Great avant-garde art eventually becomes canon. The idea of a Paris audience rioting over Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring seems as quaint as Parisians running to the doors of a different theater, seventeen-years earlier, when the Lumière brothers showed film footage of a train barreling toward a cinema screen. However exaggerated or apocryphal these well-known stories may be is beside the point. They’re vivid mental pictures of how shocking innovation can seem in the moment. This tension between what was once the cutting edge and is now considered standard issue is a running theme Todd Haynes grapples with in his illuminating new documentary The Velvet Underground.
In a recent interview with the Ringer’s Rob Harvilla, music critic Kelefa Sanneh noted two contemporaneous “visions for the future of rock ‘n’ roll” that emerged from the late ‘60s. One was ornate English progressive rock, as imagined by Yes. The other was screeching New York City proto-punk, as delivered by the Velvet Underground. While both were firmly avant-garde in their time, one band became an interesting footnote and the other a forebear of all things alternative and indie. Yes sounds “super alien” to modern ears because their vision never gained traction. The Velvet Underground, on the other hand, is now “so insanely familiar” that fifth-derivative versions of their sonic template, “could be [played by] some kids in Brooklyn.”
Sanneh was channeling a quip, probably made by Brian Eno, that every one of the thousands of people who bought the Velvet Underground’s debut album in 1967 started a band. And like an amoeba splitting in two and then into four and then into eight and so on – those bands birthed others at an exponential rate. The Velvet Underground and Nico (the “banana album”) and The Velvet Underground (the “grey album”) and Loaded (the friendly swan song) appear conventional because a DNA analysis of countless, subsequent rock motifs trace right back to those records. Only the sophomore White Light/White Heat album still feels a little bit outré, though no less influential.
Enter Haynes, one of our greatest living American filmmakers, who once turned Bob Dylan’s immortal legacy on its ear with the fractured and fictionalized I’m Not There and told Karen Carpenter’s tragic tale with the help of Barbie dolls. This is his first documentary feature, and it isn’t any more straightforward or easy to digest. It attempts to recapture the sense of the new – the once avant-garde – as it was, with multiple split-screens that incorporate Andy Warhol’s directorial footage and, for good measure, the flotsam and jetsam of film history.
Haynes’ The Velvet Underground is both undeniably stylish and somewhat comprehensive. The first-half covers the personal and artistic biographies of Welsh musician/composer John Cale and the queer-rock-god Lou Reed. How they met each other – along with guitarist Sterling Morrison, drummer Moe Tucker and German singer Nico, under the watchful eye of Warhol in his Factory – is recounted with exacting detail via many living and dead talking heads.
The film unravels along with the band’s original lineup. The busy second-half of Haynes’ encomium gives short shrift to the ins-and-outs of the Velvet Underground’s full oeuvre, not to mention Lou Reed’s indelible solo output (which is briefly acknowledged with a fleeting shot of Transformer’s cover art). The Velvet Underground largely fails as a primer. Too much prior knowledge and appreciation is assumed and taken for granted. One hopes that Haynes’ sheer enthusiasm, and name recognition, will translate to a handful of new converts. Maybe. For those of us who already worship the band, this wayward film arrives as a glorious, quasi-religious artifact. And that, no doubt, is reason enough to rejoice.
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