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The Velvet Underground were so underground and, with tracks
like “Heroin,” so commercially toxic, that little classic performance footage
or even promotional footage exists. Director Todd Haynes turns this lack of
conventional material into the strongest suit of his documentary about the
band.
It has talking head interviews (including of surviving
members John Cale and Maureen Tucker). It tells a narrative story and draws
from primary footage, but in every other way The Velvet Underground is
as unconventional as you’d wish.
Haynes is as interested in The Velvet Underground’s
avant-garde roots in music, art and film as he is in the trajectory of the
band’s cult following. Indeed, we don’t hear a Velvet Underground track until
about 45 minutes in, and even then most of the familiar tracks like “Venus in
Furs” and “I’m Waiting for the Man” are introduced from left field.
“I felt that by doing all of that, you would ideally hear
the music in a new and fresh way — which is always the challenge with a band
whose music is by now, at least within certain circles, so well incorporated in
the culture,” Haynes told Slate during the New York Film Festival.
“The idea was to put you in a trance with the more
experimental and avant-garde kinds of music that John Cale in particular was
focusing on. We also used stems from the Velvets’ songs, without the vocals,
without certain key components of the music, to kind of lure you into it,
seducing the viewer into thinking that the core underpinnings of these songs
were in the air before they were formed.”
This is Haynes’ first documentary but he’s made fictions
infused with the legends of glam rock and David Bowie (Velvet Goldmine, 1998),
and Bob Dylan (I’m Not There, 2007). In 1988, Haynes released his short
biographical film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which portrays the
last 17 years of the singer’s life as she struggled with anorexia, and uses
Barbie dolls as actors. Withdrawn from circulation in 1990 following a lawsuit
for copyright infringement for the film’s unauthorized soundtrack, Superstar gained
a huge cult following and changed the very definition of a biographical film.
For The Velvet Underground, Haynes mined the archives
of still images by major photographers, some of whom, like the teenage Stephen
Shore, came out of Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York City. Indeed, the only
real footage of this band was by Warhol, arguably the most influential artist
of the 20th century.
“All this started in late 1965, about two years after Warhol
committed himself to film. So, we didn’t have normal concert footage or tour
stuff,” Haynes said. “We only had Lou Reed’s recorded interviews on radio and
on film, and he doesn’t talk a great deal about the band. So we had to
construct this whole preamble to the birth of The Velvet Underground without
him and do it in a way that is compelling. [Plus] we only wanted people in the
film who were there at that time.”
He includes Warhol’s movies, as well as experimental films
from Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Shirley Clarke, Jack Smith,
Tony Conrad, Marie Menken, Barbara Rubin, and many more.
“This was not ornamental. This was completely intrinsic to
the story of how these people met up, who they hung out with, the kind of work
they were doing and how they really were the house band for Cinematheque
screenings, before they were even called The Velvet Underground,” Haynes
explained. “The music becomes visualized. And the culture becomes visualized.
Not in a literal, illustrative way, but really the bloodstream of the culture
we were trying to show through the films.”
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz cut the movie.
When Gonçalves and Haynes detoured to make Dark Waters (2019), it was
Kurnitz who created the assembly briefed by Haynes to include things like
playing Warhol’s screen tests of Reed and Cale in their full
duration, and using a diptych and multiple screens as an embrace of the way
Warhol and other filmmakers of the time re-envisioned projected, time-based
images.
“When we saw his cut of the first third of the film, we were
blown away because it was so compelling, both visually and conceptually,”
Haynes said.
The director’s interview with film critic Amy Taubin
for ArtForum is most enlightening. That’s because Taubin was there at
the time of The Velvet Underground’s promotion at Warhol’s Factory. Warhol even
shot screen tests of Taubin which are included in a “chapter” of Couch (1964).
She points out that Cale is a great narrator for the first
half of the film, until the point in the story, in 1968, where Reed forces him
out of the band. “Then he pretty much disappears, and I feel the loss of him,”
she says.
Haynes replies, “There’s just no way to balance out or
supplement the lack of Lou Reed (who died in 2013). I felt I could only take
the testimony of the living and decide what and what not to use. There’s no
direct relationship of subject to result. It’s a constant negotiation of
information. John wanted to do a thorough and thoughtful job and took it so
seriously, even though it’s a story that he’s given many times over the years.”
The film is also specifically about the avant-garde world in
New York City at that moment in time. Not only were Reed’s lyrics “antithetical
to the enforced optimism of so much of the counterculture at the time,” as
Haynes says, but there was a cultural chasm between NYC and the West Coast.
The irritation with the flower-power of LA’s hippies holds
no truck with Tucker today either.
“This love/peace crap, we hated that, get real,” the
77-year-old says in the documentary. “Free love, everybody’s wonderful and
everybody loves everybody, aren’t I wonderful? You cannot change minds by
handing flowers to some bozo who wants to shoot you.”
For good measure, Factory actress Mary Woronov adds, “We
hated hippies. You know, flower power, burning bras, what the fuck is wrong
with you? We become anti a lot of things that other people aren’t anti.”
The Velvet Underground is currently streaming on Apple
TV+.
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