![]() Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Nico, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas. A large number of the people involved in the band’s career, and the New York art scene that enabled it, have died. But more often than not, the feeling that the film conveys is a quiet sense of loss. Haynes will sometimes overwhelm the screen with multiple images playing simultaneously, creating a sensory overload, in order to convey to the viewer the frenetic pace of downtown New York in the Velvets’ heyday. He’s a young, insecure artist struggling to find greatness. A stunning scene occurs when Haynes shows a slow motion close-up of Reed facing the camera, while playing an archival recording of Reed reciting the lyrics to “Heroin.” In this moment, he is not the legendary and massively influential cultural institution that he was in later life. The visuals of the film are indebted to the sonic structure of “The Gift.” The majority of the film is split screen, with Haynes juxtaposing images against one another to great effect. The Velvet Underground is closer to a museum installation than a rockumentary, an experimental delight that is not just about the Velvet Underground, but everything that made the Velvet Underground, encompassing the history of New York, experimental music, Pop Art, and the LGBTQ subcultures of the 50s and 60s. ![]() How can an auditory art form be translated into a visual one? How does the director let their own voice come through without overwhelming that of their subjects? If band members are dead or unavailable, how will their absence be addressed? Will the filmmakers attempt something new, or rely on the talking head/archival footage template established by Behind The Music? Extraordinarily, director Todd Haynes is able to overcome these potential pitfalls and deliver a work that translates the Velvets’ aesthetic radicalism to film form. The problem this question presents is compounded by the inherent limitations of music documentaries. The band has influenced nearly every subsequent flavor of rock, from shoegaze to goth to punk to indie. But almost everyone familiar with the history of pop knows this. Their lyrics brought previously taboo topics like drug addiction, homosexuality and sadomasochism into pop’s vernacular, and their music was experimental, featuring heavy use of drones and distortions. In a career lasting under a decade, the Velvets expanded the scope of rock music. It’s a radical sonic experiment, emblematic of the band’s stylistic boldness. It was now mid-August, which meant that he had been separated from Marsha for more than two months.” The song is mixed so the narration is heard in one channel and the music in the other, giving the listener the freedom to listen to each track individually or simultaneously. John Cale narrates in his droll Welsh accent. It’s composed of a lengthy fuzz-toned jam and a short story, written by Lou Reed when he was a student at Syracuse University. Like most of the songs from that album, it is distorted, dissonant, macabre, and funny. “The Gift” is a song off the Velvet Underground’s 1968 album White Light/White Heat.
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