The Velvet Underground

 

Director Todd Haynes

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND               A                                                                       USA  (121 mi)  2021  d: Todd Haynes

Music fathoms the sky.                                                                                                                  —Baudelaire

Not sure there’s ever been a movie that exposes the deep rift between the East coast and West coast better than this, as The Velvet Underground are essentially a New York City band, rising out of that distinct cultural vibe that simply wasn’t happening anywhere else, as it was an eclectic mix of early 60’s avant-garde/experimental music, Andy Warhol’s Factory, the East Village bohemian literary scene, and underground cinema subcultures that spawned The Velvet Underground, a subversive rock group that was way ahead of its time, where even today they are largely misunderstood, one of the most mythologized bands of their generation, or maybe ever, as their roots are so unique.  Todd Haynes understands this and what’s shown onscreen captures the birth of the band, the unique personalities and artistic attributes they each bring, where they are simply not like anything else, which is exactly what was said about them in the beginning, with Haynes telling the story of this band through the experimental cinema of the 60’s from which they emerged.  What also makes this film so unique is just how hard it is to see it, as it doesn’t play in any ordinary venues, and you have to have very specific streaming platforms to watch it.   It’s literally been five years since it was initially released, but that day has finally come, and this film is nothing less than extraordinary, the only documentary Haynes has ever made, and it may be the best thing he has ever created, perhaps the film he was always destined to make, infused with his own formative aesthetic, hypnotic, reverently artistic, exquisitely detailed, and informative, filling in all the unknowns about a completely unorthodox music group, yet not in any conventional sense, as there’s nothing remotely mainstream about it, taking you down obscure and untold paths through sensory overload, highlighting the source of why this music, and the artists who create it, are so ingeniously creative, producing a richly layered love letter to the band.  We may have seen or experienced many of the songs or these personalities before, but not from this documentary perspective, from the people who were there and knew them, and were blown away by them, literally taking us back to that specific time and place, with Haynes choosing rare versions that didn’t get a lot of airplay, much like the previously unreleased versions chosen for Bob Dylan’s Biograph compilation, as this gets to the heart of who they really were, taking their name from a 1963 paperback book on aberrant sexual behavior by journalist Michael Leigh, The Velvet Underground (book).  The superstar artistic range of Warhol the artist and filmmaker, and such diverse musicians as Lou Reed, a quintessentially New York artist, and John Cale, who connected the realms of cutting-edge experimentalism and pop immediacy, each bringing their own unique style and vision, which is what separates this group from everyone else, as they are simply a cultural phenomenon.  According to avant-garde poet and underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas, to whom the film is dedicated, “We are not part of the subculture or counterculture.  We are the culture.”

With their connection to the epicenter of New York’s avant-garde art and cinema scene, specifically Andy Warhol’s Factory and minimalist composer La Monte Young’s Dream Syndicate, it would be impossible to examine this film without an eye to the visual, as Haynes creates visual collages featuring the works of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith, using a split screen throughout much of the film, juxtaposing new and archival interviews with film excerpts and examples of visual art.  The extensive credits at the end of the film reveal just how much archival material was drawn from to make this film, including a treasure trove from the Andy Warhol Museum, recognized as the most prominent artist of the entire Pop art era, exploring a mix of mediums, including film, audio and video.  The only other film that comes close to this is the Laura Poitras film 2023 Top Ten List #2 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), revealing a similar East coast bohemian vibe in the 60’s and 70’s, while it’s extremely important to acknowledge the significance of Warhol’s own influential films, invoking the split screen image from Chelsea Girls (1966), which was made at the same time, a period when he stopped painting and began collaborating with this new musical group.  While they are icons of the music world today, The Velvet Underground were extremely “unpopular” at the time, where their constant repetition and abrasive, industrial-like atonal sounds left audiences in visible discomfort and confusion, with a droning electric viola and lyrics that focused on drugs, prostitution, S & M, and other gritty topics that were cutting edge controversial at the time, which would inevitably get them banned from the airwaves, making them the exact opposite of the peace and love hippie flower power movement that was all the rage on the West coast, as rudeness, not sanguine smiles, was simply a way of life on the mean streets of New York City.  Defined by avant-garde or experimental rock, Warhol did several screen tests of German model and actress Nico (Christa Pӓffgen), who became a mysteriously beguiling feminine counterbalance as their singer, while clips from EMPIRE (1964) and VINYL (1965) would be blown up to play as a backdrop behind the performers, featuring various dancers from the Factory (like Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga) along with a multi-screen film projection and elaborate light shows known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which eventually became associated with live rock shows of the era, used regularly by Bay area rock promoter Bill Graham, who actually despised the group for bringing their obnoxious East coast pretensions to his sacred grounds, telling the band before they walked onstage, “I hope you fuckers bomb.”  The funniest moment comes when the group heads to play in Los Angeles in 1966, where they are greeted by the sounds of The Mama’s and Papa’s singing Monday, Monday (Single Version) YouTube (3:28), where their dark transgressive selves couldn’t have been more out of step with all that bright Southern California sunshine.    

