The 2024 Cannes Film Festival showcased a number of films engaging with the visual arts — from a documentary and biopic exploring the fraught lives and careers of artists to the newly launched Immersive competition featuring eight VR and expanded cinema works that verge on digital art, performance, and installation. The VR works made by visual artists, in particular, illustrated how technology has allowed filmmakers to explore the ever-expanding possibilities for an immersive experience.
In Céline Sallette’s much-anticipated biopic, Niki (2024), Sallette and Canadian actress Charlotte le Bon create a rousing portrait of the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle as a young woman tormented by repressed memories of her father’s sexual abuse, and later grappling with mental illness, hospitalizations, electric shocks, and years of psychotherapy. As told in Niki, vulnerability and ambition, as well as anger at the patronizing male doctors and (primarily male) fellow artists she encountered, drove de Saint Phalle’s creativity, which came in spurts and sputters, before taking off in the 1960s. Although suffering in no way guarantees greatness, the film suggests that only when de Saint Phalle unleashed her rage against all male figures, including her violent lover (not named in the film but immortalized in “Saint Sebástien or Portrait of My Lover,” 1961) did her art soar. Sallette pays less attention to the artist’s formal advances; still, she convincingly captures the pressures of marriage and mothering, and de Saint Phalle’s dramatic decision to leave her family and live independently in order to launch her career.
