A Dream Longer Than the Night

The iconic feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle excavates the perversion of the fairy-tale genre in her first and only solo feature film, A Dream Longer Than the Night. It’s a phantasmagorical delight, a fairy tale for grown women, bursting with the nascent despair, rage, guilt and shame buried us all. Whilst the film references the specific political context of post-war fascism, it transcends time and place by orbiting a universal experience: a child coming to terms with a sexually-charged world. That is, if the world was a Niki de Saint Phalle dreamscape; wherein, we follow Camélia, a girl granted the wish of becoming a woman, on a surrealist quest for romantic love. Her encounters fall short by instead featuring corrupted priests, debauched harems, and the totemic worshiping of phallic sculptures. But there’s more to the film than exploding penises: A Dream Longer Than the Night is a unique vision presented with an artist’s singular creativity which—especially in our current streaming desert of corporate product films—makes it impossible not to love.

The film is perhaps most striking for its set design and spatiality, which only a sculptor could evoke. As an artist, Sant Phalle is most known for her sculptures, often figurative, vivid and voluptuous, which claimed the large centrepieces of her major retrospectives at MoMA PS1 (2021) and Guggenheim Bilbao (2015). Giant sculptures also dominate the dream world of her film, which includes a kinetic structure by Jean Tinguely, Saint Phalle’s husband. The use of the camera itself is extremely minimal; it’s the mise-en-scène, along with occasional stop-motion drawings and paper handcrafts, which compose the striking images that make the film so memorable. This unique stage cuts through anything else otherwise lacking in the filmmaking, and gives the film a specific texture, whimsy and theatricality akin to Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) or Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin (1970). And beyond cinema; the set design of Penelope, a play devised by Leonora Carrington and directed by Alejandro Jodorwsky, first staged in Mexico City in 1957.

Near the beginning of the film there’s a tarot reading, à la the opening scene of Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). From there, a downwards spiral of nightmares begin to materialise in the young girl’s otherwise perfect life. Her father dies; he was central to her happiness, as shown by idyllic and bucolic scenes of kite-flying, fairground rides and elaborately-wrapped presents. This marks a shift from Peter Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic Daddy (1973), starring Saint Phalle and based on her real-life experiences of incest. (Saint Phalle also appears in this film as a bewitching brothel-keeper, and her daughter Laura Duke Condominas plays the older Camélia). A Dream Longer Than the Night is a lullaby of moral ambiguity, slipping constantly between dream and nightmare. We see the wide-eyed Camélia witness a gory and violent act, and then skip along happily into the next shot. This space forms the existential playground of Saint Phalle’s approach to life and creativity. In her memoir, she wrote, “[My] work and life [are] like a fairy tale full of quests, evil dragons, hidden treasures, devouring mothers and witches, the bird of paradise, the good mother, glimpses of paradise—and descents into hell.”

This orgasmic feat in horny feminist weirdness can be enjoyed thanks to a recent 4K restoration, using the the original 16mm camera and sound negatives, by the Niki Charitable Art Foundation.