![]() Its early line-up included the talented vocalist and guitarist Lou Reed, multi-instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison. Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention were, oddly enough, considered their major rivals. The Velvet Underground formed in New York in the mid-1960s. That didn’t happen once they were within Warhol’s orbit, but they never really took off, either. In an old interview, Reed recalls, pre-Velvet Underground, playing frat parties in college: “We were very bad, so we had to change our name a lot.” “She was a wanderer and eventually she just wandered off,” someone says. It didn’t matter much when she left, either. ![]() She couldn’t sing, but it didn’t really matter. There’s the “blonde iceberg” Nico, added when Warhol decided the band needed more sex appeal. We are treated to everything from concerts to insider footage of what it was like to hang out at the Factory. Directed with the era’s avant-garde spirit by Todd Haynes, this kaleidoscopic oral history combines exclusive interviews with dazzling archival footage. Geez, just thinking of how soon – and how completely – Warhol would displace those Kids in Campbell’s iconography takes your breath away.īut back to the Velvet Underground and Reed and surviving band members like John Cale and Maureen Tucker who, along with relatives, fans, and random celebs are among the faces that turn up in Haynes’ meticulous accumulation of archival evidence and recent interviews. The Velvet Underground DOCUMENTARY Experience the iconic rock band's legacy in the first major documentary to tell their story. Using the split-screen, multi-media approach that was briefly popular during the period (check out Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool” or the original version of “The Thomas Crown Affair”), Haynes immerses us in the fabric of the times.īut first, he shows us why the ‘60s were necessary (or maybe inevitable) by showing us the ‘50s with its lung-cancer-friendly commercials (“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!”) and quaint cartoon hucksters like the Campbell Soup Kids. Instead of a straightforward biopic, Haynes has given us a kind of collage – of the Velvet Underground, of the ‘60s and of Andy Warhol’s Factory where Reed and the guys were more or less the house band. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Todd Haynes, 'The Velvet Underground' shows just how the group became a cultural touchstone representing a range of contradictions: the band is both of their. You see why in the new documentary, 'The Velvet Underground.' Made by exactly the right filmmaker, Todd Haynes, this inventive, immersive movie takes you to the heart of the bands radical black. It left me with a real need to buy their records and buy something to play them on.A movie poster of “The Velvet Underground” A movie poster of “The Velvet Underground” Perhaps it’s the Spinal Tap factor, a reticence or self-consciousness about the potential absurdity of these private moments of drama.Īnd what about sex? The film is a little reticent here too, more about the underground than the velvet, and it leaves the issue of Reed’s own sexuality more or less untouched. Where perhaps it falls down is on the ordinary, gossipy sense of how exactly the band members could have fallen out so badly, and how painful that surely must have been. ![]() This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist. Then five long seconds of quiet, then an eruption as the crowd emerged, euphorically, from the spell. How great to see Jonathan Richman (a madeleine for my own record-buying past) talk about what would happen at a Velvet Underground gig at the end of a song: the crashing finality of silence for which no chord progression had prepared the audience. This was angry, confrontational, nerve-frazzling rock. But the Velvet Underground were not producing laidback hippy whale music: as drummer Moe Tucker points out, they hated hippies and (capriciously) hated Frank Zappa on that basis. Haynes gives a very good sense of what I can only call the transcendental quality of the Velvet Underground’s music, inspired as it initially was by the aesthetic of drones, sustained chords and chord variations, a sense that continuous immersion in the music will (at some stage) facilitate an epiphany that cannot be coerced or guaranteed. ![]() Haynes presents his movie in a more or less continuous split screen, juxtaposing a collage of thematically relevant found-object images, archival material about the band, and talking-head interviews with surviving band members and admirers or sometimes Warhol’s daringly static portrait-movie images of people like Reed who had to just stare into the camera lens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |