As the late filmmaker Jonas Mekas puts it in in the documentary: “We are not part of the subculture-we are part of the culture!” Andy Warhol helped ensure that that was possible for the Velvet Underground after the band formed in 1964. Cale, for his part, shared an apartment with the musician and artist Tony Conrad they lived in the same building as experimental filmmaker Jack Smith.Ī common misconception is that all such stuff existed at the margins of the artistic output of the day, but many involved never thought of themselves that way. As The Velvet Underground makes clear, all of the arts at that time were pressing up against one another, sometimes in literal ways. Haynes spliced in quick images of Johns’s famed painting Flag (1954–55), along with shots of Allen Ginsburg reading his Beat poetry and footage from Maya Deren’s At Land (1944). Out of the embers of Abstract Expressionism grew experiments by artists like Jasper Johns, whose paintings of flags, numbers, and maps brought imagery culled from the everyday into the field of art. The members of the Velvet Underground ended up in New York in the ’60s during a fruitful era. Still from The Velvet Underground (2021). Reed, meanwhile, had an even more rebellious spirit. Cale, who was given traditional training in Wales before coming to New York, once challenged his music teachers by saying he was going to learn works by Niccolò Paganini, whose violin compositions are notoriously difficult to play. Both musicians, we learn, showed an early aptitude for experimental techniques. Our introduction to Reed and Cale, for example, comes through dense montages of stock footage of ’50s kids shown in split screen. He’s unafraid to dig into the art and music history embedded in the band’s narrative, and to do so in a way that befits their music, with floods of appropriated footage cut in rapid succession. He’s more fascinated in the conceptual underpinnings of the group’s work. He doesn’t seem that interested in the rise-and-fall structure that typically pervades rock docs, although Velvet Underground fans will certainly find that here in some regard. Haynes, who directed masterpieces like Safe (1995) and Carol (2015), enlivens the film with a more unusual approach. In a time when there are so many bland documentaries about easily Googled subjects, The Velvet Underground stands out. This film considers what happens when music works a lot like art, when a rock performance works more like a happening, and what it means that the Velvet Underground chose such tactics for what some regarded as attempts at popular songs. But Haynes’s fascinating documentary is also about the ways the Velvet Underground looked at what was going on in the art world at the time and applied it to rock. Haynes’s The Velvet Underground is very much about the makers of those remarkable albums, which stimulate and assault the senses with screechy untuned guitars, pitchy vocals, and songs that can turn from poppy to aggressive. Andy Warhol's 12 Most Controversial Artworks, from Grisly Car Crashes to Fellatio on Screenįorever Alive on the Infinite Plain: The Legacy of Tony Conrad Resounds
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