The Travelling Companion

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.

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.

Rainer von Hessen and Niki de Saint Phalle met after he saw a photo of HON, the 1966 installation for Moderna Museet Stockholm, in a German magazine. Their collaboration began when Saint Phalle first designed the costumes and sets to Aristhophanes’s LYSISTRATA, directed by Hessen (then known under the stage name Diez). Thereafter, Hessen co-authored and directed her play ICH, which was performed at the Staatstheater Kassel in 1968.

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

Niki de Saint Phalle presents and comments on her work from the early 1960s.

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

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

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 Raymond Hains the torn posters.