore new formats,

with much larger canvases,

and here he didn't have the space he needed.

Yes, in terms of light.

Yes, in terms of views.

But not in terms of space.

Narrator: As was his custom,

Dalí drew up the basic scheme of how his new studio should be.

He had thought it all out.

The work was done, as before,

during the part of the year

they spent in Paris and New York.

Emili: The wall that formed a little vestibule

with the door to his studio

had to have the Dalí stamp,

so the large door or opening for communication

had to be a truncated isosceles triangle,

and the fireplace situated next to this opening

would be like the opening, but upside down--

a very different design from what we were used to.

Narrator: In the spring of 1950,

the Dalís returned from their annual trip

to Paris and the United States.

His great desire was to see the studio completed.

Jordi [Spanish to English]

At last he had a studio with maximum capacity

to receive light from outside.

At last he had a studio whose windows

all looked out on the landscape of Port Lligat,

so that the landscape really did invade the studio completely.

What's more, it was a studio whose space

was really suitable for the new canvases,

the new formats.

Narrator: The first painting he did in the definitive studio

was "The Madonna of Port Lligat,"

a supremely mystic-nuclear work,

conceived over the winter

and perfectly structured in his mind,

all he needed was a suitable place to paint it.

And the new studio was ideal.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Then he had the idea, aided by Emili Puignau,

for this metal framework,

which at first was manual,

and later worked with a push button

to move up and down,

so that Dalí always had the part of the canvas

he was painting in front of him

And then, with the maulstick and the brush,

he would paint.

He would go over to the bench and contemplate,

and it was this to and fro.

Here, for example,

he finished "The Madonna of Port Lligat,"

he painted "The Battle of Tetuan,"

the canvases for the ceiling of the Theatre-Museum,

and these and other large canvases

would be rolled up and passed out through this window.

[music sting]

Narrator: But even though he now had the new studio,

Dalí wasn't progressing at his usual rate.

His father was ill

and Dalí knew he had to go and see him

before his inevitable death.

In September of 1950, his father died.

Dalí's grief was profound.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

It was a major blow for Dalí,

because his father was his mentor

and he would always have his example in mind.

Dalí never forgot when his father once said to him,

when they had been arguing together,

"You will die alone and poor."

And he sometimes said his life had been a struggle

to prove his father wrong.

Narrator: His father's death reawakened the fear of falling ill

and dying that Dalí felt from an early age,

and rekindled his interest in immortality,

and in particular hibernation.

Salvador: I have made the decision that immediately after my demise,

I am to be preserved,

to await the discovery that will allow humanity

one day to revive the brilliant Dalí.

I am certain that a cure will be found for cancer,

that astonishing transplants will be performed

and that the rejuvenation of cells is only days away.

Coming back to life will be an ordinary operation.

I will await in liquid helium, without impatience.

[violins playing]

Narrator: In due course, Dalí returned to normal,

to his daily routine of painting and writing.

In short, he recovered his capacity to work

and his extraordinary rhythm.

He would get up early and paint until lunchtime.

Afterwards, without lingering at the table,

he took a short nap,

then went back to the studio

to paint for the rest of the day until evening.

After years of exile,

successes and tragedies,

a great deal of work and effort,

the cells have come together

to form the great mother cell, his home.

Salvador: Our house has grown exactly like a true biological structure,

in cellular outgrowths.

Each new impulse in our life

has its corresponding new cell-- a room.

The nucleus was formed by the paranoiac delirium of Lídia,

who gifted us the first cell.

[violins swell]

[violin playing ends]

Narrator: A few years have passed

since the creation of his definitive studio.

Dalí's house has been extended with additions of gardens

with olive trees around the house down to the sea.

The house has become a place of pilgrimage for many people

and also for the media from all over the world.

Dalí is a world-famous artist,

and now everyone knows where to find him.

Jordi [Spanish to English]

The first thing is that he now constructed part of the house

as a public place, a reception area,

and a kind of open-air studio

where he could work in collaboration with visitors,

other artists, younger people...

people who contribute the to temperature of modernity.

Narrator: Dalí went on with his life at Port Lligat,

a life tied to the evolution of his work,

now expanding into happenings and performances,

some of which now take shape in the outdoor spaces of the house.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

It was this combination of innovation,

but let's make this clear, because I think it's interesting

that Dalí, who was always experimenting,

also wanted to explain how he experimented

and above all for everyone to know how he experimented.

Jordi: [Spanish to English] Of course, because he wanted to get through to people.

He didn't want to be an artist enclosed

in some kind of ivory tower

who someone might be interested in some day.

He wanted to get through to people.

He wanted people to think about

the things he was thinking about.

[classical music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

These were new forms of creation,

because the world was becoming smaller for him,

and his sense of this gave him a new need to grow,

to grow where he could,

in means, in thought,

in the company of other artists or cameras, or whatever.

And above to project outwards,

to the world, always.

[in French]

[dramatic theme music playing]

The house was now a complex cellular structure,

which the Dalís had completed with the passage of time,

and had grown to include spaces like the swimming pool

or the what he called the milky way.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

There is a whole Pop aesthetic,

Pirelli, the Lips sofas,

which is a Dalí classic,

but the pool in this form,

out of "One Thousand and One Nights,"

with some inspiration from the Alhambra...

