In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a new kind of artistic movement swept Europe and America. Its very name, "Dada"--two identical syllables without the obligatory "-ism"- -distinguished it from the long line of avant-gardes which have determined the history of the arts in the last 200 years. Its proponents came from all parts of Europe and the United States at a time when their native countries were battling one another in the deadliest war ever known. They did not restrict themselves to being painters, writers, dancers, or musicians; most of them were involved in several art forms and in breaking down the boundaries which kept the arts distinct from one another. Indeed, the Dadaists were not content to make art.

They wanted to affect all aspects of Western civilization, to take part in the revolutionary changes which were the inevitable result of the chaos of the First World War. They were not interested in writing books and painting pictures which a public would admire in an uninvolved manner; rather, they aimed to provoke the public into reacting to their activities: to the Dadaists, a violently negative reaction was better that a passive acceptance.

Virtually every artistic principle and device which underlies the literature, music, theater, and visual arts of our time was promoted, if not invented, by the Dadaists: the use of collage and assemblage; the application of aleatory (chance, uncertainty) techniques; the tapping of the artistic resources of the indigenous cultures of Africa, America, and Oceania; the extension of the notion of abstract art to literature and film; the breaking of the boundaries separating the different art forms from one another and from "everyday life"; the notion of art as performance; the expropriation of elements of popular culture; the notion of interaction or confrontation with the audience--everything which defines what we loosely call the "avant-garde."

The artists and writers of Dadaism... wanted to open the way to a new art and a new society by undermining and exposing what they saw as the stale cultural conventions of a decayed European civilization which had led the world into the conflagration of the Great War of 1914-18.

Timothy Shipe, The International Dada Archive

The (Dadaists and) Surrealists were constantly fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn’t guns, of course, it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny - in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of (dada and) surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself.

Luis Buñuel

Some years ago I myself made some observations... it is that our normal waking consciousness... is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it... there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

PURE PSYCHIC AUTOMATISM
Spontaneous creation, chance activity, spontaneous improvisations, and explorations of the unconscious.

SURREALIST METHODS
Free association
Stream of consciousness
Dream states
Delerium
Automatic writing
Spontaneous drawing
Chance activity

-Roger Vail

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1928)
(Andalusian Dog)
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Luis Buñuel said that if he were told he had 20 years to live and was asked how he wanted to live them, his reply would be: "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other 22 in dreams--provided I can remember them."

Dreams were the nourishment of his films, and from his earliest days as a surrealist in Paris to his triumphs in his late 70s, dream logic was always likely to interrupt the realism of his films. That freedom gave them a quality so distinctive that, like those of Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini, they could be identified almost immediately.

His first film, written in collaboration with the notorious surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, was "Un Chien Andalou" (1928). Neither the title ("an Andalusian dog") nor anything else in the film was intended to make sense. It remains the most famous short film ever made, and anyone halfway interested in the cinema sees it sooner or later, usually several times.

It was made in the hope of administering a revolutionary shock to society. "For the first time in the history of the cinema," wrote the critic Ado Kyrou, "a director tries not to please but rather to alienate nearly all potential spectators."

That was then, this is now. Today, its techniques have been so thoroughly absorbed even in the mainstream that its shock value is diluted--except for that famous shot of the slicing of the eyeball, or perhaps the shot of the man dragging the grand piano that has the priests and the dead donkeys on top of it. . . .

- Roger Ebert