Susanna Nicchiarelli

Graduated from the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema (Rome).

[on Nico, 1988 (2017)] I chose to show the flashbacks of the sixties and of iconic Nico only with Jonas Mekas' material because it is shot and structured already as a memory. It is confused, rapid, and it represents perfectly the home-movie language of the time. I think Mekas' material is the most meaningful material we have of the entire Factory experience, or at least it is to me, because I have a feeling that it shows in its style also the brevity, the fleeting nature of that single moment in time when everything happened at the right moment. I love Mekas' movies, especially "Walden" [aka Walden (1968)]. Nico appears very little in them and that also fascinated me: a shadow, a face that appears for a few frames. One of the images I put in the film I found with the editor by pure chance and it was so brief... like a memory or rather like something that has already been forgotten. It was a great way for me to represent the icon, or rather the memories she had of herself, as something that was disappearing but kept on coming back, out of the black, unwanted and unasked. [2017]