That’s a stunt to make John Cage reach for the remote, but Cale, a deeply serious Welshman with a handsome shock of dark hair, was devoted to shaking things up. Cale’s secret is that he gave a concert in which he performed the same piano piece over and over again for 18 hours. It then presents a kinescope of John Cale, one of the band’s two founding members, when he appeared on the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1962. The documentary opens with a quote from the French poet Charles Baudelaire (“Music fathoms the sky…”). And in “The Velvet Underground,” since he can’t rely on a conventional series of back-in-the-day music and interview clips, he resorts to telling what he sees as the grand hidden story of the band: how they emerged from the depths of an underground America - the beatnik heart of the early ’60s, and the avant-garde impulse that remade art culture. Haynes has always been drawn to underground stories and underground worlds: the shadow reality that shapes us. Yet the way that Haynes has fashioned the film isn’t simply a matter of cinematic practicality. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.Ī scrapbook of images that moves, “The Velvet Underground” immerses you in the band but still leaves them slightly out of reach. As a collage of the period, “The Velvet Underground” is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. He draws on the underground films of the period, which were often dream-play documentaries, and he divides the screen into sections, introducing the principals by playing their words off the flickering black-and-white images of their Warhol screen tests. (The Velvets hated Frank Zappa, so no pun intended.) Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope. It’s called “The Velvet Underground,” and among other things it’s a fascinating study in how necessity becomes the mother of invention. The albums are there for all time, but as a historical presence the Velvets can seem a bit like a group of ghosts.īut now, the great director Todd Haynes has, at long last, made a documentary about the Velvet Underground. (It’s quite an irony considering that Warhol, the band’s mentor, was the first person to be notorious for filming everything around him, but there you go.) The Velvet Underground, whose music was a mesmerizing midnight trance-out, had no radio niche, no publicity, no “media,” no backstage verité Pennebaker or Maysles. Every time I’ve raised the subject with those in the know, the explanation comes down to: “There’s no footage.” What they mean is: There are random bits of footage, and plenty of photographs, but if you want to see the Velvets in their prime performing “What Goes On” or “White Light/White Heat” in a steamy rock club, or get a taste of what it was like to see the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (the hypnotic chug-a-chug of the band, the psychedelic blobs and Warhol films) at the Dom in New York City in 1966, or to see any full-scale concert clip that would allow you to experience the Velvets in a you-are-there, that’s-what-they-were-like way, you’re out of luck, because those clips basically don’t exist. There’s a reason we’ve never seen that film. So surely they deserve to be captured and memorialized in a film that does them justice. They are, along with the Beatles and the Stones, one of the three seminal groups in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. For years, I’ve been longing for someone to make a documentary about the Velvet Underground.
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