Pure aura, sober and undisguised. These special pictures can be seen very early in the film, of Lou Reed and John Cale, these two so unapproachably cool in their youth Loner in black. Later the other band members join in, the ethereal singer Nico, the earthy drummer Moe Tucker, the guitarist Sterling Morrison. You stand in front of Andy Warhol’s camera in the Factory’s famous “Audition Tapes”, which were about not doing anything. Don’t talk, don’t play, don’t flirt, don’t challenge.
So you hardly notice that these are not photos, but film images. So they look over at us from the early sixties in New York, pure essence, peculiarly calm intensity. And therein lies the secret of Todd Haynes’ documentary “The Velvet Underground”, which is more than just the story of a legendary band because it also captures the electrifying time of their creation. Haynes succeeds here in the trick of opening a huge window, a downright throat that draws the audience in and directly pulls them into a pulsating New York, in which painting, film, music, performance and happening mutually inspired, inspired and consumed one another. The film senses this in exploding images and whirring sounds that overlap in split-screen and sound design compositions.
Musician and music have always fascinated director Todd Haynes, but so far mainly in films like “The Karen Carpenter Story”, “Velvet Goldmine” and “I’m Not There”, in which he split the mercurial Bob Dylan into eight personalities and entrusted eight different actors, including a woman, Cate Blanchett. With this documentary he was not put off by the fact that there were hardly any concert or rehearsal recordings of The Velvet Underground so that the crazy streams of images that one is used to from rock documentaries today are missing here. Instead, Haynes is raising a much larger treasure that was kept in art, film and photo archives, especially in the Warhol Museum, because cameras were always running or clicking in its factory.
John Cale is a mixture of elegance and fragility
From the abundance of experimental and documenting images recorded by artists and filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Oskar Fischinger, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger and Taylor Mead, Haynes composes together with his regular editor Affonso Gonçalves (who the Time also bent in a special way in the ingenious first season of “True Detective”) a unique picture of that time. There are also current interviews with contemporary witnesses, from the band, from the factory, from the scene. Here, too, there are always great moments.
There is, for example, the charismatic John Cale, who explains his musical credo, a mixture of elegance and fragility. He also talks about the happiness of never having to worry about something like ‘Give me an A’: “The only stable tone we relied on was the steady hum of a refrigerator.” Jonathan Richman, who is usually rather interview-shy, is able to perform the special sound of the Velvets, which he has absorbed in around seventy concert visits, in a captivatingly charming manner with acoustic guitar and voice modulation. And the still beguilingly beautiful factory muse Mary Woronow makes fun of the hippie culture: “We hated hippies! Flower power, burning your bras? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The film reveals a wealth of information, for example about how John Cale and Lou Reed found each other, in the combination of classical tones and morbid texts, from the spirit of Paganini and Wagner, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. You learn how Barbara Rubin guided Andy Warhol into one of the first concerts, which led to the first LP getting the famous banana cover. Synergies become visible, but also explosive forces: Lou Reed was the darkly unpredictable star who first fired Nico, then Warhol and finally also John Cale. In the attentive gaze of Todd Haynes, Cale learns the overdue rehabilitation.
The Velvet Underground, USA 2021 – Written and directed by Todd Haynes. Cinematography: Ed Lachman. Editor: Affonso Gonçalves. Starring: Lou Reed, John Cale, Andy Warhol, Nico. Apple TV +, 121 minutes. Start date: October 15, 2021.