Many know Dali’s involvement in Un Chien Andalou –a famous 1929 surrealist short he co-created with director Luis Buñuel– but his other scripts remain a mystery. His cinematic endeavors typically resulted in underdeveloped scripts consisting of scribbles of ideas he believed would make monumental films.
But Babaouo was different.
Compared to others, Babaouo is one of Dali’s most ambitious and realized scripts that never made it to production.
The storyline is similar to most surrealist and avant-garde cinemas, because there basically wasn’t one. Instead, it consisted of separate sets of events that somehow seemed –in intoxicating Dali fashion– almost meant to go together.
The main character, Babaouo, who Dali described as “utterly unremarkable,” travels a great distance to rescue his beloved Mathilde, who is trapped in a Portugal chateau. During the journey he encounters many interesting, and downright odd things.
Courtesy of cinema.arte.tv
Within a series of what appears to be random events there is a stumbling headless chicken, a piano thrown down a hotel staircase and a soft watch…(naturally).
While on a train, Babaouo finds himself sitting next to a naked woman and a man with a fried egg on his shoe.
There is also a cab driver in an Indian headdress, a 15-meter-long bed placed in a garden – and lets not forget the legless, singing Japanese men floating on water inside what’s described as a “larger-than-average” bus.
These are only small glimpses of a film that continually tricks us into believing we’re prepared for the impulsive images of the next scene, because nothing could possibly top the shock value of the last, only to leave us mystified every time.
It presents the challenge to find the meaning behind every image, as if the film is a puzzle that the audience restlessly tries to put together.
Though Dali wasn’t alive to see it, the film was made into a motion picture in 1997 directed by Manuel Cusso-Ferrer with the help of Pilar Parcerisas’ adaptation of the script.
Check out the trailer below:
