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Nico Icon
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It’s
not a popular opinion in certain cinema milieux, but I sometimes get weary at
the enormous number of documentaries that fill out the programs of the major
film festivals. Yes, there are great documentaries and documentarians of all
stripes – but I’m not complaining here about Frederick Wiseman, Agnès Varda or
Jean-Pierre Gorin. I just feel that I’ve seen way too many docos that cruise
along on the novelty value of their subject matter – an eccentric personality,
or a famous film director, or an unknown piece of social history – but which
are not really very good or compelling as
films.
And
if it’s not a finally rather bland, TV-style documentary, then, at the other
extreme, it’s some precious attempt at the genre known as essay-film – often incredibly self-conscious, grindingly
intellectualised pieces that interrogate, past the point of all endurance,
their own existence as films and as documentaries; works with no breath of cinéma-vérité life in them whatsoever.
Among
the very worst viewing experiences of my entire life, in fact, was a feature-length essay-film I saw in Madrid in
the early 1990s, with the modest title of Where
is Memory (Chris Gallagher, Canada, 1993). It presented a gaunt
narrator-figure walking about, a man with “no memory” of the Nazi past. But
slowly, he starts to collect the old footage lying about in musty rooms and he
looks deep into it, gazing at the monuments and learning how to “read” them.
So, about 50 minutes later, this guy runs around with a gun in his hand, seeing
the newsreels of Hitler in his mind, and hoping to assassinate der Führer.
Well, maybe it would have looked OK in an ultra low-budget, SF time-travel
movie of the 1950s; here, it was an atrocious conceit.
However,
at the Melbourne Film Festival of 1995, I was drawn to the music doco Nico Icon. The life story and career
path of Nico is an amazing tale, and this film tackles it in an
impressionistic, zig-zag fashion. We start in the ugly final phase: Nico on
stage in 1988, looking about 100 years old after a long romance with hard
drugs. We hear from James Young, author of the remarkable memoir Songs They Never Play on the Radio, who
toured as part of Nico’s band in the ‘80s and lived to tell the tale: a tale of
hair-raising scenes of life on the road, the panicky stashing of drugs at
national borders, knives being pulled, you name it. Young’s stories are funny
and horrible all at once; he is clearly still infected by the dark romance of
celebrating the glorious failures of life and art alike. And Susanne
Ofteringer’s film (it seems to be her only directorial credit) really gets
inside this depressed but fascinating mood.
We
race back to the 1950s and Nico’s teenage career as a model (she was born
Christa Päffgen). We glimpse her in magazines, TV ads, some forgotten French
film about the high life, and one very famous Italian film about the high life
– namely, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). In a clip from this,
Marcello Mastroianni actually calls out to her: “Aay, Nico!”. So she was an
early supermodel celebrity. But she rebelled against all that, and this is
where her story starts to become gripping. Nico claims to have hated her
beauty, and did everything to destroy that glamorous image. In an 1986
interview, she confesses to only one regret: that she was not born a man.
And
soon enough, by the second half of the 1960s, she had become another kind of
superstar: an anti-superstar, full of morose, sullen, pre-punk glamour, in the
artistic circle of Andy Warhol and his famous Factory. This is the era of the
Velvet Underground, and later of her contact with Jim Morrison, where Nico’s
singing career lurched from its folky, Dylanesque beginning into an endless,
magnificent, atonal drone. This was the style that Nico developed in her solo
albums of the 1970s and ‘80s, and it is here paid a moving tribute by her
faithful collaborator, John Cale.
Nico,
like (in another cultural sphere) Yoko Ono, gave herself to the art of the
underground, the avant-garde. We get a few tantalising clips from the florid
experimental psychodrama films she made with her partner Philippe Garrel in the
1970s, works with cosmic titles like The
Inner Scar (1972) and An Angel Passes (1975). But, by this stage, we’re deep into the drug-use era, with its murky
career tunnels and long decline to death.
One
by one, the doco lines up the walking wounded of this history: an ex-lover who
curses her, an aunt who sways and cries as she listens to an Velvet underground
song; the sad mother-in-law who got custody of the Nico’s son (an incident
depicted in Garrel’s own Nico screen-memoir of 1991, J’entends plus la guitare)
conceived (it is claimed) with Alain Delon during their brief affair … and,
finally, that son himself, Ari, now a strung-out young man also addicted to
drugs, wandering the streets and indulging the Gothic romance of his mother’s
mythic burn-out of a life.
Nico
Icon is a cool, chilling, utterly captivating testament to a myth.
© Adrian Martin June 1995 |
