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Oriol Maspons, Happening in Granollers, 1974
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Dalí: Happening en Granollers con huida en mercedes, El Correo Catalán, Barcelona, 25/08/1974
Year: 1975
Director: José Montes-Baquer
Producer: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Germany Distribution and Polyphon Hamburg
Length: 50 min.
The collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer resulted in this unique audio-visual composition, for which they used a combination of cinematic and electronic techniques. The film is a tribute to the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a forerunner of the Surrealists and much admired by them, who developed a formal system with which to generate literary inspiration out of puns and the narrative references arising from these. Dalí saw Roussel as a precursor of his paranoiac-critical method and as an expression of his admiration conceived this innovative and experimental work in the form of a fantastic journey through Upper Mongolia.
Impressions of Upper Mongolia - Homage to Raymond Roussel brings together images of the recently opened Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, the house at Portlligat and the happening that the genius from the Empordà orchestrated in Granollers in 1974. The structure of the film is also articulated by the music, by the fable invented especially by the artist and by a sequence of hallucinatory images derived from the metal part of a fountain pen.
The imaginary journey conceived by Dalí revolves around the story of a Mongol princess who feeds her subjects powdered mushrooms, which produce hallucinations and stimulate them to paint. In the film, a scientific expedition is sent to Upper Mongolia to discover the huge white hallucinogenic mushroom, unknown in the West, which causes these effects in this civilization.