Nico

A portrait of the ultimate Chelsea Girl. Nico sits for over an hour while dazzling colored lights and psychedelic-patterned slides are projected onto her statuesque face. She breaks down in tears during the second reel, which made it into the final version of The Chelsea Girls.

Experience the iconic rock band's legacy in the first major documentary to tell their story. Directed with the era’s avant-garde spirit by Todd Haynes, this kaleidoscopic oral history combines exclusive interviews with dazzling archival footage.

Strip-tease has a pleasing Paris setting and a convincing strip club atmosphere, where a roster of exotic dancers do their thing. Making the club atmosphere work is the animated Dany Saval, as a charming gossip and outspoken cheerleader for the art of the strip-tease. Berthe encourages Ariane to loosen up and enjoy what she's doing.

Readings from the poets Byron, Keats, Brontë, Tennyson, Coleridge and songs from the dark repertoire of the singer Nico with portraits from the films of Philippe Garrel circa 1975 and Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls and swirling electronic music from Ash Ra Tempel and new electric guitar sound track by James Creed and tracks to the songs by Graham Dowdall aka Gagarin and ex of The Faction with new images of the River Thames put together in an elegy on iconicity, vocality, finitude and solitude.

A second screen test featuring Nico and a Hershey bar — the last being ST245. Camera exercises back and forth, from side to side, swinging, stuttering, crawling while Nico enjoys a Hershey bar. She laughs.

Nico swigs from a Coke bottle while the camera maintains constant movement, zooming in and out, panning right and left.

Shot as a proposed short film behind Iggy Pop's Ann Arbor, MI estate and summarily rejected by Elektra Records as promotional material for Nico's 1968 album, The Marble Index, Evening of Light is a gothic fantasy in a barren cornfield. Nico's song of the same name accompanies the eerie visuals.

On the evening of November 8th, 1966, following the afternoon filming of The George Hamilton Story, a movie in which Warhol cast his mother Julia as an “aging peroxide movie star with a lot of husbands”, – “ We’re trying to bring back old people.” – he took his crew and a much larger cast to Kaleidoscope, fashion designer Tiger Morse’s boutique shop on Madison Avenue in New York City, to shoot his second unreleased film of the day. A nocturnal tale of downtown bulls in an uptown China shop, Paranoia is a portrait of the always captivating, always hilarious Morse as she converses with everyone in front of and behind the camera while genuinely attempting to keep the Superstars in the room from wreaking havoc on her uniquely curated curios.

Morrissey and Warhol's commercial take on the Swedish film I, A Woman. Somebody suggested to Warhol that they wanted a sexploitation film in the vein of I, A Woman, and so he and Morrissey concocted I, A Man. They created the story of this male hustler who talks with and sleeps with a series of women over the course of the film. The women are: a young woman who worries about parental acceptance of her sexuality, a woman who is on a couch, a woman with whom he does a seance, a woman who speaks French, a lesbian, and a married woman.

Scenes of Sausalito, California, including boats, the docks, and streets. Eventually, the setting turns to night and boats appear silhouetted against the sky. A woman speaks poetic phrases on the soundtrack; at intervals her face is seen. A band begins to play but ceases again as lights appear in distant windows.

An androgynous poet/dreamer sits and writes and meditates on the aching void that is her life.

A composition of symbolic, surreal and almost mystic images.

Spotlights the Velvet Underground's 1993 reunion tour of Europe, interspersing footage of the band's Paris concert and interviews with the members of the group. Concerts in Prague and Berlin included.

More consciously experimental than Whitehead's other works, this film draws on a variety of sources, including sequences of London shot while Whitehead was at the Slade School of Art, glimpses of the singer and model Nico, and footage of the psychedelic underground nightclub UFO. There is also on-screen text, a voice critiquing it, and music from Pink Floyd, at this point still fronted by Syd Barrett--Whitehead's old painting friend from Cambridge. The track here, "Interstellar Overdrive", was recorded by Whitehead before the band signed to EMI and is much more exciting and beat-driven than the version they would later record for the label. There is no explicit link between the content of the film and the Cochrane Theatre, which is is named after, but the theatre was used as a venue for the Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films in 1966.

Garrel convinced Jean Seberg, in the midst of a long struggle with mental illness, alcohol and drug, to “star” in this silent document of her daily life. Consisting mostly of meditative B&W close-ups of Seberg and her friends, as her torments and inner life flicker across her eerily beautiful face.

Nico is an ethereal poet haunting the gaps between scenes of Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Bulle Ogier, Laurent Terzieff, and Garrel’s father, Maurice, discussing the filmmaker’s staple topics: love, psychoanalysis, and the failures of May ’68.

Athanor (Nico) is searching for fire. A flame is always at the foreground. Nico naked in tombs, looking at herself in circular mirrors, Nico in castles, keeper of the fire. Nico and Musky as medieval princesses. Athanor is a film about fire.

