The Nomi Song (2004)

One of my all time favorites.

i must have seen a different film!!

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

The one thing that everyone can say about the film making genre is that there IS something for everyone. There should be NO argument - film making can entertain, it can educate, it can caution and it can enlighten. This is a documentary that touches a bit on all of those things.You didn't have to be a youngster like me in the 80's going to New York to 'club' to feel the sentimentality of this artist within this film. I wanted to know what happened to Klaus Nomi -- and here is where I found out. From the first moment I saw Klaus, I knew he was onto something special - something new that would be hard for record marketers to categorize but God bless him for picking through all of that and still managing to have an impact career and focus on 80's "New Wave".He was different, brilliant, talented and...strange. He and his artists/band did things no one else did back then - but you had to see it, be a part of to understand. Yes, I was a Nomi fan. I remember the "Saturday Night Live" appearance with David Bowie.By the time "Urgh - A Music War" came out, I thought that would have made him a household name --- and an entertainment star. I had no idea what happened to him, Now I do. A sad, tragic ending to something that seems to have gone rampid in the late 70's and 80's - overly wonderful, talented artists looking for love - and ending up in tragedy for the one thing that everyone should safely have.Told by the people who were around him and knew him best, this documentary on Klaus Nomi tells of a man with the highest castrato operatic voice to hit 'pop' and an artistry that was in the furthest corners of the imagination that made it to the club scenes of the early 80's. And let's be honest - it was all conceived in black and white in a very colorful world. A fiercely unapproachable man who could bake one minute and astound you the next. His vision, the songwriting of him and his other collaborators, we had 80's clubbing fun - and 80's tragedy.One of the better documentaries that captures the beginning of the 'New Wave' wave before MTV commercialism and the influx of non-talented folks and alleged female bands who could look great in front of a camera with studio folks starting them out and them learning to play later, here was the "real deal".A good history lesson in 80's music (and art) touching upon the back stabbers, the brink of success, the talented, the idealistic, the weird and bizarre, the hanger-ons, the work, the sacrifice, the seriously talented, and a cautionary tale as well.

Andrew Horn's 'Nomi Song' is not a 'film' as such, but rather an extended television documentary shot on videotape. The archive footage is a treat and includes unseen home video, rare performance footage and obscure TV appearances. It's fascinating to see videotape as the primary archive source in a documentary of this kind - so crude, so unstable, so immediate. The sourcing of this material is Andrew Horn's principle achievement.But 'Nomi Song' is crude in other less interesting ways - as though a few more days in the edit might have helped. The interviews are unimaginatively staged and shot and some of the junctions between scenes jar. The first hand accounts are illuminating, but sometimes petty and it would have been useful to hear some contemporary artists and more objective commentators weigh Klaus's achievement and influence to provide some perspective. That said, this the only Nomi documentary available and we should be grateful for it. If you're curious to know more about this wonderful artist, this is a good place to start...

Andrew Horn's The Nomi Song makes no bones about it - performance artist Klaus Nomi was a man of genius. The film is an unapologetic celebration of the mystique of Nomi, the weird brilliance of this late '70s/early '80s New York club phenomenon, who had a minor breakthrough after appearing with David Bowie on Saturday Night Live (he sold well in Europe anyway). If you have no idea who Nomi was then you're not alone; his appeal was purely a cultish one. Those who sing his praises in The Nomi Song - people who were doing lots of drugs in the days they're recounting, it must be pointed out - would have us believe that this was a man of such soaring talent, it would only have been a matter of time before he became famous world-wide. The evidence put forth by Horn - old home videos, some snippets from professionally made programs - would seem to suggest something else, however: a man who, in spite of his obvious talent (he was a trained opera singer, a tenor capable of achieving a haunting falsetto), was always too wrapped up in his own strange, stylized persona to ever really connect with the masses.The Nomi Song is the portrait of a man who reinvented himself, an exhibitionist who discovered an audience by nullifying every hint of his own personality, and presenting himself as a kind of performing robot. The real Klaus Nomi, we're told, was a sweet, gentle soul, a kid from Berlin who came to New York with dreams of being a star and wound up mopping floors; and the few glimpses we get of Nomi off-stage would seem to uphold this. The real Nomi, it appears, was nothing special, outside of the fact that he could sing (it was his misfortune that there wasn't much market for German tenors who could stretch to a falsetto soprano); the fake Klaus, invented by Klaus as a replacement for the one the world didn't much care for, was a man with a painted face who dressed like a gay Ming the Merciless and sang opera-tinged pop songs in New Wave clubs. People who witnessed Nomi's bizarre, Kabuki-like stage-act gush on and on about what an overwhelming experience it was, but what we see of Nomi, though certainly odd and interesting, fails to convey this feeling. Nothing, we're led to believe, could ever capture the true power of Nomi on-stage. What the film offers us is a tantalizing taste of something eyewitnesses swear was practically transcendent; it's like trying to appreciate the greatness of Robert Johnson by listening to some scratchy old records.Maybe Nomi was what the film insists he was - a great talent who, by the sad fact of his untimely demise not to mention some egregious mis-management, failed to achieve the stature he seemed destined for. I would tend to doubt it, but the movie makes its argument compellingly, and by placing Nomi in the context of his times, the fag-end of the Andy Warhol days and the beginning of the AIDS horror (Nomi died of the disease), conveys a poignant sense of a lost era, a fondly-remembered scene (the eyewitnesses are all middle-aged, conservative-seeming people; it's hard to imagine them decked out in pink hair and Star Trek get-ups). It finally doesn't matter if Nomi really was what The Nomi Song wants us to think he was (his music was simple-minded and mannered); it matters more that he existed, and embodies in people's minds a certain time and place (those who die young always come to represent the age they lived in; James Dean IS the '50s). The Nomi Song is as much a portrait of the world around Nomi as it is of Nomi, and that world, its strangeness, its lingering energy, is the thing worth remembering.

Klaus Nomi was certainly an interesting character. Possessing a unique look and a phenomenal voice, he seemed poised for a measure of stardom during the early 1980s. Alas, Nomi was to be one of the first people of note to be struck down by AIDS.This documentary does a very credible job of not only giving us a glimpse into Klaus Nomi, but also giving us a look into the world of the "New Wave" in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is replete with footage of Nomi in performance, showing off his truly bizarre look and his unbelievable singing voice (Nomi's performance of "The Cold Song," an arrangement of a piece by Henry Purcell, is one of the most beautifully haunting pieces of music I've ever heard).Andrew Horn does a very good job of interspersing interview footage and performance footage. He does, however, misstep in a couple of areas. The use of 1950s Sci-fi footage, used to augment Nomi's ruse of being from outer space, is overdone. Horn apparently feels the need to hammer this motif into the ground. More unusual is the use of paper mache cut-outs used to represent Nomi's aunt, seen as we hear her many comments throughout the film. It is a device as obscure in its intent as it is distracting and annoying in its effect.Overall, this is a good documentary with a pervasive sadness. We lost an amazing voice before it could be heard by the world. It is a well done portrait of a unique character, a colossal talent, and at heart, a lonely man with a sweet, sweet soul.