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

Yes, it has exactly the perspective of the Alhambra Pool,

Montse: [Spanish to English] Which is funny because in fact the idea for the pool

came from a piece of polystyrene, didn't it?

You can see it in the studio.

Jordi: [Spanish to English] Yes, it's in the studio...

Montse: The chronological evolution of the house is linked,

naturally, to Dalí's artistic evolution,

and to the movements in art that were happening at that time,

because Dalí, with his curiosity,

was very much aware of what was happening.

He was interested in American abstract art.

He was interested in hyperrealism.

He was interested in Pop Art.

But we can see that what he worked most at,

really, was installation

and he was experimenting,

but he would end the Eighties, once again,

with the great classics.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Narrator: Even though Dalí was combining travel,

happenings and work in his studio in the Port Lligat house,

from 1970, one project absorbed

and concentrated much of his time,

the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres,

a center in which he invested his energy and his hopes.

[classical music playing]

In his studio, he prepared the great ceiling

of the "Palace of the Wind"

where he depicted Gala and himself.

The stereoscopic paintings, born of his interest

in optical illusions and double images,

and many of the ideas and elements

that make up the Dalí universe,

brought together here almost as if this were

a testament to his life and his art.

In this task he had the invaluable support

of his friend, the artist Antoni Pitxot.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Dalí was invited to design a nightclub in Acapulco

and he gave it an oval form inspired by the sea urchin.

It was never built, but Gala,

who followed the process very closely,

was impressed by the structure Dalí had conceived

and she asked him to apply it

as the new extension at his home in Port Lligat--

the oval room.

Salvador: Everything celebrates the cult of Gala,

even the round room, with its perfect echo,

which crowns the whole built complex

and is like the dome of this galactic cathedral.

Narrator: This is the last cellular extension

of the Port Lligat house, which in turn,

became the first cellular extension

of the Castle of Púbol, which a few years later,

Dalí gave as a present to Gala.

Salvador: Exactly one year ago,

I discovered the ruins of the noble Castle of Púbol.

I took Gala there with her eyes closed

and I gave it to her. Three months later,

on our way back to New York, in the middle of the ocean,

at 5:00 teatime, Gala took me by the hand

and suddenly said to me, "I accept the Castle of Púbol,

"with only one condition,

that you will only come to visit me at the castle by written invitation."

[dramatic music swells]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Because she found the atmosphere at Port Lligat,

where Dalí was visited by so many people, rather tiring,

and she wanted a private space of her own.

Gala: Everyone thinks I'm a well-defended fortress,

perfectly organized,

when at most I might be a little tottering tower

that, out of modesty,

tries to cover itself with ferns and hide its flanks,

already in ruins, to find a bit of loneliness.

[dramatic theme music continues]

Narrator: Then they recalled an old pact

between them that was made in the 1930s

on one of their stays in Italy.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

A trip to Italy on which Dalí promised her a castle,

and with Púbol,

I believe they gave solid form to a legend,

a legend of a love story beyond the usual parameters.

And I think that finding this castle

was like the solidification of desire.

Salvador: I had still to offer Gala

a casket more solemnly worthy of our love.

I therefore gave her a mansion raised on the remains

of a twelfth-century castle at La Bisbal,

the ancient Castle of Púbol,

where she would reign as absolute sovereign.

Narrator: Gala was delighted.

She especially liked the garden and the flowers,

above all the roses,

which reminded her of a garden in Crimea,

where as a young girl she had spent the summer holidays.

[light classical music playing]

The castle was in a half-ruined state,

both the interior floors and the roof,

but the façades and especially the courtyards,

which impressed Dalí,

were in good condition.

[opera singing]

Salvador: Magnificent, it's fantastic!

I like it.

It's worth buying for the courtyard alone.

What is more, I have seen something sublime on the façade.

Not only is it cracked, but the form of a rough edge

in the crack gives the impression that there has been

a cataclysm there, an earthquake,

that one part held firm while the other broke away and fell.

Therefore, it should not be touched.

It should be left as it is.

Gala: Dear Emili, dear friend.

As you will have realized,

Púbol is my obsession-- ours, rather.

So far, working together, we have always triumphed.

At Port Lligat, this little house has become famous,

and so we have a great responsibility

for a grand new success, you and I.

Emili: For the first time, after so many years,

I saw Gala really obsessed and very interested

in the execution of the work on the castle.

One day she said to me...

Gala: Emili, time is a vital thing.

Life is short, and so I have to be able

to make use of the castle.

Everything must be finished when we return

from Paris and New York at the end of next May.

If this results in a higher cost than envisaged, I do not mind.

I have complete confidence in you.

Emili: Both Dalí and Gala had great hopes for their castle.

He already had in mind

a whole series of details for the decoration.

Every day he had new ideas.

But he was faced with opposition from Gala, who said,

"No, no, the castle is mine

"and you must not intervene at all.

"The reconstruction of the castle is a matter for Emili and me,

so do not get involved."

Dalí smiled and replied,

"Yes, yes, Galutxa.

I very much agree on this."

But he knew very well that he would be the one

who would really complete all the details

and the decoration, and so it was.