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

Photographed entirely in color, Four Stars was projected in its complete length of nearly 25 hours (allowing for projection overlap of the 35-minute reels) only once, at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in New York City. The imagery in the film is dense, wearying and beautiful, but ultimately hard to decipher, for, in contrast to his earlier, and more famous film Chelsea Girls, made in 1966, Warhol insisted that two reels be screened simultaneously on top of each other on a single screen, rather than side-by-side. The film's title is a pun on the rating system used by critics to rank films, with "four stars" being the highest rating. From Wikipedia.

After fighting a hard-core drug habit for most of her life, Christa Päffgen aka Nico -- the striking European supermodel who sat in as an occasional lead singer with the Velvet Underground -- succumbed to a tragic death in 1988 at the age of 50, the result of a bicycle accident. Resurrecting her ghostly vocals, this rare collection of footage captures two of her final public performances, filmed in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s.

This TV documentary shows some of the colourful residents of and people connected with the New York Chelsea Hotel. Some highlights include Andy Warhol and William Burroughs having dinner; Quentin Crisp pontificating in a blue rinse hairdo on his balcony and Nico forgetting what she is talking about halfway through a dour rendition of "Chelsea Girls". A number of lesser-known characters also appear, linked together by a tour guide walking around the building and some sub-Shining sequences of a child cycling round the landings on a rickety tricycle.

A free-spirited single mother forms a connection with the wedded headmaster of an Episcopalian boarding school in Monterey, California.

Nico

Recorded on French TV, the concert marked the first time since the breakup of The Velvet Underground that Reed, Cale and Nico were on stage together.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

Nico: An Underground Experience + Heroine

Nico, filmed with an unmoving camera, reads a magazine. She scratches her head, flips her hair, looks glumly at the camera, and then rolls the magazine into a tube and peers through it.

The film depicts a rehearsal of The Velvet Underground including Nico, and is essentially one long loose improvisation.

A rare, unfinished film by Andy Warhol, Sunset is a meditation on the temporality of an everyday phenomenon. Here, a sunset over the Pacific Ocean in California unfolds as a slow and colorful shift of atmospheric light at dusk. As the sun sinks to the horizon, the deep voice of the singer Nico, who was then working with the Velvet Underground, is heard reading poetry off-screen.

nico and her band live at the dolce vita club, lausanne, switzerland on may 1 1986.

clips from nicos live perfomances, working with garrel

“More than eighty reels of film made up Warhol’s 1967 epic double-screen, twenty-five-hour film **** (FOUR STARS). Reel 20 – “Nico Music” – features the Velvet Underground’s chanteuse Nico improvising and working on the song ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’ from her first solo album ‘Chelsea Girl’, accompanied by band members John Cale and Lou Reed.” – Greg Pierce

Haunting music there, from the album The End, from Nico

Nico live in milwaukee, 1980

James Rasin's documentary “Beautiful Darling” honors American Transgender actress and best-known Warhol Superstar, Candy Darling, and her all-too-brief life and career, with a combination of current and vintage interview material, rarely seen archival photos and footage, and extracts from Darling's movies.

Love between Georges and Hypolyte has faded. George confides in Catherine that he is still obsessed with Hypolyte. He wishes that she was a virgin but since she is not, he wishes that she was dead.

Warhol's Factory visits Los Angeles.

A survival, silent black & white film shot with a hand camera, a journey into Philippe Garrel's intimate family album featuring the two women who counted in his cinematographic life: Nico and Zouzou.

A look into the many lives of Christa Päffgen, otherwise known as Nico; from cutie German mädchen to the first of the supermodels, to glamorous diva of the Velvet Underground, to cult item, junkie and hag. Many faces for the same woman, whom, you realize, just couldn't bring herself to care enough to live.

Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol shot nearly 500 Screen Tests, beautiful and revealing portraits of hundreds of different individuals, from Warhol superstars and celebrities to friends or anyone he thought had "star potential". All visitors to his studio, the Factory. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong keylight, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in slow motion, resulting in a fascinating collection of four-minute masterpieces that startle and entrance, mesmerizing in the purest sense of the word. Songwriters Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the band Luna and currently recording as Dean & Britta, incorporated original compositions as well as cover songs to create new soundtracks for the 13 films.

Roberto goes to Marseilles to give a hand to his friend Xavier, wrongly imprisoned following a frame-up organized by his associate Villanova. Roberto sets out to seduce Villanova's mistress, but when Villanova is killed, Roberto ends up leader of the band...

La vraie histoire de Gérard Lechômeur

Exploding Plastic Inevitable was a series of multimedia events organised by Andy Warhol between 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol's films, and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol's Factory. It is also the title of a 18-minute film by Ronald Nameth filmed during one week of the show in Chicago, Illinois in 1966.

