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."

Magellan (Magalhães)

 

Director Lav Diaz

director on the set

director with Sanny Joaquin and cinematographer Artur Tort

Diaz with assistant director Sanny Joaquin

Diaz with cast at Cannes

Gael García Bernal and Lav Diaz

Ferdinand Magellan at Naval Museum in Madrid

MAGELLAN (Magalhães)                 B                                                                         Philippines  Spain  Portugal  France  Taiwan  (163 mi)  2025  d: Lav Diaz

The promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.                                                                   —Indigenous natives first reaction to seeing a white man

Lav Diaz is a pioneering Filipino auteur who re-examines history through his films which challenge conventional narratives, known for his long films and contemplative style, making films of moral complexity, often delving into the themes of history, suffering, and the human condition, whose earlier four-hour film Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2014) was an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Writing and directing his own films, also sharing the cinematography and editing duties, while responsible for his own production design, most of his films are over five-hours in length, some of them pushing the nine and ten-hour mark, where six of his films are in the top 20 of the longest films of all time (List of longest films), offering an extensive exploration of the Filipino socio-political landscape through cinema, with Diaz indicating he is planning a nine-hour extended version of this film focusing more on the wife from about fifteen hours of footage shot but not used, releasing this more accessible shorter version under three hours for film festivals.  By retelling the tale of 16th century Age of Discovery explorer Ferdinand Magellan from a minimalist and modernist perspective, where he’s no swashbuckling hero of the seas, instead Diaz portrays him as radically antiheroic, depicting his voyage as a brutal, revisionist critique of colonialism, mythmaking, and religious zealotry driven by obsession, rejecting the typical “Great Man of History” narrative, conveying a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.  A meditation on the excesses of ambition and avarice, where we are forced to witness what colonialism looks like, with splashes of Native nudity, it’s a bit like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), with men developing a God-complex, versed in their own moral superiority, viewing themselves above the teeming throngs, continually downplaying the needs and interests of the Indigenous tribes who are simply not like them, and therefore don’t matter as much.  It’s a somber case study of colonialist expansion, where the rest of the world is seen only by how it can benefit the country of origin that financed the expedition, in this case Spain, as Portugal, the country of Magellan’s birth, turned down his original request, as Portugal already had a highly profitable eastern seaward trade route to the Spice Islands via Africa, making a costly, highly speculative new western route unnecessary.  

Working in color for the first time in a decade, making his first film not in the Tagalog language, primarily using Spanish and Portuguese, with the director sharing cinematography and editing duties with Artur Tort, the regular cameraman for Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, who is a producer on this film, screening in the Cannes Premiere section, yet in some ways it resembles Lisandro Alonso’s period film Jauja (2014) or Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) in its historical reach, while also treading on the same expansive territory as Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).  The difference is there’s absolutely no interiority of Magellan, or anyone else for that matter, though this is more restrained and nuanced from his other films, as Magellan’s quest turns into an obsession with power, leading to men questioning his leadership, where there’s a lot of inflicted cruelty both towards his own men, some of whom openly mutiny and are left behind in some God forsaken place in Argentina’s Patagonia, yet also towards the natives he meets in this “new world” of the Philippines.  Despite his meticulous planning, Magellan is unprepared for the difficulties he encounters attempting to pass the Strait of Magellan in the southernmost tip of South America, taking over a month, much longer than expected, with one mutinied ship returning to Spain, while another was lost at sea on an exploring expedition, yet even afterwards, setting sail into the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he is shocked that it takes months, not days, without encountering food, leaving many men dying of malnourishment or sick with scurvy en route, where his fleet of five ships is whittled down to just a single ship.  Like most Europeans at the time, however, Magellan thought Asia was much closer to South America than it actually is.  Far from the courageous explorer depicted in the history books, according to Diaz, who spoke at the Cannes screening, “Magellan is no hero—he is a man facing his own oblivion.”  There’s a lot of screaming to the high heavens, and praying to the spirits for divine intervene, yet also an autocratic ruthlessness rarely seen in depictions of epic explorations, where brutal punishment and death go hand in hand with hunger and starvation.  Yet most of all, it’s a depiction of supreme arrogance that leads to a massive sea of deaths, which mirrors the rampant corruption and presumptive superiority of the current Trump administration, but also authoritarian Filipino leaders Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial for war crimes), belittling others and downplaying the influence of anyone who does not comply with their directives or disagrees with their actions of enriching themselves, reviving the imperialist spirit of colonialism in the modern era.