Haynes has long been interested in music, both on its own terms and in its connection to popular culture, as his first film, SUPERSTAR: THE KAREN CARPENTER STORY (1987), tells the saga of Carpenter’s life using her music as a soundtrack and Barbie dolls as actors.  A similar focus shaped VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I’M NOT THERE (2007), which centers around glam rock and Bob Dylan, respectively, as Haynes brings this same understanding of music as a cultural prototype to this film, discovering there was almost no live concert footage, so instead the focus is on the extraordinarily creative minds behind this ultimate collision of rock ‘n’ roll and the art world.  Haynes highlights the band’s ability to seamlessly blend literary ambition, classical-experimental elements (thanks to John Cale), and street-level rock ‘n’ roll (led by Lou Reed).  Speaking from his own sensibility as a queer artist, Haynes explores how the band’s embrace of alienation, discomfort, and queer themes offered strength to those who felt marginalized, perfectly capturing the ultimate in outsiderism, revealing that Reed was administered shock therapy by his parents as a teenager to drive his gay and/or anti-social inclinations out of him.  Their original lineup consisted of singer, songwriter, and guitarist Lou Reed, who had a fascinating way of improvising lyrics onstage, Welsh multi-instrumentalist John Cale on bass, viola, and keyboards, guitarist Sterling Morrison, the only one who never made solo recordings, and female drummer Maureen “Moe” Tucker, who started playing drums after hearing The Rolling Stones Not Fade Away (Mono Version) YouTube (1:47) on the radio, each introduced by their Factory Screen Tests, with Cale describing the band's creative ethos: “how to be elegant and how to be brutal.”  In 1966, Pop artist Andy Warhol became their official manager, adding Nico as a singer, who added a softer, more feminine touch, a stark contrast to their black-dressed, leather-clad entourage, with the group serving as the house band at Warhol’s Factory, becoming a traveling multimedia show in 1966 and 1967.  Their first album opened to poor sales and relative indifference, where the Warhol banana cover art was what was talked about (a decal that could be peeled back), not the music, though it has since been regarded as one of the greatest albums in music history.  As fate would have it, four of the five principles have died before the making of this film, leaving only John Cale as the band’s spokesperson, which he does eloquently, offering needed objectivity and insider knowledge, where the film opens to the screeching electric sounds of his isolated viola from a song about heroin, The Velvet Underground-Heroin YouTube (7:02), where nothing before that had ever sounded so raw and crude, so alien and abrasive.  According to an IndieWire Review, “Warhol said that he liked the Velvets because they sounded the way his movies looked, and now Haynes has made a documentary that looks the way the Velvets sounded.”

