That felt apropos for the spirit of experimentation and questions being asked by artists in the 60s – Warhol in particular. I wanted to see what would happen if people’s attentions could be divided and multiplied, and dispersed across the screen. ![]() “There are moments in the film where you’re asked to divide your experience, or it becomes two things at once. A kind of underground inside yourself, where darker, confused feelings could be expressed” – Todd Haynes “Maybe the drug experiences that put them outside of the world also connected them to a kind of underground, in every sense of the word. There’s a live recording of it, and it’s such a beautiful jam riff. Just the music part, it makes you want to play that sometimes. “I hadn’t thought of ‘The Gift’, but that makes total sense,” Haynes says. To visualise the band’s contradictions, The Velvet Underground is a movie version of “The Gift”, the White Light/White Heat track in which Cale performs a spoken word track in your left ear while a separate, feedback-heavy jam explodes in your right ear. Yet on White Light/White Heat, Cale’s second and final album with the band, “Lady Godiva’s Operation” presents both artists in switched positions: Cale attempts to sing Nico-esque ballads, while Reed cagily interjects. In contrast, Cale, raised in Wales, possessed an anti-pop streak, his screeching viola battling against Reed’s catchy choruses. Reed, born in Brooklyn, was a teenage rebel who dabbled in poetry, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll flaunting a voice that was perfectly imperfect, Reed dreamed of stardom. If we, like the doc does, exclude the Doug Yule-led Squeeze from the discography, the Velvet Underground were a band fronted by Reed on guitar and vocals for four albums, on which two had Cale as an equal creative force. The band’s influence, or at least a kinship, is evident throughout Haynes’ filmography – most of his projects, such as Velvet Goldmine and his tipping-the-velvet romance Carol, could be retitled The Velvet Underground. It was as a teenager that Haynes discovered and embraced the band’s counterculture aesthetic, their off-kilter instrumentation, and the push/pull dynamic of Lou Reed and John Cale on those first two albums. ![]() When the New York outfit emerged with The Velvet Underground & Nico (the one with the banana on the front cover) in 1967, Haynes, now 60, was only six years old. By emulating the avant-garde philosophy of Andy Warhol, who produced the Velvets’ debut album, Haynes has crafted a shape-shifting, non-fiction feature with split-screen trickery and psychedelic imagery – all of which to complement the electric viola-infused drones of “Heroin”, the Nico-sung pop of “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, and however you classify the discordant breakdown of “Sister Ray”. ![]() While The Velvet Underground may not be the most original title for a film, Haynes’ approach certainly is. The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but every Oscar-nominated filmmaker called Todd Haynes who bought one after their breakup went on to shoot a kaleidoscopic, loving documentary about them.
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