When he was a high school student in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Todd Haynes was fortunate to have an English teacher who took advantage of an autobiography class to show cutting-edge films to his children. students, among others those produced by Stan Brakhage. Half a century later, in Cannes, where he came to present The Velvet Underground, his first documentary, scheduled on Apple TV + since October 15, the director of Carol (2015) thanks this teacher who exposed it “With poetic, non-narrative forms” the cinema. Haynes may be an extraordinary screenwriter (just see Safe, his second feature film released in 1995, which revealed Julianne Moore, if we had to be convinced), he is also endowed with a formal audacity that can be traced back to this encounter with American experimental cinema.
It is in the memory of these free forms, those of Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Jack Smith or Kenneth Anger, that the memory of the Velvet Underground such as the famous Todd Haynes flourishes. In 2017, as artist Laurie Anderson was preparing to hand over the archives of Lou Reed, her companion who died in 2013, to the New York Public Library, Christine Vachon, the producer of Todd Haynes received a call: “David Blackman, who heads the film and video department at Universal Music Group, told him he thought it was time to do something around the Velvet Underground, remembers Todd Haynes, and that in discussions with Laurie Anderson my name had been mentioned. Christine told him that she would check with me, but that, yes, a priori, I would be interested. I was quite interested. “
Cinema and contemporary art
The group, founded in 1964 by exiled contemporary Welsh musician John Cale, and asocial and drug addicted New York poet and rocker Lou Reed, struggled for a short decade, releasing a handful of records that did not sell much, struggling to fill. small New York clubs while their contemporaries moved huge crowds across fields of mud. This does not prevent the Velvet Underground from having exerted an influence comparable only to that which the Beatles, James Brown, Bob Marley or Bob Dylan had on popular music.
The history of Velvet doesn’t stop with music. The group’s companionship with plastic artist and businessman Andy Warhol took them to the territories of cinema and contemporary art – before recording their first album, the group took part in a performance-installation directed by Warhol, “Exploding Plastic Inevitable”.
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