The definitive film about The Velvet Underground, a band that never particularly cared about their fans or their legacy, who blazed a brief trail in the Zeitgeist before flaming out, burning with an intensity that could simply not be sustained, filmed on 16mm, 8mm, and digital by Edward Lachman, while edited by Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz, with a major assist from archival consultant Steven Bozga, unparalleled artists in their own right, this sensory kaleidoscope is just experimental enough to capture the raw artistic energy that defined the era and their music, as represented by one of their more radically subversive songs, "Venus in Furs" - The Velvet Underground (Live Exploding ... YouTube (5:11), with audiences subjected to guerrilla-type assaults from an explosive light show.  Presenting new or difficult to access materials, one of the most incisive voices heard is that of film critic Amy Taubin, who was there at Warhol’s Factory and witnessed the effect he and his films had on the Velvets, expressing her view, “Warhol, avant-garde film, and avant-garde music—it was all about extended time.”  We hear from a teenage obsessed superfan, Jonathan Richman, singer/songwriter and frontman for the Modern Lovers, a devoted fixture of their shows who reportedly saw something like 70 performances, recalling the impact of witnessing Sister Ray (Live In New York City/1967) YouTube (19:02) as if it just happened yesterday, poet and mentor Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed’s sister, his high school and college friends, even a college girlfriend (indicating they would frequent gay bars), whose observations are essential in the evolution of the band, which began with Reed and Cale fronting The Primitives, with his sister showing how to dance to their hit The Primitives - "The Ostrich" YouTube (2:38), which is pure silliness.  A few other unusual voices chime in, with just a single photograph of Reed and Laurie Anderson that speaks for itself, offering a constantly shifting pattern of viewpoints, which only adds to the viewing pleasure, as Haynes really captures the essence of the band and why they still matter today.  Quite in contrast to the infamous documentaries on Woodstock and Monterey Pop, Andy Warhol’s Factory scene felt nothing but sneering contempt for the utopian hippie crazes that were sweeping the nation by way of Northern California at the time.  John Cale, who co-founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, referred to the free love camp as “scruffy, dirty people.”  It is important to note that in performance with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, much of the Velvet Underground’s set consisted of long, dissonant, feedback-heavy improvisations (often erroneously described in reviews as tuning up) much different from the songs heard on the released albums, where these improvisations often took up more than half of an evening's performance.  For what it’s worth, very few, if any films capture the spirit of the 60’s better than this film, leaving us with The Velvet Underground & Nico - All Tomorrow's Parties YouTube (5:52), which was Andy Warhol's favorite by The Velvets, perhaps best described as "avant-garde in the extreme."

Lion's Love

 

Director Agnès Varda

LION’S LOVE          B-                                                                                                              aka:  Lion’s Love (…and Lies)                                                                                                        France  USA  (112 mi)  1969  d: Agnès Varda

Actors are like lions.  Indeed, they used to be called lions.                                                      —Agnès Varda, Agnès Varda: Interviews | T. Jefferson Kline | download, edited by T. Jefferson Kline (272 pages), 2014

From a small sample of Varda’s California films, arguably the weirdest film in the Varda repertoire, this is a dated film that doesn’t hold up well over time, where the promoted idealism was passé in the span of a decade, already recycled into new ideas and concepts, yet it is a paean to a golden era referenced in song, “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” Hair the Musical - The Age of Aquarius at West End LIVE ... YouTube (2:55).  Using a bunch of transplants from the East coast art scene, Varda creates a time capsule for the 60’s American counterculture when Vietnam and Civil Rights protests dominated the headlines, while taking the country by storm was the anthem-like rock musical Hair, with Varda using the two original Broadway stars in this movie, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who created the music and starred in the original production, while also adding Viva from Andy Warhol’s staple of underground performers.  The 60’s was the era when Andy Warhol became a pop art superstar, creating an environment for free-spirited artists in his New York Factory, making underground films where dozens of Warhol superstars improvised in front of cameras, usually on drugs and often unclothed, where the prominence of nudity was pushing the envelope of social acceptability, usually playing in tiny underground theaters that could barely pass the health codes.  Additionally, there were regular appearances of The Living Theatre, the oldest experimental theatrical group in the country, where their claim to fame was touring college campuses around the country creating scandalous appearances, as inevitably the show would end with all the performers stripping naked, asking audience members to join in, and then they’d march out the theater spilling out into the streets where they would immediately get arrested.  It would be hard to fathom that kind of lewd activity occurring today, but in the late 60’s when this film was made, it would have been hard to miss.  Equally representative of the era was a decade of political assassinations, first with President Kennedy in November, 1963, Malcolm X in February 1965, Martin Luther King in April 1968, and then two months later Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles during his political run for President in June 1968, the same week this film was being shot and in the same town.  Varda was in Los Angeles when her husband Jacques Demy was invited to Hollywood to make MODEL SHOP (1969), an often misunderstood and underappreciated film, with Varda incorporating newsreel footage into this film, where politicans are viewed as particularly wealthy and well-versed actors, who come and go in the nation’s conscience like movie stars from a distant era that fade from memory, recusitated each time we see them again onscreen, gaining resonance with each new generation, as the characters sit around and watch the political tragedy unfold on television, a medium that dominates American life, holding them all transfixed for a brief moment in time.  Like many of Varda’s films, it’s a work about different things all strung together, combining the transience of Hollywood and politics through an intersection of mixed mediums, like surrealist painting, portrait photography, avant-garde theater, experimental film, and television, combining audio and visual, even introducing a few songs, given a Godardian twist for good measure, offering elements of contradictions, exploring what Varda describes as themes of historical truth and lies (television) along with collective mythomania and truth (Hollywood).  The icing on the cake, perhaps, is the presence of independent film director Shirley Clarke making a brief visit to Los Angeles, serving as a stand-in for the director, finding it difficult to raise funds for a new film, “I’m supposed to be making a movie using movie stars as real people,” but it comes with restrictions on the final cut, with the studio insisting upon retaining their rights to make changes, a compromise she’s not willing to make, as she insists on making her own films.  The story was actually a proposed Varda film about American hippies entitled PEACE AND LOVE which was never made, with Varda claiming it might have been easier if she’d compromised, but she would have lost her autonomy and the films would have looked nothing like her own.  “I didn’t have a career,” she reflected recently in an interview, “I made films.  It’s very different.” 

