The Velvet Underground
Focus on the Documentary
Todd Haynes delves into The Velvet Underground – the band that created a new sound that changed the world of music.
Todd Haynes delves into The Velvet Underground – the band that created a new sound that changed the world of music.
Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope. Haynes presents the evidence on an ever-shifting split screen, generating a kind of live artistic friction as the clips and images play out side by side.
As a collage of the period, ‘The Velvet Underground’ is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.
Please note that the times for this film have been amended from the printed programme. These times online are correct.