Haynes’ film is like that because the scene around the band was like that - a constellation of talents greater than the sum of their parts. Modern Lovers founder and Velvet Underground superfan Jonathan Richman describes the band’s “strange melodies” and how you could see everybody onstage and still not account for where a particular noise was coming from. Warhol said that he liked the Velvets because they sounded the way his movies looked, and now Haynes has made a documentary that looks the way the Velvets sounded. ![]() Nevertheless, “The Velvet Underground” is a film you hear with your eyes. But if “The Velvet Underground” excerpts oodles of experimental films (and channels several more) without threatening to become an experimental film itself, that’s only because Haynes’ loving tribute is able to translate the language of a singular American moment into something digestible enough for us to understand that no one will ever speak it the same way again. There are tired expository stretches toward the end - unhappy families might be different, but unhappy bands all seem to break up the same way - and there are giddy moments that threaten to explode non-fiction norms with the director’s usual flair. Just when you thought you’d rather watch all eight hours of “Empire” for the second time than ever sit through another fucking documentary about Andy Warhol, this lucid history sparks a new appreciation of what his factory made possible.Īt its best, Haynes’ film is neither a dry accounting of who the Velvets were nor a heady evocation of their work it’s a movie about the fires these people set inside each other and how they spread to anyone else who was burning and gave them the same permission to push back against expectations. The historical fact of their transgressive greatness has been distilled/immortalized/done to death by t-shirts, dorm-room décor, The Strokes, et al., but Haynes also captures the specific texture of the creative freedom that conjured the Velvets from the heteronormative safety of “Mad Men”-era New York. And not just them, but also remembering the perfect catalysy of creative energies and tore it asunder before most of the world even began to recognize what it meant. ![]() The answer to those questions - or so it seems after the first of what could easily become a dozen viewings - is that Haynes is less interested in reinterpreting the Velvets than he is in remembering them. Related ‘A Man Called Otto’ Review: Tom Hanks Is a Grumpy Old Man in This Limp Remake New Movies: Release Calendar for December 23, Plus Where to Watch the Latest Films Related 23 Controversial Film and TV Book Adaptations That Rankled Their Audiences and Authors Influential Awards Bodies Reshape 2023 Best Documentary Feature Race ![]() What might compel an auteur capable of exorcising “Far from Heaven” from the ghost of Douglas Sirk to make a film so full of talking heads and archival footage? Why would someone with Haynes’ gift for interpolating his influences in unexpected ways submit himself to the strictures of a basic rise-and-fall rock saga that everyone knows? It makes Haynes’ choice to make a comparatively straightforward non-fiction movie about his favorite band is a curious one, and it calls implicit attention to the kind of artistic intentionality that most womb-to-tomb music docs only highlight in their subjects. Hypnotically vibrating in the fuzzy black space between a very special episode of “Behind the Music” and the longest film that Stan Brakhage never made, Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground” is a documentary (his first) by a man whose previous musical tributes include a glam-rock fantasia that gave David Bowie the “Citizen Kane” treatment, a “Mishima”-esque kaleidoscope that refracted Bob Dylan through the infinity mirror of his own myth, and an underground Karen Carpenter biopic that cast the late singer as a literal Barbie doll.
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