"Dementia Is Nothing To Be Ashamed Of": Gaspar Noé On 'Vortex', His Experimental Study Of Old Age And Death - Cannes Q&A “But I thought, ‘Where do you stop? I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then you figure that out.Saliva, Sex & A Scene-Stealing Reveal: The 'Covid Cannes’ Will Be One For The Record BooksĬannes 2021 Market & Fest Takeaways: Post-Pandemic Theatrical Still Anemic, Streamer $$ A Boon To Content Creators & A Curse For International Distributors “There’s generations of people who could tell you how great the Velvet Underground are, how meaningful they were to my career as a musician or my career as an artist or whatever,” Haynes said. Haynes did not call on critics or historians to venture theories or explain the band’s importance, and the closest we come to a musicological analysis is delivered by the eccentric Velvets protégé Jonathan Richman. It would be hard to find a more complicated figure than Reed, who left the Velvet Underground in 1970 and embarked on the fruitful solo career evoked in “Velvet Goldmine.” He was the kind of wildly creative, mercurial figure who is catnip to documentarians, and he is everywhere in the new film: a voice, either singing or heard in interviews an unsmiling face staring us down at times a presence felt more than seen.Īnd yet even after those two hours, Reed, who died in 2013, remains an enigma, much like the Velvet Underground itself. Admiration and rejection partly based on the scrambling of gender roles feature prominently in “Velvet Goldmine” via the knotty relationship involving a journalist and a pair of flamboyant rockers - one inspired by David Bowie and the other an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The Carpenters were still widely derided as milquetoast soft rock for girls and housewives when “Superstar” came out, and the film helped lead a critical reappraisal of the duo in the early 1990s. Maybe that’s why the musicians in Haynes’s movies draw heated responses from real-life viewers and other characters. Haynes has always been very conscious of such hopes - especially when they are based on gender and sexuality, an area in which rock has been simultaneously groundbreaking and retrograde. He has explored the formation (and transformation) of identity in his music-related work, but also fandom and its attendant heightened expectations. If “Superstar” - which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders - has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Ĭale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. The Velvet Underground’s John Cale - who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker - was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.” Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019. The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin.
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