![]() ![]() It's a feedback loop of information, creating a cinematic equivalent of that hypnotic drone that flows beneath so many of the Velvet Underground's songs, and that Cale insightfully tells us was modeled on the "60-cycle hum" of appliances and machines from that period in history, the sonic undercurrent of modern life. The effect is less like sitting in a classroom and having facts laid out for you than listening to a semi-improvised Velvet Underground jam while perusing coffee table books or pictorial websites about the band, and pondering connections between the music that the band was making and the events that were unfolding in the world around them. Woronov hilariously contrasts the acidic, bleak 1960s New York version of the counterculture with its California equivalent, ridiculing peace, love, and flower power as political cop-outs. Taubin critiques the sexism of the Factory, where women, including lead singer Nico, were prized for their looks over all else. Singer songwriter Jonathan Richman dissects the band’s musical choices, imitating both Reed’s vocals and Cale’s background drones, blending the enthusiasm of a fan with the rigor of a working musician. Under Haynes' supervision, cutters Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz let the material flow and change direction, twist back, feed on itself recursively, digress, then return to the main point. Every few minutes, the editing shifts emphasis so that you're not just switching musical tracks but intellectual tracks: as in railroads, as in "one-track mind," or "train of thought." Like another great 2021 music documentary, Questlove's "Summer of Soul," this movie appears to deliberately adopt the structure of a mid-twentieth century vinyl album-the kind with songs arranged in tracks that are meant to be experienced in a linear way, first Side A and then Side B, straight through, without stopping. Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention were, oddly enough, considered their major rivals.Interview subjects who were present at the time-including Velvet co-founder Cale, a Welsh classical musician Mo Tucker, their signature drummer actress and painter Woronov my colleague Amy Taubin, a veteran film critic and the late Anthology Film Archives co-founder Jonas Mekas, who died not long after his interview-offer commentary and insight, alternating between taking a detached "long view" of things and plunging us into the middle of it all. That didn’t happen once they were within Warhol’s orbit, but they never really took off, either. In an old interview, Reed recalls, pre-Velvet Underground, playing frat parties in college: “We were very bad, so we had to change our name a lot.” “She was a wanderer and eventually she just wandered off,” someone says. It didn’t matter much when she left, either. She couldn’t sing, but it didn’t really matter. ![]() There’s the “blonde iceberg” Nico, added when Warhol decided the band needed more sex appeal. We are treated to everything from concerts to insider footage of what it was like to hang out at the Factory. Geez, just thinking of how soon – and how completely – Warhol would displace those Kids in Campbell’s iconography takes your breath away.īut back to the Velvet Underground and Reed and surviving band members like John Cale and Maureen Tucker who, along with relatives, fans, and random celebs are among the faces that turn up in Haynes’ meticulous accumulation of archival evidence and recent interviews. Using the split-screen, multi-media approach that was briefly popular during the period (check out Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool” or the original version of “The Thomas Crown Affair”), Haynes immerses us in the fabric of the times.īut first, he shows us why the ‘60s were necessary (or maybe inevitable) by showing us the ‘50s with its lung-cancer-friendly commercials (“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should!”) and quaint cartoon hucksters like the Campbell Soup Kids. Instead of a straightforward biopic, Haynes has given us a kind of collage – of the Velvet Underground, of the ‘60s and of Andy Warhol’s Factory where Reed and the guys were more or less the house band. ![]() A movie poster of “The Velvet Underground” A movie poster of “The Velvet Underground”
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