The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021) (Patreon)

I'm very glad indeed that Haynes' The Velvet Underground exists. It's an admirable attempt at something very few rock-docs even think to do: placing the artists under consideration in a broader context of cultural and aesthetic history. Granted, the Velvets kind of demand this. They entered the broader consciousness (so to speak) through the patronage of Andy Warhol, who saw the foursome as a sonic complement, or even an equivalent, to what he was trying to do with painting and cinema. So even though other major bands have to be understood in terms of a general Zeitgeist -- for example, The Doors, The Who, The Sex Pistols, and The Jam -- the Velvets' connection to adjacent developments in other media is more tangible and absolute.

The problem is, Haynes struggles to find a cinematic language with which to address this problem. Certain of his gestures make sense. Warhol becomes a central figure in the documentary, almost a fifth band member, and so his unique sensibility (and its role in cancelling hippie culture, introducing hard drugs, irony, and detachment) saturates The Velvet Underground. Haynes seems to be trying to adapt Warhol's image multiples and multiscreen projection practice, but not everything fits so intelligibly into this format. Even artists who had direct connections to Warhol and the Velvets, such as Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, and Barbara Rubin, were so distinctive as to be rather badly served by this treatment.

Granted, it's not Haynes' fault that in 2021, a Warholian image collage looks like a Zoom call. What's more, he is grappling with a pretty big artistic limitation. There isn't very much footage of the Velvet Underground in performance. The most extensive documentation if their work, Warhol's featurette The Velvet Underground and Nico, depicts an unstructured 60-minute jam session, which is not exactly emblematic of their work. Despite John Cale's involvement in New York minimalism / No Wave composition, the band was always much more focused that La Monte Young. (If I may speak out of turn here, it sort of makes sense that Lou Reed ended up with Laurie Anderson. His music represented one way of popularizing minimalism, and hers represented a very different one. But their cultural touchstones were exceedingly similar.)

Given the fact that Haynes had to organize his film around an absence, it makes sense that he chose to visualize their music with material from the New York underground film and poetry world. But this ultimately turns important films into wallpaper, and relegates the Velvets' music to a sonic base for this visual exploration. On paper, it makes perfect sense to combine "Venus in Furs" with Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising and Fireworks. But in practice, the audio and video clash so dramatically as to undermine the very notion of a coherent "scene." That's fine, I suppose, but it defeats the purpose if Haynes wanted to convey deep veins of shared experience through the techniques of expanded cinema. 

Mike D'Angelo sometimes critiques documentaries by noting that they are insufficiently cinematic, and might have better conveyed their ideas in an article or a book. That's certainly not the case with The Velvet Underground. But this is one film that probably should have been an immersive web experience. It aims for an expansiveness that is undermined by its own linearity.