A black screen that seems to shiver under the screeching of John Cale’s bow on the strings of his viola. Todd Haynes made the foreground of The Velvet Underground a sort of dantesque warning: “you who enter here” … Do not seek your dose of nostalgia, nor the canonization of your heroes. If the director of Safe and of Carol tries for the first time in the documentary form, it is to extract the vital principle of Velvet Underground, the subversion of reality by poetry. Haynes sacrificed to the necessities of the genre, collecting the words of survivors (John Cale, drummer Maureen Tucker), witnesses (critic Amy Taubin) and an epigone (Jonathan Richman), bringing together the photographic and audio documents that testify to the group’s career. There is enough here to tell the aberrant story of a group hated by the greatest number, grown up far from the sunstrokes of Summer of Love in the shadow of Andy Warhol’s Factory, torn by clashes of a violence that would pass off conflicts between Beach Boys, Kinks or Who for kindergarten court arguments. But there isn’t quite enough to make a movie.
For that, we need cinema and Todd Haynes went to look for it at the source, on the side of the directors of the New York avant-garde. Andy Warhol, of course, who in the mid-1960s had retained John Cale and Lou Reed to be the subjects of two of his Screen Tests, but also Jonas Mekas (to whom the film is dedicated), Jack Smith or Barbara Rubin. These images of New York and its inhabitants in a moment of extreme effervescence, which range from documentary chronicles to abstraction, retain an energy immediately perceptible through the elegiac varnish deposited by the passage of time.
Lack of images
Apart from the images shot in Paris, at the Bataclan, by Claude Ventura in 1972, when Lou Reed, Nico and John Cale found themselves on stage, a few years after the former had successively got rid of both. , we will not see the Velvet in concert – lack of documents. The footage shot on the occasion of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the multimedia performance conceived by Warhol, which marked the group’s irruption in 1966, is not equipped with sound.
Todd Haynes makes the best use of this shortage, sparking sparks between the images borrowed from his illustrious elders and the soundtrack. The strength – the violence, sometimes – of the aesthetic shocks inflicted by these sequences nevertheless leave in evidence the narrative framework, that of the impossible romance between John Cale, a European intellectual who escaped from his Welsh valleys to get closer to his almost namesake New- Yorker, composer John Cage, and become a pillar of contemporary music and Lou Reed, queer rebel, rocker who had achieved near success with a single chord hit, The Ostrich, disciple of the poet Delmore Schwartz.
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