THE VELVET UNDERGROUND is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high wire montage.” “A coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND is a documentary that meets The Velvet Underground eye-to-eye and enriches it.” Haynes deals with the band on the level they wanted (as musical poets, innovators, and influence) with admiration, but not uncritical reverence. “Hypnotic, seductive, and, just simply, very cool. It’s Godardian, but it’s also Warholian and Haynesian… it’s hypnotizing, brain-expanding, and just plain fun. An experience, something you feel as you might feel the drums during a live music performance: in your gut. A spectacle as well as an account of a time and place. The group would bridge the gap between the Brill building, Baudelaire, and downtown New York bohemianism… extraordinary.” Scott’s Critic’s Pick review and Elisabeth Vincentelli’s feature in The New York Times. Presented with support from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund Reviews “Fabulously entertaining.” – The Hollywood ReporterĢ021 120 MINS. Haynes interviews only figures who were part of the scene, including: Cale, whose electric viola and piano work were key elements of their sound drummer Tucker Terry Philips of Pickwick Records, where Reed cut his teeth as a staff songwriter Factory superstar/The Velvet Underground dancer Mary Woronov singer/songwriter Jonathan Richman, who attended over 60 of their shows and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela of the avant-garde collective Theatre of Eternal Music (where Cale fine-tuned his viola-drone sound). Andy Warhol, the band’s Svengali, discovered Nico, the blond chanteuse whose deadpan beauty added to their mystique. Todd Haynes (who previously explored the many guises of Bob Dylan in I’M NOT THERE and glam rock in VELVET GOLDMINE) traces their origins, assembling a mind-boggling collage of underground movies (Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Tony Conrad) and Lower East Side performance art. With songs like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Venus in Furs,” and “Sister Ray,” they were a gritty riposte to hippiedom and an influence on rock for decades to come. The quintessential 1960s New York art-rock group, The Velvet Underground - Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker - oozed cool, from their expressionless stage presence to their trancelike music and lyrics evoking sex, drugs, kink, and all things transgressive. It’s a trove of rare performance clips, vintage experimental-movie snippets, and new interviews-as much a portrait of an era as of a band, told in the style of the avant-garde filmmaking that fueled the Velvets’ moment in the spotlight and secured their status as world-renowned countercultural icons.“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” – Brian Eno. in his first documentary, charting everything from Lou Reed and John Cale’s early musical collaborations to the group’s early-’70s dissolution.
Who better to pay tribute to the Velvet Underground than Todd Haynes (MVFF Tribute, 2017)? The filmmaker who gave us an abundance of Dylans in I’m Not There (MVFF 2007) and the glam-rock freak out Velvet Goldmine turns his attention to the V.U.
They were the downtown NYC group that doubled as the missing link between John Cage, Rimbaud, and the Brill Building the in-house band for Warhol’s Factory happenings and the leather-jacketed, sexuality-blurring rock stars that inspired generations of musicians to pick up droning guitars.
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