The film takes place in a rented villa in the Hollywood Hills, a very loosely structured film with Viva in a ménage à trois with her two boyfriends offering a reverie on sexual relationships, viewing themselves as the Holy Trinity, each loving the other two in an attempt to expand and redefine the terms of a relationship.  Blending documentary with fiction, the film opens and closes with bits and pieces of Michael McClure’s avant-garde play The Beard, The Beard by Michael McClure - Warholstars (Jim Morrison can be seen in the audience), an imagined fictional confrontation between Jean Harlow (Billie Dixon) and Billy the Kid (Richard Bright) that was viewed at the time as lewdly obscene, with the police bringing obscenity charges that were later dropped, but the playwright and the actors went to jail, while the subject matter generated demonstrations outside the theater by conservatives, and the Los Angeles theater was ultimately burned to the ground.  What’s shown, however, leaves out the crude sexual language and is completely harmless, more of a battle of the sexes, an exaggerated farce veering into a misogynist melodrama.  The use of dolls and puppets mysteriously given voice lead to our human threesome who engage in lighthearted banter throughout the entire movie, all of which feels improvised, so if there was a script it is only a scant outline.  Even Varda intrudes into her own picture, seen behind the camera at one point, referred to directly by Viva, calling her by her first name, heard again in the final scene, even making two brief appearances in front of the camera.  Broken down into equal thirds, the film accentuates a dizzying absurdity to their Southern California lifestyle that borders on comical, with Dr. Pepper the cure for all their ills, yet nearly every attempt at cleverness or originality falls flat on its face, as they each demand to be the center of attention, literally spilling all over themselves to be seen by the camera, mostly behaving like uncontrolled little children, which turns especially detestable when they actually bring in children, stuffing them with candy and sweets and soda, where their permissiveness is pretty sickening, as their full-fledged narcissism couldn’t be more obnoxiously offensive, yet perfectly represents the pot-consuming vacuous airhead culture of Los Angeles, dressed up in a bohemian flair, but feels utterly tiresome, seemingly going nowhere, drudging up empty banalities.  The introduction of Robert Kennedy giving a stirring victory speech the week he won the California Presidential primary, his most significant primary victory, combining progressive anti-war politics with a burgeoning youth movement, boldly awakens the film to a different reality, offering the significance of political promise and its quick demise, as an entire movement was lost with the June 5th assassination of Robert Kennedy.  He provided aspiration and garnered great hope that the Presidential campaign could be re-energized with new ideals and values that were altogether missing from the campaign.  Those dreams died with his abrupt death, offering pictures of yet another televised Kennedy funeral where the stoic family once again shows extraordinary strength and grace, with kind words of condolence offered by Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King.  And finally the film offers a nostalgic history lesson of Hollywood, as narrated by Carlos Clarens, a Cuban film historian who takes us through a magical mystery tour of Hollywood, at its birth “an orange grove with breakfast served by the Ritz,” where streets have the name of former movie stars in a town where actors used to be called lions, even an unseen chorus chimes in out of nowhere, viewed through the lens of the Larry Edmunds Bookshop, Book Store | Larry Edmunds Bookshop | United States, which serves as the epicenter for classic movie history in the absence of an existing Hollywood museum, located midway between Hollywood/Vine and Grauman’s Chinese Theater (renamed TCL Chinese Theater), not far from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with a brief cameo by Peter Bogdanovich holding up his own book on John Ford to hide his face.     

