“My vocabulary did this to me.”
We see a woman sitting on a cliff, on rocks in a desert. She has long dark hair with short bangs. She is wearing a long, white, shapeless dress-thing and knee-high brown leather boots. From the upper right of the screen, a figure moves towards her. It turns out to be a man, dressed in a kind of hippy version of a courtier’s outfit. He takes her hand and gently pulls her to her feet. “Where are you taking me?” she asks thickly. The camera pulls out to a medium shot, follows them along for a while, and then lets them wander off into the distance, into the desert.
***
We see a woman with dark hair sometimes looking into the camera, sometimes not. Her eyelashes are impossibly dark and long. She glances down. She looks like a goth avant la lettre. She stretches her long, bare arms out and lays her head on top of them. She looks bored.
***
We see a dark-haired woman, festooned in scarves and cloaked in dark clothing. She seems to be sitting on a park bench. She looks up into the camera and looks away. She looks into the sky. She closes her eyes. She rests her head in her hands. The soundtrack plays a concert performance of Nico’s “Frozen Warnings,” from The Marble Index. After applause, we hear “You Forget to Answer,” from The End. On the screen, a milky-white tear rolls down the woman’s face.
***
A look at the release dates for Nico’s albums tells a certain story: 1968, 1969, 1970, 1974, 1981, and 1985. Another story, perhaps another version of the same story is suggested by the release dates of films she appears in directed by Philippe Garrel: 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, and 1979.
It would be tempting to say that Nico’s film career took over from her music career in the 1970’s. Except that her appearances in Garrel’s films don’t really constitute a “career” and that she never gave up music during this time. Bootleg tapes exist documenting Nico’s performances during the 1970’s, and these clearly only scratch the surface of her activity during this time, which is not at all well-documented. The lurid aspects of Nico’s life, particularly her heroin addiction, are what receive attention from 1974 on. The nature of heroin addiction is such that it resists detailed recording by biographers. Richard Witts’ biography of Nico, so admirably detailed in other periods of her life, falls understandably short here. A kind of algebra of absence results: people are drawn to the image of Nico as junkie, there isn’t much information on her day to day life as an addict, and so it seems as if nothing much happened.
While this is no doubt true to an extent—Nico often called herself lazy—she also managed to perform quite a bit, even without a record contract, or an agent, or any of the traditional support that surrounds pop musicians. I’ve only managed to hear a small amount of her performances in this period, but what I’ve heard sounds very assured, very powerful.
She also performed with other musicians at this time, not only by herself. The best documented of these collaborations is a kind of supergroup concert (a bizarre one, certainly) featuring Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico, and Brian Eno. She also performed with Cale and Ayers separately, with a flute-player named Didier Malherbe, and most significantly with a guitarist named Lütz Ulbrich. It is a shame that these performances are not more widely available.
Next page: "An Icelandic saga on acid" and other films with Garrel