[violins playing]

Salvador: I have here the list of orders

I have received from Gala so far for her castle.

A roof fifteen meters across

that will represent, in the Mediterranean sky,

a nocturnal hole from which surrealist objects fall.

Chairs that do not touch the floor.

Six water-fountain elephants with stork legs,

which flow into the pool with the 27 ceramic heads of Richard Wagner.

Screens painted with optical illusion representations

of heating radiators to conceal radiators.

Solid gold taps and shower heads for the bathroom

that will be painted black

because according to the rules of alchemy,

treasures must always be hidden.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

When we come to the first floor and see the first room,

we are amazed by the imaginative deluge

with which a setting has been created,

which transports us to the Middle Ages,

yet it is very clear that we are not in the Middle Ages,

but in the world of Salvador Dalí.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

It's like the intermission of a play.

Before we come in,

all the elements are already there...

Gala's throne, Gala's powerful presence

and then we come further in

to reach even more hidden spaces,

such as the library, or the bedroom.

But first, the magnificence.

Jordi: [Spanish to English] Exactly!

Narrator: Dalí used walls

and half-ruined roofs very intelligently,

creating unsuspected spaces of strongly contrasted dimensions.

The result is a place with spaces of great beauty,

such as the old kitchen converted into a bathroom

or the Piano Room.

[violins swell to finish]

Dalí was interested in the concept of ruin.

In fact, all the houses that make up the Dalí triangle

were rebuilt on top of ruined buildings.

And in all three, he always applied the same criterion.

He reconstructed and redecorated them

as if they were sets

with elements that evoke the Classical period of the Renaissance,

such as domes, columns or sculptures.

At Púbol in particular,

there is a clear scenographic intention

with links to Classicism and Romanticism.

[classical music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Yes, for me, this whole area of the pool and the garden

is the most scenographic part of the castle.

And as Dalí himself said:

"I am an eminently theatrical artist."

Jordi: [Spanish to English None other than Visconti

considered that he had a theatrical talent

and a gift for the stage.

Visconti: Then Dalí came.

I met him in Rome when he was studying Bramante

and I was looking for an eccentric set designer,

a magician, but one who really possessed

exactly as he demonstrated in "As You Like It,"

the gift of creating a stage set.

For a month, he immersed himself in the construction

of his geometric forest of Raphaelesque trees,

among shepherds, courtiers,

sheep and atomic pomegranates.

Montse: [Spanish to English] Because Dalí needed to step out of the canvas,

he needed to go far beyond an exhibition room,

and these were arts that allowed him to express himself

in his entirety.

His creativity in the field of set design

extended to the world of cinema,

especially in the U.S.,

where Alfred Hitchcock chose him

because he felt he was the artist best equipped

to reflect the realm of the subconscious,

a realm that Dalí ended up transporting into his own spaces.

[suspenseful music]

I requested Dalí.

Selznick, the producer, had the impression

that I wanted Dalí for the publicity value.

That wasn't it at all.

Dalí was the best man for me to do the dreams

because that's what dreams should be.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Narrator: Dalí took a special interest in the design

of the exterior spaces of the castle.

In Italy, he had been fascinated

by the baroque magic of the gardens of Bomarzo,

not far from Rome.

[suspenseful music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Here again a reference to Classical mythology,

to the labyrinth and to structures

that are both seen and not seen,

this play of visible and invisible,

which is always very present in Dalí.

[suspenseful music continues]

Dalí was also a great lover of forced perspectives,

the one that interested him the most

is the one in the Palazzo Spada in Rome.

[in Spanish]

Jordi: [Spanish to English] What Dalí did with one of the paths in the garden

was to project a perspective like the one in the Palazzo Spada,

but instead of using columns, he used the trees,

and in a very skillful way,

he had the trees planted and the vegetation cut

in such a way as to create this false perspective.

[suspenseful music playing]

Emili: In 1974, the pool and the garden were constructed.

With these interventions,

the work on the Castle of Púbol was completed.

[suspenseful music continues]

Narrator: The Castle of Púbol was Dalí's gift to Gala,

his lady, to whom he rendered vassalage,

and agreed not to enter the castle

without her written permission.

Salvador: I am giving you a Gothic castle, Gala.

Gala: I accept with one condition,

that you only come to visit me at the castle by invitation.

Salvador: I accept.

Since I accept in principle every condition

in which there are conditions.

It is the very principle of courtly love.

[foreboding music]

The day that Dalí decide

I give this castle and tell Gala

"please, you catch this castle because it is one gift."

Tell "No! Only one condition...

You never come in this castle sin me,

only with written invitation.

Man: From your wife?

Salvador: From, from... and Dalí is...

every day more masochist,

and love tremendously this condition.

And now receive an invitation and bring you this afternoon

and you look one second

the visual Gala open and close the door.

Salvador: Gala became the impregnable castle

that she had never ceased to be.

Intimacy and, above all, familiarities

make all passions diminish.

Rigor of feeling and distances,

as demonstrated by the neurotic ceremonial

of courtly love, make passion grow.

[music swells]

Narrator: Gala has always been considered the muse of Salvador Dalí,

an inspiring muse and a mysterious woman.

