| I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then *you* figure that out. |
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A collage from Todd Haynes' "The Velvet Underground."
(Apple TV+)
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“I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then *you* figure that out.”
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Film Fatale
Almost every time a contemporary critic, historian or any such "expert" shows up in a music documentary, it's a sign the documentary has failed. Failed to get someone who was there to say exactly what the director wanted to say. Or failed to get the images or sounds the director needed you to see or hear. The expert is there less to provide insight or context than to cover up the documentary's holes, to tell what the film does not show.
There are no such voices in director TODD HAYNES' THE VELVET UNDERGROUND, which, after brief sketches of the film's, and the band's, two main protagonists growing up in Long Island and Wales, drops them and you into the middle of the avant garde film, art, literature and music scene of 1960s New York, leaving you to encounter all of it as you might have if you, too, were there. There's a dizzying barrage of imagery, often in split screen—Haynes has said he licensed two and a half hours of footage, more than the running time of the film. There are stories, some with beginnings and ends, some without, told by key players including LA MONTE YOUNG, JONAS MEKAS, MARY WORONOV, AMY TAUBIN, JONATHAN RICHMAN (the MODERN LOVERS founder was a superfan who the band took under its wings) and two of the band's three surviving members (DOUG YULE declined to participate, which may be why the band's end gets a lot less play than its beginning, though it may also be that Haynes found the end a lot less interesting). There are other voices, contemporaneous ghosts, on tape.
The documentary is, in a sense, about all of it and all of them, about a transitional moment when it became clear, as Jonas Mekas puts it, "We are not part, really, of subculture or counterculture. We are the culture!" There are the basic details of a band forming, a band finding its voice and a band falling apart, and there are holes and elisions, which Haynes displays no particular urgency to fill. The essence of the story, he seems to be telling us, is there to be felt and absorbed, as is. The sound and imagery aren't there to tell the story. They are the story. They are the culture.
Like all of Haynes' music films, "The Velvet Underground" is super stylized. It looks, sounds and feels very much like the time and place it's documenting, with all those pop-art split screens, scratchy sounds and footage, and images and stories that dissolve into each other, not always sequentially. It's easy to forget, as you're watching, that this story took place more than 50 years ago, that only three of the VU's six principals are alive, and that precious little footage of the band has survived. That's part of Haynes' miraculous achievement in a documentary about a band that in many ways was headed for failure, but that refuses to fail itself.
After Hours
Oh, and then there's the film's closing credits, which I'll let music producer/preservationist ANDY ZAX explain, for they may be "The greatest part of Todd Haynes's truly great VU documentary." Film school, as it were.
Rest in Peace
Film and TV composer RALPH CARMICHAEL, best known for his score for "The Blob." He also wrote hundreds of gospel songs and worked as Nat King Cole's arranger/conductor... British field recordist and sound archivist IAN RAWES... Dallas punk scene fixture OLAN MARTIN.
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