Spellbound (1945)

In 1945, Salvador Dali's movie agent called him up and ordered a nightmare. The request came at the behest of director Alfred Hitchcock, busy planning the dream sequence for his psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945).

Spellbound (1945)

Before the blonde, there was Bergman. In the second half of the 1940s, Hitchcock cast Ingrid Bergman three times, and on each occasion asked her to incarnate a different kind of leading lady. In the film noir Spellbound (1945) she was a psychoanalyst defrosted by Gregory Peck, and she played the loyal sister of a convict in 19th-century Australia in Hitchcock's first colour film, the costumed period piece Under Capricorn (1949).

At the same time, Hollywood has obviously also borrowed much from the traditions and practices of various arts and many theorists, critics and promoters of the industry have argued that movies are but a new form of art. Along with relying on all other art forms for its aesthetic styles and formal designs, there are also a variety of instances in which Hollywood uses art as an explanation for what it does and we can see that the term Hollywood studios, for instance, while referring to the tradition of "artist studios" which conjures visions of lone artists or small guilds of workers creating singularly beautiful works of art, is regularly used by the Big-8 as an analog for its Fordist industrial moviemaking process including its strict division of labour and corporate institutional structure. The history of Hollywood is littered with the work of countless artists who have contributed to popular movies. Most famously perhaps is Dali's dream seguence in Hitchcock's standard thriller Spellbound (1945) which, though shorter than originally planned, is extraordinary. But even this famous example is compromised by knowing that neither Dali nor Hitchcock were satisfied with the realization of the sequence and were frustrated by producer David O. Selznick's cost-conscious interference. 041b061a72