The result is a loving homage to the Lower East Side and a split-screen secret history of 1960s American underground cinema from Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken and Maya Deren, to Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger.Īnd – overwhelmingly of course – Andy Warhol. Indeed the film is dedicated to the memory of Jonas Mekas, founder of New York’s Film-Maker’s Cooperative, who died during production and at whose early-’60s screenings Warhol began to cast his Factory superstars. Understanding the challenge of making a movie about a band three of whose members are dead, and who left almost no live footage, Haynes has cast the net far and wide across the archives of the world for B-roll.
But though you might have hoped for some occult, oneiric version of the story told via fabulist casting, phantasmagoric CGI and a little puppetry, The Velvet Underground: A Documentary Film by Todd Haynes is a story as straight as its title. With an oeuvre devoted to the poison, perversity and paranoia of the 20th century and a passion for telling tales of ambition, fame and oblivion, you couldn’t imagine a director better suited to a Velvet Underground documentary than Todd Haynes.
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