Part 6 · Jim Morrison and Nico
The lost film
Jim Morrison (1943–1971), singer of the Doors, read Nietzsche as a teenager. One academic study of his life says he asked for a collection of Nietzsche’s works for his sixteenth birthday and read The Birth of Tragedy, the text of Part 1. Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboard player, described him as a , not a showman.
The Trip, May 1966
Gerard Malanga, the whip dancer of Part 5, says Morrison came to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable at The Trip while he was still a UCLA film student. Malanga’s theory is that Morrison took his black leather trousers from Malanga’s costume.
The lost student film, 1965
Before you read: the two descriptions below mention Nazi soldiers and news film of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in protest (1963).
Morrison made a short film for a UCLA production class in 1965. It no longer exists. Ray Manzarek wrote that it was thrown away at the end of the semester with about three hundred other student films. We know it only from people who saw it.
“Jim’s girlfriend danced on a television set.”His teacher, in an interview with American Legends. While she danced, a news clip came on showing a Buddhist monk burning himself.
“It was a poetic collision of images.”Ray Manzarek. In his memory, a German girl dances on top of a TV; Jim turns it on, and Nazi storm troopers appear.
The professor and most of the class disliked the film. Manzarek called it cinematic poetry. In Oliver Stone’s film The Doors (1991), Stone plays the professor himself, and his Morrison answers the criticism by saying “I quit.” In real life Morrison did not quit: he graduated from UCLA in Theatre Arts in 1965. One earlier Morrison film does survive: First Love (1964), four minutes, silent, black and white.
Listen for “will to power.” Morrison names Nietzsche’s idea in this clip. Go back to Part 2, “Self-Surpassing,” and read what Zarathustra means by it before you answer question 5.
Nico, summer 1967
Before New York, Nico worked as a model and actress. In Federico Fellini’s (1960) she plays herself in the party of the nobles.
Nico, the German singer of the Velvet Underground’s first album, spent July and August 1967 with Morrison in California. He told her to write her own songs, and she later called him her “soul brother.” The result was The Marble Index (1968), written mostly by Nico, playing a harmonium, and arranged by John Cale, the viola player of Part 4.
Final task: rebuild the lost film
The film is gone. You have two descriptions of it, and they do not agree. Write the film again, as a shot list.
- Write 8–10 numbered shots. Use the present simple: “A woman dances on top of a television. The screen is dark.”
- Use details from both descriptions. Where they disagree, choose one and say why in one sentence.
- Add one line of narration, in your own words, that connects the film to Apollo and Dionysus (Part 1).
- Record yourself reading the shot list and the narration aloud, as a 2-minute presentation.
Study questions
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