The Velvet Underground
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Transformations in Non-fiction Filmmaking: The SCAD Savannah Film Festival presents the 8th Annual Docs to Watch Roundtable
This year’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival – the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” which ran from October 23-30 – was a conveniently hybrid event that also marked my own return to the in-person festival circuit. Admittedly, as someone residing in a blue state with a strict mask mandate in place, traveling to the Deep South was a somewhat disorienting experience. And a stark reminder that the U.S.’s politicization of a global pandemic really is a war within – and specifically within the states themselves. On the one hand, Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp issued an executive order back in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 4, 2021 -
“A Haunting Symbiosis”: On Ed Lachman’s Newly Restored Lou Reed & John Cale Concert Film, Songs for Drella
Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 22, 2021 -
NYFF Critic’s Notebook: The Velvet Underground and The Girl and the Spider
Peter Buck, the guitarist for R.E.M., is often quoted as saying, “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” Now it seems, all those bands are the subjects of documentaries. Finally, even the Velvet Underground. The eponymous film is one that Todd Haynes appeared destined to make. Popular music, rock’n’roll mythology and the vagaries of self-invented personas are a core of the director’s filmography, going back to the Super-8 transgression of Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a melodramatic biopic of the ‘70s pop singer cast with Barbie dolls. Velvet Goldmine (1998) […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2021 -
Reflect What You Are: Jim O’Rourke Interviews Todd Haynes about The Velvet Underground
It’s 1963: High-minded Welsh musician John Cale participates in a concert of Erik Satie’s Vexations—per the composer’s intent, 840 piano performances of the same piece, totaling 18 hours—alongside experimental luminaries like John Cage, La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. Later that year, Cale appears on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, where guests are grilled by a panel that tries to determine what their particular secret might be. Cale’s performance of the Satie piece is eventually established as his in front of a slightly disbelieving host and audience. The not-so-politely implicit question: Why would anyone do something so […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz on The Velvet Underground
Editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz first worked together on Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch’s very funny and infectiously playful 2016 documentary on The Stooges. The Velvet Underground is a different band, whose story places different demands on the filmmakers and audience, but Gonçalves and Kurnitz once again found the proper cinematic corollary for their subject with Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground. Gonçalves is a Haynes regular, having edited narrative features Carol and Dark Waters for the director, along with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. Kurnitz is a first-time Haynes collaborator (but, as he notes below, longtime Haynes enthusiast) best known […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 11, 2021
