Iconographer

"We didn't even know at the time that it was 10 years old," she recalls. "It was just something that had some sort of a decadence about it. It took us someplace we would like to have been instead of Cologne. Just somewhere else. When I heard them, of course, was when they were rediscovered by the punk and new-wave movement in England and they had become really popular."

The Velvet Underground prevailed as one of the seminal bands in rock music. Nico, however, became little more than a footnote to their legend, her solo career dwindling into cryptic albums, disastrous concert appearances, drug addiction, and an early death. Ofteringer was intrigued not just by the spectral quality of the music, but because Nico too was a Cologne native. Some years later, when Ofteringer was studying film at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, she decided that her first feature documentary would be a study of this ephemeral icon.

"In the very beginning I didn't know anything about her. Nothing had been published. So I didn't really have an image of her when I started. After research and talking to people I found this ambiguity in her very interesting. And she became more interesting when I started discovering the less charming sides of her character. Even the people who were really hurt by her were still affectionate about her. She had some sort of an impact that they couldn't escape, whether they wanted to or not."

Still, not all those celebrities with whom Nico associated in her better days were willing or able to participate in the film.

"I tried Lou Reed, but he declined several times. He didn't want to be in the film. I got a fax from his management that Lou Reed does not want to comment on or be interviewed about Nico. But he came to the opening in New York and he said he liked it very much. I tried Bob Dylan; he was on this never-ending tour and wasn't interested. Leonard Cohen was interested and his management was very friendly, but it wasn't in my time frame.

The people she did interview ranged from filmmaker Paul Morrissey, who discusses her initiation into Warhol's factory and her brief tenure with the Velvet Underground, to James Young, the keyboard player in her last band and author of a sardonic, often disparaging book about her last tour called Nico: The End. The latter provided many of the less charming details about her subject, including details about her heroin use, her manipulation of people, and her physical dissolution.

"The book had just come out so I didn't really have a chance to read it before I met him," says Ofteringer. "I had the impression that it was a negative image that he conveyed of her, but then in talking to him I realized that the book was more about the lifestyle of an unsuccessful rock band on the road. In the film he calls her the `Queen of the Bad Girls,' and all these other artists since, like Madonna, make this effort to be regarded as bad girls. But she seemed to some sort of a natural in that respect."

Does Ofteringer think Nico provided a feminist role model? Or is she a negative image for women today?

"I think she's actually both. What I tried to do in the film was show her the way she was and not change her into something I would like to see. I think there is something about her development and her career that is admirable. Whenever she had the chance she said she hated feminism, and she hated women, but that's what she would say. I still find that she was a very strong and independent woman with an impressive career, so maybe in that sense she could be a role model.

"Sometimes after the screenings people ask me, so do you think she was a good person or wasn't she? I think that is kind of a strange question, because if she was or wasn't, that doesn't make her less of an artist. The interesting thing for me about Nico was also the fact that she remained an icon of subculture throughout the decades, not only in the '60s. And maybe that's what people are looking for again -- subculture."

-- Peter Keough