The goal of the segment is a staple of sixties popular media: to mock the avant-garde via mainstream American standards, with Cale being made to participate in his own mockery. The film opens with Cale’s 1963 appearance on a popular game show of the era, “I’ve Got a Secret.” His “secret” is that the week prior he performed, as part of a rotating group of pianists, Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” which, according to the show’s host, ran eighteen hours and forty minutes. There are, to be sure, some attempts at framing. And for a film that eschews a voice of its own and must depend on what passes through the lips of its interview subjects, there’s no way to fill in those gaps. Why, for instance, at the peak of their success, did Reed fire Warhol without the knowledge of the other band members? Why, shortly thereafter, did he announce to the group that Cale was no longer part of the Velvet Underground-and dispatch Morrison to inform Cale of the fact? Too many crucial elements are left unstated for the film to work as an introduction to the band. There’s no sustained attempt at narrative indeed, there is no narration, per se, outside of the remarks of band members, fellow-artists, friends, and family. If one is coming to it Velvets-curious but not Velvets-familiar, then the film could be a somewhat confusing experience. That role would seem to relieve the film of the burden of a coherent narrative it can cater to nostalgia without any obligation to tell a connected story.
(Read everything Ellen Willis ever wrote about them, beginning with her piece for Greil Marcus’s anthology “ Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.”) If a viewer is steeped in the Velvets’ legend but hungry for the multimedia sights that originally accompanied their sound, then Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” delivers: it functions almost as online bonus material for all the books and articles and interviews. How, at this very late date, might a documentary filmmaker come in and presume to tell this tale? The Velvet Underground is a storied band in a very literal sense few pioneering rock groups have been written about so well and in so much detail. Most of those who would tune in for the two-hour film already know a lot about the band, with knowledge they’ve cobbled together from print sources. Yet the film’s belated appearance raises questions not just about documentary technique but about audience. Reed is also present, albeit in archival voice-over, to give his side of the story. But Cale gives every impression of being an evenhanded, terrific storyteller and historian. Given that Reed threw Cale out of the band, in September, 1968, after the first two Velvet Underground records, Cale’s prominent talking head might seem to threaten the film’s objectivity.
The only founding members with onscreen interviews are John Cale (bass/viola/keyboards) and Maureen (Moe) Tucker (drums). Four of the band’s principals- Lou Reed (guitar/vocals), Sterling Morrison (guitar), Nico (vocals), and Andy Warhol (impresario/genius)-died before the documentary was made. The film’s late arrival does create some unusual narrative challenges. Although the film was long in its coming, the exciting trailer, released in August, and the awareness that the film was directed by Todd Haynes, the virtuoso behind two powerful, quixotic rock-and-roll movies-“Velvet Goldmine” (1998) and “ I’m Not There” (2007)-suggested that the half-century-plus wait may have been worthwhile. More than a half century after the Velvet Underground’s obscure rise and spectacular implosion, one of the most storied American bands of the nineteen-sixties finally has a proper documentary.
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