From the maker of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1962), made a year earlier than Antonioni’s infamous Zabriskie Point (1970) that showed the radicalization of America, both are European comments on the American youth movement, where even the magazine covers bear a strange resemblance, with Antonioni’s stars gracing the cover of Look magazine while Varda’s appear naked on the first issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine.  The film is basically a series of impressions that are amusingly self-indulgent, combining early elements of the French New Wave with the evolving Underground movement in America, but is short on substance, with suggestions that too much freedom can be just plain irritating, where one character (James Rado) bleakly utters, “There are no messages, only mistakes.”  A recurring theme in the household is waking up in the morning, as they have no shades or blinds, so they cover the window each night with a brightly colored cloth that allows a filtered sunlight to seep through, but someone inevitably rips the cloth down, where an overwhelming burst of sunlight overtakes them in short order, which may be a metaphor for too much light, where their habitual indolence of never leaving the house leads to an all-consuming decadence, hardly the cultural trendsetters they aspire to be.  They frolic in an outdoor pool, with Viva laying naked atop a raft while the two men flirtatiously compete with each other to gain her attention.  It’s mostly silliness, though when the histrionic Viva gets going it’s hard to get a word in edgewise, where they actually have to yell at her to shut up at one point, where their theatrics can be a bit overwhelming, spiraling into anarchy and chaos.  Similarly, when the three of them read The Confessions of Thomas Aquinas, an early autobiographical appeal to convert to Christianity, they literally speak over one another, creating confusion, where all content is lost.  The presence of Shirley Clarke shifts from a stand-in for the director to a fictionalized portrayal, where Varda asks her to portray a director taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a suicide attempt, which she initially refuses to do, forcing Varda herself in front of the camera, but Clarke finally agrees to do the scene, creating a montage of the paramedics coming to rush her to the hospital (where she quickly recovers), coinciding with the June 6th early morning death of Robert Kennedy and a June 3rd assassination attempt on the life of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas, an unstable member of the Warhol fringe (reports have Viva on the phone with Warhol while having her hair done at the time of the shooting), and after two months in a hospital Warhol recovered from a gunshot wound, but his health deteriorated significantly after that, turning him into an overly frail recluse, dying 19 years later.  The promise of freedom in the hippie peace and love movement just a year or so earlier was undermined and eradicated by America’s right-wing gun violence that simply eliminated the most potent American voices of the left.  The whimsical opening is met by a theme of tragedy and violence, followed by what is arguably the most coherently entertaining aspect of the film, delving into the history of Hollywood with a joyous panache, filled with plenty of Varda color and spectacle, making it her own take on the city she is only temporarily visiting, uniquely blending the mythologies of Hollywood with the American counterculture, ending on Viva in an extended shot that amounts to a Warhol screen test, where even a perplexed Eddie Constantine makes a cameo appearance.  This whole thing is tediously overlong and so frickin’ crazy that it has an endearing quality about it.  There’s a Brechtian aspect of theatrical artificiality, where the German playwright Bertolt Brecht had his own dealings with Hollywood, with well over 200 movie and television writing credits to his name, including THE THREEPENNY OPERA (1931), but his apt description for the industry was a “marketplace of lies.”  When asked to describe what this film is all about, she offers (Agnès Varda: Interviews | T. Jefferson Kline | download), “I could give you twenty different answers that would all be more or less true and more or less limited.  I wanted my film to express two great currents in America:  sex and politics.  The film, which I’d prefer to call a collage, is about:  nostalgia for the stars of yesteryear and, as I’ve already said, the political stars; my attempt to make a film in Hollywood; a certain mysticism, the mysticism of the hippies; Hollywood, the magical city with its typical streets, enormous boulevards and enormous studios; the end of youth since the characters are too old to be hippies, too young to be adults; and contradictions—between political events and private life.”