![]() There’s little fresh light cast on the band dynamics. And you’ll know of the dismal sales, disastrous tours and bitter feuds that followed four of the greatest albums ever made. Mary Woronov and Amy Taubin are on hand to recall the early days of the Factory (there’s some marvellous footage of a wacked-out superstar tarot reading) and Warhol’s ambition to make the Velvets, now incorporating the lunar glamour of Nico, the house band at “the biggest discotheque in the world”. But if Haynes’ earlier investigations into rock history were propelled by genuine mystery and loss – who killed Karen Carpenter? What happened to David Bowie in the ’80s? Who on earth is Bob Dylan? – The Velvet Underground can feel a little like a diligent, almost academic tribute to the cross-cultural crosstown traffic of mid-’60s NYC, rather than an urgent enquiry into an enduring musical miracle.Ĭertainly Uncut-reading VU-heads will be abundantly familiar with the story of Lou as Pickwick’s jobbing songwriter meeting the conservatoire rebel Cale and together discovering the negative zone where Bo Diddley backs La Monte Young and garage-band primitivism meets transcendent drone. The first scene features a spiffy Cale appearing on I’ve Got A Secret, the early-’60s CBS panel show, as a token avant-garde wacko, fresh from an 18-hour performance of Satie. The film opens in a squall of Cale viola, a frenzied, channel-hopping montage of 1963, and then a young Lou gazing dreamily into Andy’s impassive lens, as though seeing clearly through the storm, steadfastly focused on… what? Riches and fame (high school bandmates and his sister recall a steely determination to become “a famous rock star”)? Literary immortality as predicted by college mentor Delmore Schwartz? Or simply his own chemical and sexual oblivion (he seemed compelled to shock his school and college friends with squalid adventures in search of degradation)? The result is a loving homage to the Lower East Side and a split-screen secret history of 1960s American underground cinema from Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken and Maya Deren, to Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger.Īnd – overwhelmingly of course – Andy Warhol. Indeed the film is dedicated to the memory of Jonas Mekas, founder of New York’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative, who died during production and at whose early-’60s screenings Warhol began to cast his Factory superstars. ![]() Understanding the challenge of making a movie about a band three of whose members are dead, and who left almost no live footage, Haynes has cast the net far and wide across the archives of the world for B-roll. ORDER NOW: David Bowie is on the cover of the December 2021 issue of Uncut.But though you might have hoped for some occult, oneiric version of the story told via fabulist casting, phantasmagoric CGI and a little puppetry, The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film by Todd Haynes is a story as straight as its title. With an oeuvre devoted to the poison, perversity and paranoia of the 20th century and a passion for telling tales of ambition, fame and oblivion, you couldn’t imagine a director better suited to a Velvet Underground documentary than Todd Haynes.
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