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| 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."