Loved by some, hated by others,

she left no one indifferent.

She was a woman of great intuition,

with an exceptional artistic sensibility,

who recognized the artistic and creative genius

of intellectual artists such as Paul Eluard,

Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí.

Montse: [Spanish to English] She was a woman,

a strong character, Gala,

powerful, very cultured.

And she was in fact of the few women

to be accepted by the Surrealist group.

Estrella de Diego: [speaking Spanish translated to English]

The relationship with the Surrealist group

was always, I believe, very conflictive,

because the Surrealist group,

however much they strove to demonstrate the contrary,

was a group of petty bourgeois captained by André Breton

who who wanted the world to adapt itself to their needs.

Then along comes Gala,

who does not want the world to adapt to Breton's needs,

and I think it turned into a conflict.

Narrator: In 1917, Gala married Paul Eluard,

who introduced her into the artistic and literary circles of Paris,

where she was one of the few women

accepted by the Surrealist group.

In 1929, Gala met Salvador Dalí

and they fell in love.

Eluard reluctantly accepted that his wife was leaving him

for a young artist ten years younger than she was,

an emotionally unstable artist with an uncertain future.

Estrella: [Spanish to English]

Gala saw what Dalí was

and, of course, suddenly she meets this guy,

fascinating, totally crazy,

as he must have been at that moment, spontaneous.

And she realizes that she has a great deal to learn,

to look at, to shape...

[Estrella continuing barely audibly in Spanish]

She has in front of her a treasure,

she has a gift.

[Estrella continuing barely audibly in Spanish]

We are always ready to admit that suddenly,

great artists find their muses.

Well, I believe that Gala was a great artist

who found her muse in Dalí

and on that account she left a successful poet,

a fascinating life of great pomp

with a great poet of Breton,

and went to live...

well, almost with fishermen, with country people...

[foreboding music playing]

Gala: The most essential thing for me is love.

It is the axis of my vitality and of my brain,

the spring that launches me forward

with elasticity and agility,

with more clarity and precision

in all the movements of my senses,

my impulses, my knowledge.

Salvador: Gala had begun to explain to me in minute detail

the reasons for her desire.

And it suddenly occurred to me that she too

had her inner world of desires and failures

and moved with her own rhythm

between the poles of lucidity and madness.

Narrator: Throughout his autobiography,

Dalí tells us about Gala

in relation to desire and the discovery of the sexual act.

Salvador: I kissed her on the mouth,

inside her mouth.

It was the first time I did this.

I had not suspected until then that one could kiss in this way.

With a single leap all the Parsifals

of my long-bridled and tyrannized erotic desires rose,

awakened by the shocks of the flesh.

Narrator: And then, also in his autobiography,

in an ironic tone,

the most Surrealist Dalí associates food

with the loved one who has to be devoured

in order to arrive in this way at total love.

[in French]

Salvador: Since Malaga, I had become Gala's pupil.

She had revealed to me the principle of pleasure.

She taught me also the principle of reality in all things.

She also taught me the principle of proportion,

which slumbered in my intelligence.

She was the Angel of Equilibrium,

the precursor of my classicism.

Narrator: Gala became the model and muse that Dalí had been waiting for.

A muse that inspired him in the same way

that other women inspired the Renaissance painters

that Dalí so admired....

"Galarina" is a clear example of this.

[dramatic music playing]

Salvador: I called it "Galarina" because Gala is to me

the muse that La Fornarina was to Raphael.

In short, every good painter

who aspires to create authentic masterpieces

must first marry my wife Gala.

Narrator: Gala took it on herself to provide Dalí

with the financial stability he needed,

in order to dedicate himself exclusively to art.

It was she who, with great tenacity,

sought out the best dealers, the most prestigious galleries

and the most refined clients to buy,

sell and exhibit Dalí's work.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

In fact, Dalí never had a dealer

or a gallery to represent him.

Gala did it all.

We see the two of them

with the influential New York gallerist Julien Levy.

This was part of her role, the role she took on,

and she performed it very well.

Estrella: [Spanish to English] She creates a place, a comfort zone,

as we would say in contemporary terms,

which is to be that woman,

as when she writes the letter to his father,

which she reads to her husband,

when she looks after him as Russian women do,

and from that parapet

she comes up with lots of different personas

between which she modulated throughout her life.

Gala: I, like all of us Russian women,

personally help my husband in everything.

I try to lighten his load.

I have to do it, and in any case I enjoy it.

I often serve as his model,

I also act as secretary and take charge of everything

to do with the practical part of our life,

I do all that because he, as you see,

is totally immersed in the creative world,

in his work.

He is not able to deal with these trifles.

I am not very brilliant either,

but we live like all artists,

we work, and that is the most important thing.

The possibility of expressing oneself thanks to a talent.

[slow jazz music playing]

Salvador: Gala alone was a witness to my furies,

my despairs,

my fugitive ecstasies

and my relapses into the bitterest pessimism.

She alone knows to what point

painting became for me at this period

a ferocious reason for living,

while at the same time it became an even more ferocious

and unsatisfied reason for loving her, Gala,

for she and she alone was the reality.

And all that my eyes were capable of seeing was "she."

