Although marginally more available than her concert appearances in the 1970’s, Garrel’s films with Nico are also frustratingly obscure. The first one they did together, La Cicatrice Interieure, represents the fullest collaboration between them (I describe its opening scene in the first paragraph of this article). For one thing, it’s filled with Nico’s music. Most of the songs are to be found on her album Desertshore, although one, an instrumental with Nico playing harmonium and someone else playing acoustic guitar, is not on any of her recordings. The last song featured in the film, “König,” was not recorded until her last album in 1985.
Nico is also very prominent on the screen in this film. There are essentially two parts to the film. In the first, Nico and Garrel are in a desert. If you could see the film, you would understand why I am not going to provide a detailed summary. It is, essentially, plotless. Nico has most of the lines, delivered primarily in English with some in German—not that it makes any difference. One memorable scene involves Nico sitting on the ground in the desert, crying hysterically. Garrel starts to walk, apparently in a straight line but actually in a large circle—eventually he comes back around to Nico sitting and crying. On the soundtrack, meanwhile, is Nico’s “Janitor of Lunacy.” When the song is over, Nico tells Garrel, essentially, to leave her alone, and so he leaves, with her following, until both are lost on the horizon. This is the sort of avant garde film that Monty Python were able to create such effective parodies of—and I like La Cicatrice Interieure.
The second part of the film was shot in Iceland and features Nico and Pierre Clementi (best known as the sadistic young thug in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour). This part of the film resembles an Icelandic saga on acid, with Clementi riding around on a white pony naked, except for a bow and a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder. As I have suggested with the earlier part, much of this stuff is risible—and yet, at the end of the film (with the very fine song “König” playing) there is a scene of real beauty, mystery, and majesty: a static scene, with Clementi surrounded by hissing volcanic rock, with Nico in white, up above and looking down. It’s an image right out of William Blake, though executed by Carvaggio.
This film does seem to be a real artistic collaboration between Nico and Garrel. What I’ve seen of the other Garrel films in which Nico appears suggests that this level of collaboration was not to persist. Les Hautes Solitudes from 1974 (the second film I describe at the beginning) features Jean Seberg and Tina Aumont. The brief description I provided is the extent of Nico’s appearance. What happens in the film is hard to work out, not least because it is absolutely silent—no sound of any kind. It is, however, a series of interactions between Seberg and Aumont, and to a lesser degree Laurent Terzieff. Nico seems to be an afterthought.
There is a famous moment in Warhol and Morrisey’s Chelsea Girls in which Nico cries on film. She has said that she was frustrated at the relentlessness of Warhol’s camera’s gaze. Nico is absolutely passive in that film. If La Cicatrice Interieure represents an advance over Chelsea Girls, then 1975’s Un Ange Passe (the third film I describe at the beginning) is a depressing step backwards. It is hard to see how Garrel’s objectification of Nico differs from Warhol’s. True, in Garrel’s film, Nico’s music is featured. Also, at the end, a clip of Nico performing a concert is shown, over which we hear her recite a poem. But, as with Les Hautes Solitude, she seems absolutely peripheral to the main thrust of the film, which in the case of Un Ange Passe involves four actors having conversations, including Garrel’s father, noted French actor Maurice Garrel.
It must be said as well that the music that Nico performs in these films is, except for the two songs I mentioned in La Cicatrice Interieure, from her second, third, and fourth albums. The bootleg tapes indicate that she began to perform new material in concerts in the 1970’s, but for real documentation of new songs, it is not until 1981’s Drama of Exile that we see anything significant.
Next page: Drama of Exile and Live Performances