Velvet Underground's first public appearance.

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, a piece by Marc’O, concerts by Bob Marley and Patti Smith (not always recognisable)... It’s like a maelstrom of psychedelic images that are passed through a particle accelerator.

A man and a woman live in a clothes-cabinet, literally; they contemplate leaving, but never do. For a time only their voices are heard, until they try to have some light, and open the door. The Woman takes an almost maternal role, they share a sandwich and a cigarette, discuss the contents of the closet, and then The Woman wonders if there is any sexual attraction between them. The Man is too shy for that, or to leave the closet.

A study of the alienated people who frequent the Ballhaus Barmbek dance hall, including an obese El groupie, an old man reciting poetry, two young women and a regular dance employee.

Documents each member of The Velvet Underground having their cards read at a big apartment party. The tarot reader is continually interrupted in her readings by the chaos created by the characters around her.

The Velvet Underground's first public appearance, filmed in Super 8 at a Psychiatrist's Convention, at the Delmonico Hotel, New York, January 14, 1966. Andy Warhol was invited to speak at the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. He brought along the Velvets and other factory regulars.

A young officer in the army of Empress Catherine of Russia is on his way to his new duty station at a remote outpost. During a blinding snowstorm he comes upon a stranger who was caught in the storm and is near death from freezing. He rescues the man and eventually brings him back to health. When the man is well enough to travel, the two part company and the man vows to repay the officer for saving his life. Soon after he arrives at his new post, a revolt by the local Cossacks breaks out and the fort is besieged by the rebels. The young officer is astonished to find out that the leader of the rebellious Cossacks is none other than the stranger whose life he had saved during the storm.

Documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field.

DANNY SAYS is a documentary unveiling the amazing journey of Danny Fields. Fields has played a pivotal role in music and culture with seminal acts including: the Doors, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, MC5, Nico, the Ramones and beyond.

"Not a documentary but the the ruins of an attempted documentary." - Grashina Gabelmann

Follows John Cale, a Welsh musician and producer, who founded the legendary 60s and 70s NY rock band - the Velvet Underground, with Lou Reed. Cale delved into other mainstream and experimental music genres as well.

Salvador Dalí is a 35-minute film directed by Andy Warhol. The film features surrealist artist Salvador Dalí visiting The Factory and meeting the rock band The Velvet Underground.

Nico, in a pseudo ‘commercial’, holds a large, partially unwrapped Hershey bar to her chin, with the labelling upside down; the camera remains stationary while she gazes morosely into the distance.

Lacking a formal narrative, Warhol's mammoth film follows various residents of the Chelsea Hotel in 1966 New York City. The film was intended to be screened via dual projector set-up.

This intimate portrait of Andy Warhol pulls together a unique library of material shot by New York film legend Jonas Mekas. Spanning from 1963 to 1990, the film features a cast of counterculture icons including Allen Ginsberg, George Maciunas, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, as well as John and Caroline Kennedy, and Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy Onassis's sister and Warhol muse)—to whom Mekas dedicates the film. The film features footage from the Velvet Underground's first public performance. A portrait of the remarkable life of arguable the twentieth century's most famous artist and leading iconographer.

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

Episodic journey of journalist Marcello who struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.

A color sound meditation on the erstwhile Warhol superstar.

Positano is an island of the Amalfi Coast that Neptune would have, according to legend, created for the love of a nymph. Perched on the rocks of the island, the house of Frédéric Pardo and Tina Aumont became in 1968 a meeting place for the underground community. Pierre Clémenti stays there for a while and makes images of dazzling sensuality. Beyond Pierre Clémenti's intimate love of these faces and bodies often naked in this Mediterranean landscape, the film reveals the moving beauty of a utopia where living together could still be achieved in a territory of sharing and permanent creation. Flow of perceptions of consciousness, visual impressions, physical impregnations, the work of Pierre Clémenti is an ode to sensuality and "life-cinema".

A collection of rare outtakes and performances from Pennebaker's 1965 documentary Don't Look Back.

Season 9 episode 23 of The South Bank Show, highlighing the velvet underground

Nico's 48'49" complete set live at Cinema Le Rond-Point Marseille on Saturday April 12. 1975 ; opening for John Cale Digitized from the master tape for the first time since it was recorded 1. Purple Lips 2. Secret Side 3. The End 4. Janitor of Lunacy 5. Abschied 6. No One Is There 7. Frozen Warnings 8. You Forgot To Answer

An evening with harmonium & flute. Nico plays stripped down versions of "The Drama of Exile" tracks and some oldies at the Théâtre Campagne-Première, Paris on March 31st, 1978 backed by French flutist Didier Malherbe.

Nico & the Faction : live in Prague, 4 October 1985 (VHS is from :Nico appreciation society Holland)

Nico and The Bedlamites - live in Vienna, 1987

nico perfoming live

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