And it was the portrait of her

that would be my work, my idea, my reality.

[slow jazz music continues]

Narrator: In his autobiography,

"The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí,"

the artist explains how at a crucial moment in his life,

thanks to Gala, his work evolved,

fusing Surrealism with Classicism.

Salvador: "My prisons were the condition of my metamorphosis.

"But without Gala, they threatened to become my coffins,

"and again it was Gala who with her very teeth

"came to tear away the wrappings

"patiently woven by the secretion of my anguish

and within which I was beginning to decompose."

[slow jazz music continues]

"Arise and walk!" I obeyed her

"You've accomplished nothing yet!

It is not time for you to die!"

My surrealist glory was worth nothing.

I must incorporate surrealism into tradition.

My imagination must become classic again.

I had before me a work to accomplish

for which the rest of my life would not suffice.

Gala made me believe in this mission.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Gala: This time I will send you a catalogue

of the exhibition and you will see

that his paintings cannot be done

in a quarter of an hour like most of modernism.

His technique is classical and the content,

we could say, is an absolutely new movement

with a symbolic meaning.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Gala signified all of his intelligence,

all his culture, all his creativity,

all his... his pragmatic sense of life.

Because she was also...

she could serve as a crutch, right?

But she was absolutely essential for Dalí's life,

his creative and pragmatic life.

Salvador: Since my Surrealist period,

I have signed my best paintings "Gala Salvador Dalí."

It is not necessary to be Sartre

to affirm that the name is the person,

but it is necessary to be Dalí

to affirm that the superperson,

the superman of Nietzsche

and the Dalinian superwoman are his castle.

Estrella: [Spanish to English]

I think that Gala was in camouflage all the time,

which is to say that from that point of view

I think of Gala almost as a kind of postmodern heroine.

Montse: [Spanish to English] We said before that the title "The Visible Woman"

is almost a contradiction, really,

because in fact Gala is the invisible woman,

the one we do not get to know, right?

And this is part of her mystery.

Gala: From the beginning I imposed a very personal norm

that has nothing to do neither with morals

nor with ethics or with anything.

I adopted it by and for myself,

and it consists in not agreeing to any request for an interview,

in not making any statement for the press.

I want to go down in history as a legend.

When everything is over and done with,

when everything that is now cloudy is clean,

when time has passed, things will be said about me,

for good or ill, but for now,

I do not want anything to be said.

[bell tolling]

Narrator: On June 10, 1982,

Gala died in Port Lligat

and was taken to her Castle of Púbol,

where she is buried.

Just a few months before,

in view of the precarious state of his wife's health,

Dalí took it on himself to prepare a crypt

in the space formerly used to store the tithes.

Emili: Finally we buried Gala in her tomb,

which had been made ready.

A priest from a nearby town officiated at the ceremony

and Dalí, deeply moved,

managed to attend the funeral for a few moments

before leaving abruptly.

Narrator: Dalí had to leave his wife's funeral.

It was too painful for him.

Downcast, he retired to the Piano Room.

He did not want anyone near him,

other than his faithful friend

Antoni Pitxot, who was also an artist.

[in Catalan]

[somber music playing]

Narrator: "The Death of Hector,"

represented in the tapestry in this room,

was quite significant in those moments of pain.

During the funeral, Dalí and Pitxot

sat for over an hour in front of the tapestry.

According to Pitxot, Dalí was absent,

contained, even expressionless,

staring into space.

To distract and rouse him,

Pitxot talked about the tapestry in front of them

depicting a scene from "The Iliad"

of Hector being killed by a spear.

Eventually, Dalí looked up up and focused on the scene.

And after a moment's reflection,

made the following comment.

Salvador: This is what has happened to me, Antoni.

The final spear-thrust.

Narrator: His magnificent house of cards has collapsed.

Gala was dead.

Jordi: [Spanish to English] We have to think that Dalí--

it's what we were saying, isn't it?

For some years he had been aware that he was getting old,

and on top of that in 1982 he found himself alone.

For the first time in his life he was alone in the world

because he no longer had Gala,

he had no one to cover reality for him.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Narrator: After Gala's death,

Dalí didn't want to go back to Port Lligat.

He told Antoni Pitxot

that he intended to stay at the castle to be close to her.

Salvador: I have been worried, and thinking all night,

and I have made this decision.

I do not want to go back to Cadaqués anymore.

I want to stay in the castle.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Narrator: Dalí moved into Gala's room.

He slept in her bed and shut himself up in the castle,

not going outside and seeing almost no one

except for the staff and Antoni Pitxot.

[in Spanish]

[in French]

Narrator: The days were passing and Dalí was still no better.

Artur, his butler,

occasionally got him to walk in the garden.

Emili: On one of these walks,

on which I also accompanied him,

he pointed with his cane to the wall

that was near us and said...

Salvador: Tell them to raise it half a meter

so that I cannot be seen from the neighboring field.

Narrator: A few days later,

the wall had been built up.

Dalí was enclosed in on himself, absent.

His health was deteriorating with every day that passed,

he did not want to eat

and the nurses no longer knew what to do with him.

He didn't want to see anyone.

[in Spanish]

Narrator: Antoni Pitxot came over every day from Cadaqués

to visit him and tried to encourage him

to regain his enthusiasm for painting,

but he did not find it easy.

