Niki de Saint Phalle
In the sixties the painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle started her career with shooting paintings, reliefs that were fired at with paint bags. She became famous and popular for her Nanas, colorful sculptures of big and cheerful women, and for the cooperation with Jean Tinguely. The frame of this film is a tour through her tarot garden in Tuscany.
François de Menil and Monique Alexandre's short portrait of artist Niki de Saint Phalle, shot in 16mm, 1982.
A dazzling, inventive, and rarely-screened fairy tale from the feminist artist.
"In this heady, phantasmagoric fairy tale, a young girl comes face to face with a friendly dragon and a magnanimous witch. Upon the witch granting the girl’s wish to become a young woman, this surrealist chronicle follows the precocious Camélia on a series of quests in pursuit of love. Niki de Saint Phalle’s sophomore film revels in the sexual decadence that defined the 1970s zeitgeist, showcasing scenes of debauched harems and totemic worship of phallic sculptures. An astounding piece of directorial bravery, UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT confirms Saint Phalle’s wicked yet earnest pleasure in excavating the underlying perversions at play within the romantic quiet of fairy tales." - Anthology Film Archives
Daddy, filmed in cooperation with movie director Peter Whitehead, discovers the connection between a father and little girl. Like the majority of Niki De Saint Phalle’s films, the flick combines autobiography with imagination, mixing erotic scenes of incest with a reverse of energy as the female character humors the daddy figure. Saint Phalle narrates the film, offering an almost psycho-analytical explanation of its content and explains the different inexplicable.
Rainer von Hessen and Niki de Saint Phalle met after he saw a photo of HON, the 1966 installation for Moderna Museet Stockholm, in a German magazine. Their collaboration began when Saint Phalle first designed the costumes and sets to Aristhophanes’s LYSISTRATA, directed by Hessen (then known under the stage name Diez). Thereafter, Hessen co-authored and directed her play ICH, which was performed at the Staatstheater Kassel in 1968.
The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.
The artist and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle is filmed against the sparkly background of the Factory. She looks elegant, solemn, and slightly sad. Her large-eyed gaze seems to avoid direct engagement with the camera; towards the end of the roll, she strokes her chin pensively.