The story is told in three sections, with the dates imprinted on the lower left side of the screen, the first is set in Malacca, Malaysia in 1511, commonly known as the Spice Islands, where Magellan (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the first international star Diaz has ever worked with), under someone else’s command, Afonso de Albuquerque (Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Alan Koza), participates in the capture of Malacca, leaving him wounded and injured in the leg, eventually limping from the onset of gangrene, yet they are victorious, with bloodied bodies seen strewn across the landscape, acquiring a Malay slave named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who is initially seen caged but becomes his own personal interpreter.  Little more than a footnote in history, Enrique is often omitted entirely, but in some ways he is the true protagonist of the film, patiently getting his revenge in obtaining his freedom, a near silent observer who has the last and final words of the film.  The second follows his recovery in Portugal where he has a controversial falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration and grew furious when he aligned himself with King Charles V of Spain, taking an oath of allegiance, which was paramount to treason in Portugal, as the two countries were arch rivals who were not only competing for dominance in the spice industry, but also for influence in colonies around the world.  It’s here that he takes a wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who grows pregnant before his departure in 1519, and is seen as an angelic counterpart to his ruthless ambition, Magellan new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 (1/3) YouTube (1:45), surrealistically appearing in his dreams during the long voyage.  The proposed longer version supposedly revolves around Beatriz, where virtually nothing is known about her.  Once he sets sail, his 265 men all-Portuguese crew is mostly comprised of criminals, because many experienced sailors refused to support Magellan, unraveling in a long, slow section where time appears to stop, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (50 seconds), losing all that initial eager anticipation of what they may encounter, where the prolonged voyage severely weakens the crew, becoming a test of hunger and allegiance, exposing questions of loyalty, where Magellan’s behavior is markedly different than when they began, as he started treating his officers in a cruel way, growing very angry and indignant that some of them mutinied, forcing one to behead the other, subjecting men to lashes while executing crew members who engaged in homosexuality, according to a journal kept by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian navigator whom Magellan hired to keep detailed documents of the voyage.  Diaz apparently spent seven years researching Magellan, aided by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo, using a replicated reconstruction of the actual ship Victoria, historically accurate costumes, with no battle scenes, only the devastating aftermath is shown, and no actual violence other than what he forces his own sailors to endure on the ship, ultimately shifting the focus from the European perspective to that of the Indigenous tribes, becoming a revisionist work that goes against the grain of conventional historical accounts, much of which is little more than victorious mythmaking.

The third section shows Magellan arriving in the Philippines in 1521, a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce, comprised of more than 7000 islands, though fewer than 2000 are inhabited, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (1:32), which they thought to be the Spice Islands, but they didn’t find any spices, discovering instead a developed society, one not at all isolated from the outside world, possessing a written language, and already having some knowledge of Europeans through traders.  They are met by local leader Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), with Magellan offering sweet jam to his sick son, who may have been suffering from scurvy, while also presenting him with a statuette of Santo Niño to watch over him.  When the boy recovers, many attribute his miraculous recovery to God, quickly converting the island to Catholicism and baptizing the inhabitants, but in their zealous rush for complete domination, they destroy all remnants of the local anitos, viewing them as sacrilegious idolatry figures, an act that emboldens resistance, as their island way of life is being destroyed.  With obsessive delusions of grandeur and undisputed power, most of the tribes capitulate, but there are holdouts, with Humabon leading Magellan into the wrath of one of his foes, another chief named Lapu-Lapu who refuses to convert, instead mobilizing his forces against the foreign leader, with Magellan profoundly underestimating the strength of the natives, believing superior European weaponry would scare off the “barbarian” forces, but due to shallow waters, his ships remained at too great a distance to inflict harm, so he takes a small landing party of only about 60 half-armed men, burning the grass homes, which only helps mobilize the resistance, where the overwhelming counterattack by 2000 natives wipes out the European forces in what amounts to a massacre, killing Magellan on the spot, like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, leaving no survivors, turning tragically dark and morbid, a fate surprisingly narrated by Enrique, conveyed through an ultra-realistic approach to colonial violence.  The dead bodies on the beach paint a dire picture of human slaughter, with the remaining 18 men on the ship, one of whom is Enrique, quickly making a hasty exit and returning to Spain, becoming the only ship to completely circumnavigate the globe.  In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is a celebrated national hero for having withstood the initial European invasion, remaining a mythic cultural figure that remains embedded in the national consciousness, even warranting a national holiday, but Diaz subverts this image with provocative suggestions that Humabon, in an attempt to overcome his rival, may have invented Lapu-Lapu, who is never seen, and may not have ever existed in human form, cleverly planted in the mind’s eye as a myth to deceive Magellan and his men, which then leads to their downfall in an ambush, using the power of mythmaking as a political weapon.  Questioning whose version of history gets remembered, Diaz suggests history is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.