Cinema and Sovereign Powers: About Daddy—Review, Positif, 1974

I. The Rape

"When I start, it seems to me that my picture is on the other side, only covered with this white dust, the canvas." There is a brutal version of Braque's text, "My Picture" in Daddy by Peter Whitehead. Agnès (Niki de Saint Phalle) uses gunshots to make a religious accumulation explode, white as a canvas, white as the screen.¹ The work is inclusive, contained, buried perhaps, in matter which is formless and colourless. One brings to it only the gesture, the action, but no supplementary material. It is born of its own encounter with a brutal act: it is born of a raped mother, of the brutality of a father who manufactured arms; it is the nothingness and it is the rape. And above all, the huntress shows herself committing this act; she shows herself to someone—a director—who in his turn shows her to us, and who, himself, puts himself in the position of receiving the gunshot in order that from this woman who is still unknown—white—who he shows to us, through the act, violent in return, from the camera, Agnès emerges.

On the contrary (while in the coloured present the father has kept the original whiteness of the past: in the black coffin, he is no more than a huge plaster phallus),² the brutality of an exterior event (the telegram: "Your father is dead") makes only the past loom up, suddenly without colour: black and white of the vegetable labyrinth rigorously fashioned in irrationality, a world where the father's hands (the eyes being blindfolded for the game of blind man's buff³) and the mischievous look of his birds of prey hem in the child who is nevertheless offered naked (provocative?). And from the swimming pool at the end of the labyrinth, under the unkempt gaze of her father, Agnès emerges.

But the Agnès who displays herself also wants to look at the establishing scene where the father whips a provocative mother, a blonde accomplice and a fat victim of boredom. The child looks at herself in the mirror, wearing a blonde wig and Daddy locks her in the black room—but what is the act that she must "never again" commit, look at or imitate? Daddy will marry her, he says (like he marries his birds). Then will she marry Daddy?

But now Agnès is a woman who dresses in men's clothes and who can show Daddy, tied up in his invalid chair (dead), that mummy, as a prostitute, gets more plea sure out of her than with him or with any other client. Both of them, in boots or feathers, reduce Daddy to being no more than a blind man, or a debagged dog. Another girl arrives, adolescent and blonde, whom Agnès undresses in front of her father, who deposits in the chamber pot a present for him to eat, then who, naked and painted by Agnès, dances before him. With whom above all she plays at blind man's buff, a delicious opportunity to uncover rounded buttocks.

But the child knows how to take plea sure alone. Moreover Daddy is no more than a girl in disguise, who would do better to take his tablets instead of bedding horrible malformed dolls. She might just as well shoot at Daddy and become a "female Daddy." Agnès, who has therefore become a dragon, reads to her dead father the first book she found in the house of the deceased, a history of dragons which certainly says that dragons cry sometimes. And the young man in the field bears an exact resemblance to Daddy.

II. The Mirror and the Screen

Daddy revisits, of course, the fundamental and naïve questions about cinema: what is real and what is true? (When Agnès teaches the adolescent to fake her orgasm, the latter, to perfect the simulation, masturbates herself and laughs at having a real orgasm, but is it true?) What is it that wishes to be perceived in the same way...