Niki de Saint Phalle

Gaumont, the Étrange Anthology

To mark the 30th anniversary of L'Étrange Festival, Gaumont is opening up its archives to offer the best of its most secret, bizarre and crazy images, digitized for the first time. A unique program featuring black magic, surrealistic happenings, world records, the evolution of feminism, wild bets, vanished places, forgotten inventions and other delights.

Niki de Saint Phalle – Who Is the Monster, You or Me?

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.

AIDS: You Can't Catch It Holding Hands

Based on the book of the same title written and illustrated by his mother, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle.

Niki de Saint Phalle

François de Menil and Monique Alexandre's short portrait of artist Niki de Saint Phalle, shot in 16mm, 1982.

A Dream Longer Than the Night

"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

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.

Mode d’Emploi, Les Nouveaux Réalistes

Filmed in the 1970s with the art critic Otto Hahn, this film is the only visual document which brings together the thirteen Nouveaux Réalistes who participated in the artistic movement created by critic Pierre Restany in 1960 and including the text of the declaration collective was signed by Yves Klein in nine copies. Each of the artists appropriates a piece of land from the civilization of waste: from Arman the accumulations, from César the compressions of scrap metal, from Jean Tinguely the rusty machines, from Ramond Hains the torn posters.

HON

Filmic portrait of Niki de Saint Phalle's HON, a temporary indoor sculpture installation for the Moderna Museet of Stockholm.

Andy Warhol Screen Tests

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.

Screen Test [ST292]: Niki de Saint Phalle

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.