Chaos and Creation

Year: 1960
Directors: Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman
Original screenplay: Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman
Producer: Videotape Productions Inc.
Length: 18 m.

This film, a collaboration between Dalí and his friend the photographer Philippe Halsman, was made to be shown at the Fifth Annual Convention on Visual Communications, held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in April 1960.

Widely regarded as one of the first artists video, Chaos and Creation adopts a documentary approach, beginning in the form of a lecture and ending with the creation of a work of art. The footage shows the planning, development and execution of a performance by Salvador Dali, whose central theme is the paranoiac-critical method.

In the course of the film the artist voices some of his thoughts about contemporary art and what he sees as the cold rationality of modern art. In this context, in order to show the oppositional diatribe between chaos and creation he makes use of an abstract painting of Piet Mondrian.

In this film Dalí put forward his new conception of post-Freudian artistic creation, heavily influenced by the new means of artistic production made available by technological advances, and his renewed interest in science thanks to his reading of Heisenberg.