Niki de Saint Phalle (1996)

Niki de Saint Phalle is introduced through scenes of her shooting-picture actions and excerpts from her experimental film Daddy. Jean Tinguely introduces himself as an artist who creates machines that serve no purpose. In 1962, the two stage the anti-nuclear art action The End of the World in the Nevada desert. Niki de Saint Phalle recounts her artistic development. She was born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, but her mother called her Niki because the name suited her better. She kept the name when she became an artist, also as an act of rebellion against her family. She began with aggressive shooting pictures, through which she could express her anger toward men, her family, and humanity. “Instead of becoming a terrorist, I became a terrorist of art,” she says. Her art moved from anger to pain, giving rise to suffering female figures, including prostitutes, women giving birth, and brides. One day, the pain inside her was gone, and she was able to create the Nanas, figures of joy that she also sees as a glorification of women. At the instigation of Pontus Hultén, she created the oversized Nana Hon for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, which was a huge success. The film shows both the sculpture’s construction and its subsequent dismantling. Excerpts are shown from a dance performance by Roland Petit featuring Nanas, as well as Le paradis fantastique, a group of figures by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely created for the roof of the French Pavilion at Expo 67 in Canada. In 1970, she created a children’s playground for a poor neighborhood in Jerusalem; Nanas for Hanover and a playhouse in Belgium followed. Niki de Saint Phalle increasingly experienced health problems, which she attributed to a polyester allergy. At times she worked with an oxygen device. Starting from the Nanas, she created a variation: all-devouring mothers, which Tinguely found repulsive. Another transformation came in the 1970s, when she began making films that she directed and also acted in. In the experimental feature Daddy, she rails against men and, above all, father figures, and in a semi-documentary way processes the rape by her father that she suffered as a child. Un rêve plus long que la nuit (A Dream Longer Than the Night), starring her daughter, depicts the hell of the adult world. When she had to choose between film and sculpture, she chose the latter. At the age of 50, she received land in Tuscany from friends and devoted herself to the task of a lifetime: building the Tarot Garden. Glass, ceramics, and mirrors dominate the sculpture garden. Niki de Saint Phalle introduces her favorite places in the garden. Other works, such as the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, are shown and explained. Tinguely died in 1991, and his funeral, which he had planned himself, became his final grand spectacle. Over the next two years, Niki de Saint Phalle championed her husband’s legacy and completed the monumental sculpture Head/Le Cyclop in the Forest of Fontainebleau, begun back in 1969. Retrospectives in Bonn and works in Paris define the following years. Her health deteriorated, and she came to rely regularly on a breathing device. Her doctors advised her to go to San Diego, and her health improved to the point that she no longer needed the device. She began discovering new subjects, among them orcas, which she encountered on visits to SeaWorld and sometimes assembled to move mechanically, in a way reminiscent of Tinguely’s work, before letting them fall apart. Another subject was paragliding—the film’s final shots show Niki de Saint Phalle flying high in the air with a paraglider.