In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Ĭale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale - who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker - was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.” Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019. Reed’s all-round fractiousness - he once punched his hand through a glass door to get out of a gig on a river boat - gives the film its juice as far as Haynes' film is concerned, once he fires Cale it marks the beginning of the end.The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. It’s here that German guest vocalist Nico enters the picture - much to Reed’s annoyance - shines brightly, then leaves. When the action moves onto Andy Warhol and The Factory, Haynes really puts you in the room. The odd couple - Reed wanted to be a rock star Cale an experimentalist - came together in a Lower East Side loft (where else?), and Reed’s song-writing became informed with Cale’s improvisational genius, the music described as “the drone of Western civilisation”. Cale was raised in a Welsh mining village, wasn’t allowed to speak English until aged seven and was molested by Anglican priests. Reed came from a stultifying suburban background - suffering clinical depression as a child, undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (which his sister denies was to curb his homosexual tendencies) and developing degrading views of sex. Within the impressionistic approach, the biographical beats are clear, Haynes deep-diving into the different backgrounds of founding members Lou Reed and John Cale without baulking from the darkness. As much as the film is a portrait of a band, it also crystalises the whole ’60s scene: The Velvet Underground not only documents the period but also feels like it could have come from it. Taking his cue (and footage) from the avant-garde filmmakers of the ’60s, Haynes employs an almost ever-present use of split-screen - De Palma would be green with envy - juxtaposing interview material with adverts, newsreel, photographs and footage of the band made possible by the continuous presence of a camera documenting things at The Factory, Andy Warhol’s creative hothouse (the archival research is immense). Given Haynes’ experimental CV, the structure of The Velvet Underground cleaves surprisingly closely to rock-doc conventions (how they met, the success, the dis-banding). What it lacks in critical edge, it makes up for in imagination and a sense of the bigger picture. With many of the major players no longer with us, Haynes still creates an ambitious, immersive portrait of one of music’s most influential, maverick acts. Not only are Haynes’ music dramas Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There set in the same era as Lou Reed’s band operated in, but the filmmaker and group are united in sensibility: marginalised artists constantly pushing the envelope in challenging ways. Todd Haynes is perhaps the perfect filmmaker to document the short life and weird AF times of The Velvet Underground.
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