8 – 10 May 2026
Niki de Saint Phalle is well-known as an artist who worked across an array of media and forms. She most famously took fire at paint-filled canvases and sculpted voluptuous feminine figures, before spending twenty years creating her monumental site-specific work, The Tarot Garden, in Tuscany. That she made feature films is less widely known, but in the mid-1970s, she extended several themes of her work – such as dream, fury, sexuality, societal oppression and liberation from family trauma – into explosive and fantastical cinema.
Daddy (1973) and A Dream Longer Than the Night (1976) are both collaborative works that link Saint Phalle’s art to the British counterculture and the French avant-garde. While the documentary filmmaker Peter Whitehead co-directed the first and composed original music for the second, Saint Phalle’s partner, the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, constructed enormous metal sets for A Dream. Yet through these cinematic collaborations, Saint Phalle always maintained her distinctive signature: merging childlike fascination and imagination with an assault on convention, attacking the patriarchal machinery of church and state with the blunt and transformative force of a bullet.
In an interview, Whitehead described these films as inseparable sides of the same coin: he kept A Dream in a box for decades, he said, so that it could be appraised and reconsidered alongside Daddy. Acknowledging how much these underseen but spectacular films are interrelated – one, inclined to darkness; the other, light – this two-part programme brings them together in new 4K restorations, each of which will be introduced by one of the season curators.
In Focus: Niki de Saint Phalle is curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Laura Staab.
Niki de Saint Phalle is well-known as an artist who worked across an array of media and forms. She most famously took fire at paint-filled canvases and sculpted voluptuous feminine figures, before spending twenty years creating her monumental site-specific work, The Tarot Garden, in Tuscany. That she made feature films is less widely known, but in the mid-1970s, she extended several themes of her work – such as dream, fury, sexuality, societal oppression and liberation from family trauma – into explosive and fantastical cinema.
Daddy (1973) and A Dream Longer Than the Night (1976) are both collaborative works that link Saint Phalle’s art to the British counterculture and the French avant-garde. While the documentary filmmaker Peter Whitehead co-directed the first and composed original music for the second, Saint Phalle’s partner, the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, constructed enormous metal sets for A Dream. Yet through these cinematic collaborations, Saint Phalle always maintained her distinctive signature: merging childlike fascination and imagination with an assault on convention, attacking the patriarchal machinery of church and state with the blunt and transformative force of a bullet.
In an interview, Whitehead described these films as inseparable sides of the same coin: he kept A Dream in a box for decades, he said, so that it could be appraised and reconsidered alongside Daddy. Acknowledging how much these underseen but spectacular films are interrelated – one, inclined to darkness; the other, light – this two-part programme brings them together in new 4K restorations, each of which will be introduced by one of the season curators.
In Focus: Niki de Saint Phalle is curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza and Laura Staab.
Programme
Friday 8 May, 6.45pm
Daddy (4K restoration)
By turns surrealist and sexually provocative, Niki de Saint Phalle’s feverish debut transforms the pain of personal trauma into the meaty material for raw psychosexual catharsis. Made with filmmaker and ex-lover Peter Whitehead, this hallucinatory rape-revenge fantasy remains as controversial as when it first premiered in 1973.
Sunday 10 May, 4pm
A Dream Longer Than the Night (4K restoration)
Garnering comparisons on its 1976 release to Jean Cocteau and Georges Mèlies, Niki de Saint Phalle’s colourful, marvellously polymorphic fairytale follows a girl into an alluring dreamscape, where sexual awakening is imagined as an excitable quest that runs on quixotic feminine desire.
Friday 8 May, 6.45pm
Daddy (4K restoration)
By turns surrealist and sexually provocative, Niki de Saint Phalle’s feverish debut transforms the pain of personal trauma into the meaty material for raw psychosexual catharsis. Made with filmmaker and ex-lover Peter Whitehead, this hallucinatory rape-revenge fantasy remains as controversial as when it first premiered in 1973.
Sunday 10 May, 4pm
A Dream Longer Than the Night (4K restoration)
Garnering comparisons on its 1976 release to Jean Cocteau and Georges Mèlies, Niki de Saint Phalle’s colourful, marvellously polymorphic fairytale follows a girl into an alluring dreamscape, where sexual awakening is imagined as an excitable quest that runs on quixotic feminine desire.
