#THE VELVET UNDERGROUND MOVIE#
#THE VELVET UNDERGROUND FULL#

If “Superstar” - which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders - has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Ĭale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email.

#THE VELVET UNDERGROUND MOVIE#

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale - who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker - was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.” Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music.

Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019. The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. Or they set up an example of a unique - and usually in my mind radical - experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.”

“They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture.

“The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said.

#THE VELVET UNDERGROUND FULL#

Even Haynes’s contribution to the HBO omnibus “Six by Sondheim” (2013) departed from convention: Whereas an older female performer usually handles the “Follies” number “I’m Still Here,” he had the former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker croon it to a dimly lit cabaret full of women, a neat reversal of the male gaze. In 2007 he made “I’m Not There,” with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan, or at least versions of Dylan. He burst on the scene in 1987 with the 43-minute-long biopic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which was cast with dolls. Haynes’s queering is particularly effective in music-centric movies, a field that has often been dominated by a straight-male point of view.

The velvet underground