Dalí was not the same.

From his bed, he asked him to close the curtains

so as not to let the sunlight in.

Salvador: Close the curtains! That is life!

Antoni Pitxot: Many days when I arrived in the morning

and asked him how he was, he would answer me,

"I'm dying, I'm dying." And things like that.

Then, to change the tone of sadness

and give it a brighter turn,

I would say, "Why don't you sing it to me?

"Like that song I'm sure you know that goes...

♪ Con el ay, con el Marabay

♪ Con el ú, con el Marabú

♪ Ay, que me mu, que me muero... ♪

[woman continues singing "El Marabú"

Antoni: And he immediately opened his eyes and said,

"San Juan de la Cruz,"

which is exactly how the bolero "Marabú" continues.

Then Dalí became more lively

and made the nurses laugh by singing all kinds

of nonsense and songs of that time.

[woman continues singing "El Marabú"]

Narrator: In those difficult days,

in order to stimulate his friend,

Pitxot brought him a lot of sketchbooks,

so he would have them to hand and feel prompted

to draw or paint.

Antoni: One day I arrived and I found him

with one of those sketchbooks in his hands.

I said to myself "At last!"

And I asked him, "What are you doing?"

And he tore out a sheet in tremendous ill humor

and threw it on the floor.

When he threw the first sheet I said nothing.

Then he threw six or seven balls of paper in a row,

as if expressing a feeling of suppressed rage.

Then I said in a rather pacifying tone,

"I'm sure this thing you're doing

"responds to some feeling you have,

"but let me tell you that it's absurd.

Give it a function, that's what it's for."

And he threw another ball of paper on the floor.

So I said: "That's okay. Carry on.

"If you like, we'll bring you more

"so you can cover the floor with crumpled paper.

Then he beckoned to me to come closer and he snarled,

"Dying is probably like crumpling up sheets of paper."

Narrator: But Antoni Pitxot did not give up.

He knew that the only way to stimulate Dalí

was through painting.

Antoni: I need you to recapture the spark of the painting,

which is my religion.

You know that I don't believe in anything, only in good painting.

I believe in Rembrandt's "The Slaughtered Ox,"

the brushstrokes of which, as our teacher Nuñez said,

deserve to be kissed. You remember?

If I can't follow this cult of my religion,

then I will stop coming.

Salvador: I promise you that tomorrow I will do something again.

[in Spanish]

Narrator: Antoni Pitxot's persistence paid off,

and by the end of 1982, Dalí was active once more,

working obsessively in the sketchbooks,

drawing symbols inspired by the catastrophe theory

of the French mathematician René Thom

and creating what he called catastropheiform writing.

Antoni: When I finally got him to paint again,

this is what he came up with, which I found wonderful.

They were in a sense the signs of his ailments,

but expressed in an absolutely free, fantastic way.

He filled whole sketchbooks,

drawing in those same sketchbooks

from which he had torn out the pages and crumpled them up.

He covered page after page with these catastropheiform signs.

Narrator: After a period of emotional and physical crisis,

Dalí was ready to pick up his brushes again.

He chose a spot in the main hall of the castle,

next to a window, and set up his easel there,

adapting it as an improvised studio,

which was to be his last studio.

Dalí gives form in these works

to the subjects that obsess him...

immortality, and the nostalgia for a past

that will not return again.

Salvador: Mine is no longer an imagination

at the service of caprice and dreams,

or of automatism,

now I paint meaningful things

taken directly from my own existence,

from my illness or from my most present memories.

Narrator: One of these oil paintings,

"We'll Be Arriving Later, Around Five,"

is a curiously enigmatic image of a dark interior.

At the back of this work lies the theme of mortality,

and the fact that it depicts a removal van,

takes us back to Dalí's youth,

when he heard André Breton declare,

"I ask to be conducted to the cemetery in a removal van."

Montse: [Spanish to English]

This painting, "Swallow's Tail," from 1983,

is the last oil Dalí painted,

and he painted it at Púbol. It is, then,

another reference to the catastrophe theory of René Thom,

in which Dalí was interested at the time,

from various angles, including the scientific.

Narrator: These oils from Dalí's last period,

marked by his interest in catastrophe theory,

bear witness to a world that is ending,

something that is collapsing.

They are a kind of self-portrait of his final stage.

And in a way,

these works also have a premonitory significance.

[slow theme music playing]

Radio Announcer: Salvador Dalí suffered minor burns

when his bedroom at Púbol caught fire.

A fire which completely destroyed Dalí's room

broke out at dawn yesterday

at the painter's habitual residence.

Dalí, who is relatively unharmed,

according to those closest to him,

has minor burns on his right thigh and right forearm,

and was slightly affected by the smoke.

The doctors recommended that Dalí be moved to a hospital.

The painter Antonio Pitxot

attributed the cause of the fire to a short circuit.

Narrator: The nurses had a bell installed in Dalí's room

in case he should needed anything.

That night, in a state of nerves,

Dalí pressed the button so many times

that it caused a short circuit and started a fire in his bed.

[slow melodic music playing]

Dalí had to be admitted to a clinic in Barcelona

to treat his burns.

