Directed by:
Todd HaynesScreenplay:
Todd HaynesCinematography:
Edward LachmanCast:
John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison (a.f.), Lou Reed (a.f.), Jonathan Richman, Danny Fields, Jackson Browne, Angus MacLise (a.f.), John Waters (more)VOD (1)
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Emerging from the primordial soup of glamour, gutter sleaze, and feverish creativity that was New York’s 1960s underground culture, the Velvet Underground redefined music with its at once raw and exalted blend of experimentation and art-damaged rock and roll. In his kaleidoscopic documentary The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes vividly evokes the band’s incandescent world: the creative origins of the twin visionaries Lou Reed and John Cale, Andy Warhol’s fabled Factory, and the explosive tension between pop and the avant-garde that propelled the group and ultimately consumed it. Never-before-seen performances, interviews, rare recordings, and mind-blowing transmissions from the era’s avant-garde cinema scene come together in an ecstatic swirl of sound and image that is to the traditional music documentary what the Velvets were to rock: utterly revolutionary. (Criterion)
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Talking heads commenting in great detail on the subject and unique archival footage would be enough to make The Velvet Underground an information-packed two-hour documentary from which you will really learn a lot about the titular band and the American counterculture of the 1960s. Thanks to Haynes’s self-aware, avant-garde play with imagery, which has the vibe of both early Warhol and late Godard and is always subordinated to the divine music with rhythmic precision, The Velvet Underground is both an incredible audio-visual experience and one of the best films of the year.
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