Daddy. 1973. France/UK. Directed by Niki de Saint Phalle, Peter Whitehead. Screenplay by Saint Phalle. With Saint Phalle, Rainer Diez, Mia Martin, Clarice Mary. North American restoration premiere. DCP courtesy mk2 Films. 75 min.
Scabrously funny and deeply disturbing, Daddy is a feminist sendup of sexploitation movies, with their role-playing fantasies of incest, adolescent lust, and familial power games, told from the perspective of a young girl who, because of her father, harbors a hatred of all men. A collaboration between the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle and the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead (then best known for his Swinging London portraits of the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd), Daddy was filmed at a French chateau and starred the actress-model and heiress Mia Martin, best known for her work on The Benny Hill Show and the Hammer production The Satanic Rites of Dracula. The film was notorious from the very start. When asked in a 2009 Cahiers du cinéma interview, “What is the most subversive film of all time for you?,” Whitehead replied, “Daddy made Niki’s psychoanalyst mad with rage and was applauded by Godard and Lacan at the premiere in Paris on February 1, 1974. But more importantly, Niki said it was a woman’s movie.” Indeed, Saint Phalle herself would observe, “There are detective films. There are spy films. There are ethnographic films. There’s Mae West. This is a family film. We’ve drawn on our knowledge of a milieu, a religion that we’ve had occasion to experience. Daddy isn’t my father or Peter Whitehead’s father. But he was our father during the making of the film. This film is based on family archetypes that we denounce!”
Restoration in 4K presented by mk2 in collaboration with Niki Charitable Art Foundation, done by the laboratory L’Image Retrouvée (Bologne, Paris) from the feature internegative and sound negative with the support of Dior.