We are thrilled to announce we won this year’s Museums In Short Jury Prize for our Christmas 2018 ad ‘A Surrealist Christmas’.
A Surrealist Christmas
The Freud Museum hosted a blockbuster exhibition from October 2018 – February 2019 entitled Freud, Dalí and the Metamorphosis of Narcissus” and to accompany this exhibition, the Freud Museum Shop developed a promotional Christmas video advertising our exhibition-related products. The video was inspired by the Surrealist method of “automatism”, which is linked to the Freudian concept of “free association”. Each item featured shares a common characteristic or ‘association’ with the next item. The animation style was inspired by Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python and the unique soundtrack was inspired by the poetry of Dada artists.
The film begins by presenting Dalí and Freud as companions, honouring their meeting in 1938 which was the focus of the exhibition. It then explores their shared interest in dreams and Freud’s most famous case study – the Wolfman. This leads into a magnetic poetry kit that reads “dream of mother”, humorously referencing the Oedipus myth and the desire for one’s mother. The next scene references the loss of an eye, a Freudian motif which is also featured in a Surrealist artwork by Herbert Bayer, which adorns a plate sold in the Museum shop. It ends with an association that leads us to a statuette replica of a hand holding an egg – present both in Freud’s collection and in Dalí’s “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” painting on show in the Museum.
This was a hugely successful advert both for the Museum shop at Christmas and for promoting the exhibition.
You can see this year’s shop video here: Spark Your Curiosity with the Freud Museum Shop
Museums in Short
Museums in Short is an international contest for short videos related to museums.
Short films are a valuable instrument for disseminating museums’ contents in an engaging and direct way.
Launched in 2012, Museums in Short aims at enhancing public awareness of the museums’ role in innovative video production.
