The speakers, as standard talking heads, are only sparingly shown as they appear now. (Doug Yule, who replaced Cale in the lineup and is still living today, is also present solely through audio recordings.) But Haynes - utilizing split screens and montage sequences composed of clips from avant-garde films and other archival materials produced contemporaneously to the Velvets - rarely shows us anything or lets a statement made by a subject stand to be taken as a straightforward fact. Deceased members, including Reed, Sterling Morrison, and Nico, are conjured through archival recordings. Presented largely as an oral history told by those who were present during the band’s brief but explosive existence, most of the information comes to us through interviews with the still living members of the band, John Cale and Maureen Tucker, and various contemporaries and collaborators. As mentioned, the film is primarily biographical, but the most important aspect of the experience is how Haynes arranges the information. A great deal of what made up The Velvet Underground’s particular mystique came from their association with Warhol. Put another way, The Velvet Underground charts the creation of a mystique - that most important and ineffable factor that is so central to the greatest rock ’n’ roll bands. His means of exploring this is what makes the film so singular. But Haynes is most interested in how these particular minds came together at such a particular time and place to create music that would, without exaggeration, change the course of popular music. You will hear all about Lou Reed’s turbulent adolescence, the band’s relationship with manager Andy Warhol and the Factory, and various road stories, notably from their trip to Los Angeles where they didn’t fit in with the peace and love crowd. Anyone looking for an introduction to The Velvet Underground are certainly in the right place. The Velvet Underground, his first traditional documentary, is not operating in completely unfamiliar territory - it guides us through a thoroughly detailed telling of the life of the Velvets with the aid of interviews and a series of textual epilogue cards relating what happened after the band broke up. In Haynes’ two other narrative films about musicians - his David Bowie-inspired Velvet Goldmine(1998) and the kaleidoscopic Bob Dylan epic I’m Not There (2007) - he replicates retro media coverage of rock stars from the 1960s and ’70s and mimics the style of vérité documentaries like D.A. There are no producers at mixing boards saying “and this is how we made the guitars go skroooonkkkk!” These omissions are unsurprising though, as Haynes has been poking fun at these types of tropes since his breakthrough film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988), in which he himself plays one of those fawning young critics. There are no contemporary music critics stating the obvious of the band’s continued relevance. It avoids the boring habits of most rock docs. So when making a film about The Velvet Underground, a band that was so short lived and chameleon-like, the biggest challenge for a filmmaker is finding a way to tell the whole story without evaporating the mystery and the danger that lives on in the music.Ī large part of The Velvet Underground’s success lies in what it leaves out. Then came the more gentle acoustic songs and the eventual turn to radio-friendly pop before chief songwriter Lou Reed called it quits in 1970. (It only took The Beatles two years to go from performing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on Ed Sullivan to dropping acid and chanting verses inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead in “Tomorrow Never Knows.”) But the Velvets were writing songs about hard drugs and sadomasochism right out of the gate around 1965 and performing them as extended, droning, feedback-heavy jams well before the release of their 1967 debut record. Looking at their career today, it is just as challenging to answer the question Lester Bangs posed in his review of the band’s 1969 self-titled album: “How do you define a group… who moved from ‘Heroin’ to ‘Jesus’ in two short-years?” The 1960s were certainly an era of quick changes in culture. It is everything you could hope for in a film about a band that remains so mysterious half a century after their breakup. Unlike most music documentaries and band-sanctioned biopics made these days, Todd Haynes’ brilliant exploration of the Velvet Underground is far more than a conventional biography. Haynes’ first documentary creates a vivid and challenging portrait of a band that remains mysterious half a century after their breakup
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