‘Daddy’ Is a Blast of Feminist Art to the Face

Conceived as an almost literal blast in the face of cinema, Daddy is one of the highlights of the Museum of Modern Art’s January festival of film restorations, To Save and Project. Created by Niki de Saint Phalle and Peter Whitehead, Daddy is often referred to online as a “surreal horror film”, although that’s as misleading as any other description. The French drama has been almost impossible to see or even know about, but the 2025 restoration screens on 21 January.

Daddy opens with the standard advisory that characters are imaginary, blah blah, living or dead purely coincidental, yadda yadda. We’ll have more to say on that later. The credits are Saint Phalle’s colorful drawings telling us this is “a film by Peter Whitehead and Niki de Saint Phalle” and that Whitehead is the photographer, editor, and director. We don’t denigrate Whitehead as a contributor, but he seems to be the one documenting Saint Phalle’s ideas and performances, since the whole film feels like one facet of her creative expression as one of the major modern artists of the last half of the 20th Century.

Subtitled “A Bedtime Story”, Daddy begins with an example of the type of art that first made Saint Phalle famous. Propped before what looks like a ruin of an old castle or cathedral, we see a large religious triptych, or rather a parody of such a thing. Found objects, like animal skulls, are embedded onto the surface with cans of red spray paint.

Nattily dressed in a hunting uniform, Saint Phalle fires a shotgun at the cans to splash red everywhere. Red will be a primary color throughout. This imagery is accompanied by classical piano, probably played by Whitehead.

A telegram in closeup: “DADDY DROWNED RETURN IMMEDIATELY FUNERAL SUNDAY SHOW RESPECT FOR HIS DEATH LOVE = MUMMY.” The shooter-narrator uses red lipstick to cross out “love”.

After nearly eight minutes, the first voice-over begins as we look upon black-and-white memories of a girl and her father running playfully through a hedge maze. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl who dreamt she lived in a castle. Do you remember, Daddy, how much I loved you? You made my life into a fairy tale. Do you remember Blindman?”

The little girl is an uncredited actress. Daddy (Rainer Diez) is a young actor with a clearly phony bald cap and eyebrows in no attempt at realism. Blindman turns out to be a blindfold game in which the girl is prepared to lead Daddy into tumbling down steps (with his laughing collusion?) and during which Daddy feels up her thighs and pulls at her stockings. 

These scenes are immediately discomfiting and queasy, despite the absence of anything graphic. The most shocking moment to modern viewers will probably be the minute in which the girl is shown swimming nude. While it’s not a sexual scene per se, we’re conscious of Daddy observing, and his gaze is conflated with the viewer’s.

Perhaps unwittingly, this scene recalls another film reviewed by PopMatters, Harry J. Revier’s Child Bride (1938). The viewers are being challenged to look at this material and analyze their emotional responses. Do we see or are we blind?

Daddy is emphasized as a military figure with medals and uniform, and as a German to the strains of the song “Lili Marleen”. He also likes predatory birds, such as owls, eagles, and falcons. The fact that falcons get hoods placed over their heads, like blindfolds, becomes a symbol. (Whitehead was a noted falconer.) 

Daddy had been seen chasing and whipping Mummy down the stairs while the little girl spied on them, and it’s unclear the extent to which this is sado-masochistic play for them. In a later fantasy, while Daddy submits to seemingly willing humiliation, he barks like a dog and sings Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in another Germanic moment. 

Most of Daddy consists of our grown narrator imagining herself lecturing, teasing, and almost torturing Daddy with a series of fantasy tableaus while he’s tied in a wheelchair. He’s even older, although the baldness seems to have filled in. He’s silent, looking on with anguish and sorrow as his daughter implies incestuous kisses with Mummy (Clarice Mary) and cavorts with a stray, unnamed lover (Mia Martin) who’s sometimes nude or body-painted.

If most of Daddy feels like a feminist exorcism of patriarchal influence, trying to reduce the messaging to simple revenge fantasies will come up short. Daddy is depicted as abject and pathetic, and he’s told he secretly wants to be a woman (cue the cross-dressed get-up). Daddy is almost exclusively a fantasy object whose voyeuristic participation is necessary for our heroine’s enjoyment. Her fairy tale narratives complicate any reductive impulses with their tales of resurrection, sexuality, freedom, traps, and the interchangeability of love and hate.

Daddy is a classic example of an artist making a museum film showcasing her art and performance. The style is early John Waters: dead-on capturing of what’s happening in front of the camera without attempts at aesthetic flourish. Also like Waters, the confrontation has an essentially campy and humorous edge, but that doesn’t soften its most blunt declarations.

Niki de Saint Phalle is most famous today for her huge, rounded, largely feminine sculptures with their bright colors and Dr. Seuss stripes, bits of which can be glimpsed in Daddy. The film is only one facet of her endless, socially committed, essentially joyous and playful creativity. If the film’s tone is much less joyful than much of her art, that’s probably because she really is confronting, exorcising, and re-imagining a relationship with her father, despite the disclaimer. Her relations with mom weren’t so hot either.

More than one version of Daddy has existed. What’s been restored in 2025, under the supervision of the artist’s niece Arielle de Saint Phalle, is the 35mm theatrical version. Viewers looking for either horror or softcore titillation are likely to be disappointed by this showcase for fantasy performances and in-your-face commentaries. Viewers looking for documentation of feminist art that dares to be uncomfortable yet playful will find that in spades.