“Am I Providing a Good Show for You?”

The underground film Daddy (1973), a collaboration by French artist Niki de Saint Phalle and British countercultural filmmaker Peter Whitehead, is a sexually explicit surrealist pop-art Freudian rape revenge fantasy. It stems from de Saint Phalle's autobiographical narrative of parental abuse and the development of a young girl's sexuality. Deploying a performance studies lens to focus on performance practice and process, this article takes a new methodological approach to the film that could be applied to other avant-garde cinematic practices. Drawing on previously unseen materials and examining a key and frequently underexplored element of female labor within film, this essay traces the skills, training, and experiences shaping female performative labor, and demonstrates that Daddy's interrogation of sexual politics and displays of female sexual expression depended on this labor. Dissecting it offers revealing insights into the complex and frequently hidden dynamics of control and agency underpinning Daddy's artistic and sexual collaborations.

Introduction

This introductory chapter traces a process of cultural transformation that, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, led to the rise after World War II of the phenomenon called slapstick modernism. Manifesting itself in literature, (underground) film, and popular music, the rise of slapstick modernism signaled the coalescence in cultural practice of the artistic experimentation associated with high modernism, and the socially disruptive lunacy linked to the comic film genre. However, the concept of slapstick modernism has yet to receive adequate theorization; this is partly due to the insufficiency of the terms initially used to capture the specificity of this new, hybrid cultural entity. Slapstick modernism had no manifesto of the sort that mobilized the various avant-garde ventures of the early decades of the twentieth century.

Underground, Or Once There Was A Country

Film memiliki kemampuan untuk menghadirkan memori. Tidak hanya itu, film juga mampu menjadi memori. Melalui kekhasannya sebagai media audio dan visual film membawa penontonnya dari kurungan ruang dan waktu untuk masuk ke dalam situasi berbeda. Hal tersebut dapat disaksikan pada film garapan Emir Kustirica, Underground. Film yang mengedepankan kekuatan memori, gerak dan pergerakan, serta imajinasi. Melalui Underground penonton tidak hanya diajak mengetahui tentang sebuah negara, Yugoslavia, juga dibawa masuk ke kisi-kisi sejarah dan imajinasi yang sublim. Keywords: film, memory, movement, Emir Kusturica, Underground

British Cinema

Before the 1960s, much historical and critical writing on British cinema was generated outside of the academy—for instance, a multivolume, largely economic history of the silent period, subsequently republished in the 1990s, was commissioned by the British Film Institute and sought extant personnel as consultants. With the introduction of film courses to British universities came an unfortunate prejudice against the homegrown product, largely inherited from European commentators. A small contingent of trailblazers then led a group of writers, teachers, and disciples who did not affect to despise British films and who found British cinema a worthwhile subject of study and analysis. British cinema became no longer “an unknown continent.” The number of designated courses has proliferated alongside the publication of increasingly specialized and focused monographs and edited collections, devoted to specific periods, genres, themes, individual directors, individual films, and individual stars and actors (a distinction recurrently made in British cinema discourse). In recent years, attention has broadened from discussions of British cinema as narrowly “national” (something possibly peculiar and insular) to a just appreciation of demonstrable transnational exchanges in historical and contemporary contexts. Coverage has correspondingly deepened, with volumes devoted to particular roles in production: cinematography, composition, editing, and set and costume design. It has also extended to “cult” and “alternative” areas of production and reception, addressing not only films that fall into these provisional categories but also their audiences. Fandom itself has become a topic of investigation. Furthermore, a trend toward “bottom-up” history and a reevaluation of personal and collective memory as the basis for the writing of history have encouraged both investigation of the cinema in Britain as a social space and a broader investigation of mainstream and underground film culture.