Nihilistic poetry, the patronage of Andy Warhol and hypnotic sounds - Todd Haynes's detailed account of the most influential collective of the late 60s.
The history of the American group The Velvet Underground can be easily folded into a vivid historical collage: decadent New York of the 60s, the junction of pop art and avant-garde, experimental cinema, prohibited substances, Andy Warhol. In this turbulent landscape of counterculture stretching from east to west, fertile ground for a musical breakthrough could not but appear. In 1967, The Velvet Underground released their legendary banana sleeve album - which will later be called the most influential album in the history of rock music, whose hypnotic rhythms, coupled with the raw sound and cheeky lyrics of Lou Reed, will infect generations of punks and rockers. The music of the Velvet, unlike anything and sounding modern even fifty years later, created its own language on the fly, drawing from sources from everywhere: from modernist prose, Baudelaire's dark poetry and Burroughs' deconstructive texts.
A documentary by Todd Haynes, born in the glorious sixties, reconstructs the Velvet path. Here is the youth of vocalist Lou Reed, worthy in itself of a Burroughs novel: from the treatment of homosexuality through electroshock therapy to drug addiction in Harlem. Here is the academic training of John Cale, a violist from Wales, who brought minimalist experiments to the sound of velveteen, which he mastered at La Monte Young. The Corduroy quickly moved from playing in small halls to playing on the main venue, Andy Warhol's Factory. The pop art icon and producer of the newfangled group became something of a patron of the arts, and the era of psychedelics and the American Cultural Revolution (which was primarily a sexual revolution) - a kind of Renaissance in need of a respected patron of the arts.
Haynes arranges the poetics of the film in unison with the hypnotic sounds of the Velvets: slow, unhurried rhythm, split-screen experiments, on one side of the frame - the streets of New York in the 60s, and on the other - photographs of the band members. Slides, like the acclaimed Heroin track, flow slowly, providing living artifacts of the era. Haynes' inventive and in its own way rock and roll language recreates in detail the energy of the swinging 60s, when creative life was in full swing at Warhol's Factory, and Andy created a kind of American gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art where the Velvet Underground's performances accumulated the ability of music, and fine arts, and cinema, and a large-scale art disco.
And it is not surprising that Haynes' documentary work is gradually turning into a eulogy to Warhol, whom the band members called a genius and a deity. It was the creator of the soup cans that Campbell saw in the blonde Nico as a decisive link in the chain of the creative formation of the "Velvet" - gloomy decadents in black clothes, against which, of course, the spectacular blonde singer looked very advantageous. The inimitable production of the debut album belongs to Warhol, without whose patronage, it seems, no event would have happened - the artist's influence is easy to understand by comparing the 1967 disc with subsequent recordings made without Warhol's participation. This stems from the conflict between Lou and Andy, which ended in the dismissal of the king of pop art. He was the very glue that united the participants: without Warhol, the group not only faded, noticeably losing in inventiveness and audacity, but also gradually cooled the relationship between the musicians - so much that after exhausting tours, the Velvet played in silence, and later completely parted, unable to withstand the stress. Even Lou Reed and John Cale could not get along, completely diverging in creative views.
Haynes captures the moment of explosive rise of the Velvet - short and unexpected, like all the great miracles in history. Without excesses and inappropriate digressions, in the frame there are only people, circumstances and time - the product of the latter, of course, the musicians were, merging in the synergistic effect of creativity. In the 60s, sugary pop music was overcome by counterculture - discoveries and innovative experiments were enough on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was Nico's frustrated guitar, driving bass and cold vocals that brought the musical avant-garde to a new level.
Today it is difficult to imagine that in 1967 The Velvet Underground & Nico did not gain commercial success, and many radio stations flatly refused to reproduce compositions with provocative lyrics by Lou Reed. But everyone who heard "Velvet" in the year it was released, it seems, really bought guitars and created their own underground rock army, stationed at the crossroads of different musical trends - everything as Brian Eno bequeathed in his famous phrase. And the main merit of the film is in the zeal and shamanic tread with which it recreates the magic of the music of the Velvet. Rapid editing, like a kaleidoscope, a skillful combination of documented facts with impressionistic sketches, as well as the author's emotions, in which one can feel the sixties nostalgia (Haynes, if you remember, already confirmed his attachment to the time, putting "I am not there" about the life of Bob Dylan) - The Velvet Underground has finally gotten the on-screen biography that it has earned a long time ago.
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