In his biography of Luis Buñuel,
John Baxter quotes another biographer, Lachlan Mackinnon, who said,
"Those who survived it [the Surrealist movement] were either
heroic individualists like André Breton or psychotics like Salvador
Dalí." This makes it sound as if it were something like a war,
which it was and wasn't -- it was certainly a concerted and
organized effort in response to something. The French author and
poet Breton served as the
grand poobah of the
Surrealists in the 1920s, deciding on who would, or would not, be
admitted as a Surrealist member and be allowed to call themselves as
such in public. The Catalonian-born Dalí, who cultivated his
nuttiness for the sake of Art, knew, like Picasso and Andy Warhol,
exactly how to market himself. With the Spanish Civil War and the
ascension of the Franco regime in Spain, Dalí went to the U.S.,
designed department store window displays, and did paintings such as
one which rendered the Golden Gate Bridge as if it were made from
human bones. He also achieved the singular accomplishment of
grossing-out no less a personage than Cecil B. De Mille with a
screening of Un Chien Andalou, the film which would define
Surrealism in the minds of many people for years to come.
But the Surrealists themselves were begat from the Dadaists, whose manifesto was written by poet and writer Tristan Tzara in 1918. Like the Surrealists -- who would create public disturbances and even wreck establishments they felt disinclined towards -- the Dadaists didn't confine themselves entirely to the world of the arts. Dadaism was in part a response to the conditions which were engendered in Europe by the catastrophic First World War -- among which was the effective sweeping-away of the old Europe, including two of its "central powers," the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the use of armored tanks and mustard gas and trench warfare in battlefields; and the disastrous tactical errors made by military commanders, sometimes resulting in the loss of several thousand soldiers per day and, in one instance, troops breaking-rank and refusing to go back into the trenches because they had lost all faith in their upper command.
Dada -- an "anti-art
movement" born of "misunderstanding and confusion" --
was a means by which to challenge conventions and confront the very
questions of existence. "Every page must explode," Tzara
wrote in his 1918 "Dada Manifesto," continuing, "On
the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the
glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men.... We will put an
end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one
continent to another...." The Dadaists created publications,
photomontages, held poetry readings where two or more people read
on-stage simultaneously or while accompanied by tomtoms. Exhibitions
were held where patrons had to enter through a urinal. In Berlin,
members of the Weimar parliament were showered with incendiary
leaflets declaring that Dadaists were "rulers of the
Globe."
Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists --
who included poet and impresario Hugo Ball, artist Hans Arp, and
writer Richard Hulsenbeck -- regularly convened at the Cabaret
Voltaire, a cafe in Zurich, Switzerland, and the new documentary Dada
Changed My Life is essentially about how a group that could be
called the New Dadaists reopened the Cabaret Voltaire in early 2002
as a meeting and performance space, and how they subsequently fought
to keep it from being turned into a pharmacy and apartment block by
developers. The documentary -- made by Olga Mazurkiewicz (who's
Polish-American), Daniel Martinez (who's Spanish), and Lou Lou
(who's Swiss, making this a respectably international undertaking)
-- takes its title from a story related to the filmmakers by a woman
-- Ursula Sterling, "Council President" for the
"Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches" -- who was
arrested at the Cabaret one night by a policewoman who, instead of
taking her to the station, took her back to her apartment, where
they had a drink and an evening that is described simply as being
"wun-der-schön." The film is playful, loose, and
scrappy in a way that Tzara and his group probably would've approved
of. It includes portions of slam-poetry readings, a marriage
ceremony at a "Ministry of Silly Weddings" in Britain
(interrupted on account of a phone call for the bride), and an
attempt to interview the "sole surviving Dadaist," who
only manages to get out how the new kids are "mierda"
before keeling over for good. The Dadaist "Foundation
Kroesus" decides to liquidate their assets by throwing them out
the window to people on the street below, while a hiccuping
recording of John Philip Sousa's "Liberty Bell March"
plays in the background.