But on his way to Barcelona,

he asked for the ambulance to take him to his Museum in Figueres

so he could see it at night,

probably thinking that he would never do so again.

So, in the middle of the night,

the nurses, the doctor and Dalí's usual retinue

accompanied the injured painter

as he visited the rooms of his Museum one by one,

before being taken to the clinic.

He paid special attention to the boat

that he and Gala often used when they lived at Port Lligat,

which that very day had been put in place

as part of a central installation in the courtyard.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

Many people will not know the geographical locations

of Figueres and Púbol,

but it took a special effort for a person in his condition

to go to Figueres, which was quite out of the way.

In other words, it says a lot about what he was thinking,

about what was on his mind at that moment.

Narrator: During this convalescent period,

as the day approached when he would be discharged

and leave the clinic,

the dilemma as to his future residence returns.

He could not go back to the castle,

because the fire meant that repairs were needed

and he could not live there.

As Dalí was well on the way to recovery,

the question was put to him.

His answer was immediate and concise.

Salvador: I will go to Figueres, to the Torre Galatea!

Narrator: The Torre Galatea,

formerly known as the Torre Gorgot,

is an annex to the Dalí Museum.

The tower dates from the 17th century

and preserves the only visible remnants

of the old mediaeval wall of Figueres.

Salvador Dalí had refurbished it,

connected it to the Theatre-Museum,

and given it the name of Torre Galatea.

In addition, in honor of all the enigmas surrounding Gala,

he transformed its general appearance with bright colors,

loaves of bread and eggs on the façade.

Jordi: [Spanish to English] Precisely at that time,

Dalí at Púbol was working on the Torre Galatea.

It was from Púbol

that he redesigned and decorated the Torre Galatea.

What I am saying is that we can clearly see

that Dalí in Púbol was thinking more and more

about his real masterpiece,

which is the Dalí Theatre-Museum.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Salvador: Prolonging my Theatre-Museum of Figueres,

I declare that from now on, Torre Gorgot

will be called Torre Galatea.

I raise a monument, unique in the world,

in honor of all enigmas.

[light theme music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

The curious thing is that he returned to his home town,

Figueres, which he had left long before.

In fact, he wanted to come back here

to feel close to the Museum,

the church where he was baptized,

and also the place where his father organized

his first painting exhibition.

He wanted to close the circle.

Indeed, he wanted to close it so much

that he even said that he was to be buried in the Museum.

I believe that in itself is the total culmination of his work.

[light theme music playing]

Narrator: In October 1984,

Dalí settled permanently in the Torre Galatea,

in a set of rooms that communicated internally with the Museum.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

I think another of the reasons why he chose it

is also because there is a huge window

that looks out on the wall of the Museum

and that was an absolutely direct connection

that he established with his Museum.

Antoni: In his room, Dalí often spent hours

looking at the stone wall opposite.

This reminded him of what Leonardo da Vinci said

about being able to see images of great battles

in the stains on a wall,

and of Piero di Cosimo

among the tuberculosis patients,

who saw dragons and other monsters in the sputum coughed onto the walls.

Dalí, who had always known how to see beyond reality,

found in these visions a form of escape.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

He led a very closed life,

and he chose to see only a few people,

his staff of nurses, his whole team,

and especially Antoni Pitxot.

It was interesting because

I was with Dalí for some of this time.

In fact he had asked me to read Stephen Hawking's

"A Brief History of Time" to him.

And we would read articles from the "Scientific American,"

because he had not lost his curiosity.

He still had that very profound vision

and that curiosity, which he never lost for a moment.

Dalí's doctors were visiting him regularly,

and although his condition was stable,

he was fully aware that he was in a process

of irreversible deterioration.

Pitxot, always close to his friend,

was by his side, supporting him.

[in Catalan]

Montse: [Spanish to English] They were very hard moments for Dalí

because he was someone who had created that mask,

his persona as such,

which was one of his works,

and he was perfectly aware of his decline,

precisely because he retained that lucidity,

that magnificent mind he always had,

while his physical condition was failing to keep up with it.

Narrator: Every night, before going to bed,

Dalí would always ask Antoni Pitxot the same thing.

He wanted to hear Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde."

In the opera, there is an apotheosis

in which Tristan descends from the sky

and the trumpets sound.

This represents the arrival of Tristan,

and it was only then that Pitxot leaves

and Dalí would fall asleep.

["Tristan and Isolde" plays, music swells]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

Dalí was always interested in science,

in the possibilities it offered him,

in optical phenomena.

And he was always interested in new languages.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]: That was the way that Dalí found

to go on explaining the inexplicable,

by way of science, when it seemed to him

that other approaches had been exhausted.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

And a symposium on determinism and freedom

was organized in his Museum,

entitled "Process of Chance."

[in Catalan]

Mathematics has nothing to say to reality.

Man: That is your point of view, it's not mine.

[in Catalan]

[applause]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

It was the confluence of the search

for a faith he could not find

and the support that science gave him in seeking to explain

the processes of chance, of chaos,

and in fact, quantum mechanics and physics

helped him look for answers that,

in the last analysis, he did not find.

[in Spanish]

Narrator: What Dalí was seeking in science

were new foundations from which to approach

the immortality he so desired.

