UbuWeb Has Damn Cool Stuff

I regret not exploring UbuWeb more in the past. . . . In addition to their new streaming audio feed, today there’s a post about Salvador Dali’s Impressions de la haute Mongolie. Hommage a Raymond Roussel (1974-75) complete with full video.

The “videografía”, written in collaboration with its director José Montes Baquer and produced with Sony-Cologne and WDR, narrates the exploration of Dalí to the remote land of Mongolia in search of the Great White Mushroom. Salvador Dalí, a consummate expert in media manipulation, invites the spectator to become his accomplice and partner in what it seems a drug-induced “trip” to a faraway and distant land where wonderful treasures are hidden.

And the literary connection?

The homage that Dalí pays to himself in the film is made extensive to the figure of his beloved Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), the author of Locus Solus (1914) and Nouvelle Impressions d’Afrique (1932) whose homonymic puns where so celebrated by the Surrealists, and are the base for Dali’s explorations of the double-image and the macro/micro reality on which his own impressions are based.

Although U.S. distribution for Calder books is a totally crapshoot, it looks like you can order Roussel’s Impressions of Africa and maybe Locus Solus online or from your local bookseller. Shouldn’t have any problems getting How I Wrote Certain of My Books from Exact Change, and really, you should buy and read all three. He was one of the best . . .