The Philosophies of Dada & Surrealism with George Melly (1978)

George Melly takes a wayward day trip to the the Hayward Gallery and a major show of pictures from the days of Dada and Surrealism. His indirect journey, inspired by the Surrealist dérive, takes him through rooms, streets, a strange café, with brief curious encounters on the way. Among them, the last of the surrealists in England (Eileen Agar, Conroy Maddox, Robert Melville and Roland Penrose), punk rock band The Stranglers, and an elephant. Melly intersperses the journey with memories of Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and E.L.T. Mesens, talking about the influence of Dada and Surrealism on his early life.


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Melly’s enthusiasm was so well-known that he was often called upon as a token advocate of Surrealism whenever one was required by the TV channels, hence this film whose title implies an admission of something disreputable. A major exhibition of Surrealist art was taking place 1978 at the Hayward Gallery in London, and it’s to this exhibition that Melly journeys, explaining (and demonstrating) what it means to be a Surrealist along the way. I saw this when it was first broadcast, and the absurd phone calls to strangers inspired myself and a few school-friends to similar activities; teenage pranks seemed less frivolous with an artistic justification. There’s a slight connection to yesterday’s post in Melly’s recounting of an anecdote from the 1950s when he was spared a night-time beating by his reciting of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate to a group of belligerent youths. Elsewhere you get to see punk band The Stranglers scowling at the camera—Melly suggests that the punks might be inheritors of the Dadaist attitude—and director Alan Yentob standing at a urinal.