By turns surrealist and sexually provocative, playful and profoundly disturbing, Niki de Saint Phalle’s feverish debut transforms the pain of personal trauma into the meaty material for raw psychosexual catharsis. Subtitled “A Bedtime Story”, Daddy unfolds as a rape-revenge fantasy cast in the mold of performance art. It was made in collaboration with the British film-maker Peter Whitehead, known at the time for his documentaries about popular culture, particularly music, and who was Saint Phalle’s ex-lover. 

Set in a grand and decaying French chateau that evokes Saint Phalle’s aristocratic background, Daddy follows a young woman’s reckoning with power and abuse across a series of stylized tableaux, each playing out a strange or symbolic scene, like the death and castration of the Father. Saint Phalle’s own father, who sexually abused her when she was 11 years old, died in 1967, and it wasn’t until 1994 that she went public with this. While not exactly hiding its autobiographical elements, Daddy folds the raw and confessional into the fantastical, drawing on elements pulled from children’s fairytales, psychodrama, BDSM role-play, sexploitation, surrealism, and horror cinema. Casting a nightmarish spin on the nursery storybook, the film exhumes the murky inner landscapes of childhood, creating the conditions for personal transformation that also paved the way for her final feature, A Dream Longer Than the Night. 

The film stars Saint Phalle, Clarice Rivers (whose third-trimester body inspired the Nana sculptures), and the actress, model, and exotic dancer Mia Martin, best known for her work in the 1973 Hammer horror film The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Jaggedly theatrical and in-your-face, Daddy attacks the patriarchal machinery of church and state with the blunt and transformative force of a bullet, remaining as shocking as when it first premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1973. 

This screening will be introduced by the season co-curator, Sophia Satchell-Baeza. This is the UK premiere of a new 4K restoration made with funds from Dior.


The ICA's In Focus: Niki de Saint Phalle is curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Laura Staab. The UK Premiere of the 4K restoration of  A Dream Longer Than the Night screens on Sunday 10 May.