And to overcome death,

always so present in his life and his work.

I enjoy tremendously every single moment of my life.

Because of death, all times very close,

watch me.

And the death like catch me,

and every five minutes, the death no catch me,

I enjoy tremendously.

...a little piece of Vichy water,

you said to me a little tea or something...

Everything becomes one tremendous pleasure,

because the death surrenders,

and because the death is so close,

it's possible make erotic

every single piece of my life.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Salvador: I have lived with death since I have known I breathe,

and it kills me with a cold voluptuousness

only comparable to my lucid passion to outlive it every minute,

every infinitesimal second of my consciousness of being.

This constant, stubborn, fierce,

terrible tension constitutes the whole story of my quest.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

There comes a time, especially in the last period, I think,

when what concerns him most, more than physical death,

is the death of the intellect,

the non-transcendence.

[melodic theme music playing]

Narrator: Step by step, little by little,

and day by day, it was clear that one more page

of his transit towards the end was turning.

And Dalí saw it and accepted it.

Dalí, the eternal observer,

was the spectator of his own end.

[in Catalan]

[in Catalan]

Narrator: In fact, the Dalí Theatre-Museum goes much further.

It is also the consolidation of his desire

for transcendence and immortality.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Antoni: In spite of Dalí's health problems,

his last stage had moments of great richness.

He liked to look back, to remember, to go over his youth.

He remembered García Lorca, Buñuel,

the tangos of Irusta, and Demare.

[Spanish guitar music playing]

[suspenseful music plays over Spanish guitar music]

Salvador: In June, 1932,

there suddenly came to my mind

without any close or conscious association,

which would have provided an immediate explanation,

the image of The Angelus of Millet.

This image was composed of a very clear

visual representation and in color.

It was nearly instantaneous

and was not followed by other images.

It appeared to me absolutely modified

and charged with such latent intentionality

that The "Angelus of Millet" suddenly became for me

the most troubling, the most enigmatic pictorial work,

the densest and richest in unconscious thoughts

that I had ever seen.

[suspenseful music playing]

Narrator: This painting produced in him a dark anguish so acute

that the memory of these two immobile silhouettes

pursued him for years with the constant disquiet

produced by their continual ambiguous presence.

Montse: [Spanish to English]

There is another fundamental theme in Dalí,

which is his interpretation of Millet's "The Angelus,"

and is an interpretation that makes through

the paranoiac-critical method,

a method that was his contribution

to the Surrealist movement

and made him stand out over the others.

Because he engaged with paranoid thinking

and understood that reality is never as we see it,

the more deeply we look at reality,

the more interpretations we can find.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

While we may see this painting as a conventional scene

of two peasants reciting the midday Angelus prayer...

Dalí, in contrast, saw two parents

mourning the death of their son,

because he did not interpret the carrycot as a carrycot,

but rather as the coffin of a child.

Surely, in fact, it is a direct reference

to both the premonition of death,

which is what the icon of Millet's "The Angelus"

ended up being for Dalí,

and to the obsession with his brother's death

that stayed with him all his life.

[in French]

Narrator: And it was in the Torre Galatea,

right next to the church where he was baptized

and opposite the wall of the building

in which he had his first exhibition,

that Dalí spent the last days of his life

before finally being extinguished

on January 23, 1989.

[bell tolling]

[somber music playing]

Tell me this what do you think

will happen to you when you die?

Myself no believe in my own death

You will not die?

No, no believe in general death,

but in the death of Dalí, absolutely not... not.

Si believe in my death becoming very afraid,

almost impossible.

-You fear death? -Yes.

Death is beautiful, but you fear death?

Exactly, because Dalí is contradictory

and paradoxical.

[dramatic theme music playing]

Montse: [Spanish to English]

In fact, I believe that we have had to reach

the 21st century to appreciate all of the capacity

for rebellion and that appeal

to individual freedom that Dalí makes.

In effect, Dalí invites us

to be transgressors through provocation.

There is a constant provocation

and we feel provoked because we are being provoked

by a thinking machine.

Jordi: [Spanish to English]

To enter into his mind is to enter fully into his time

and thus to enter into the whole world of the 20th century.

[in Catalan]

Oooohhhhh!

Oooohhhhh!

[dramatic theme music playing]

Salvador: Heaven is what I have been seeking all along

and through the density of confused

and demoniac flesh of my life-- heaven!

Alas for him, who has not yet understood that!

When with my crutch I stirred into the putrefied

and worm-eaten mass of my dead hedgehog,

it was heaven I was seeking.

When, from the summit of the Molí de la Torre

I looked far down into the black emptiness,

I was also and still seeking heaven.

Gala, you are reality!

And what is heaven?

Where is it to be found?

"Heaven is to be found neither above nor below,

"neither to the right nor to the left,

"heaven is to be found exactly in the center

of the bosom of the man who has faith!"

At this moment, I do not yet have faith,

and I fear I shall die without heaven.

My triumph will lie in the fact

that I was able to overwhelm my period

and at the same time achieve immortality.

My triumph is the gold

that accounts for my present-day success

and nurtures my eternal genius.

[inspirational music playing]

[classical music playing]