Or munching on a Hershey’s chocolate bar.Īnd we don't just mean two screens. It's as if one viewpoint would never suffice there’s always another, even if it’s just a photo of a pensive Reed, implicitly casting skepticism over what someone is saying. Most importantly, Haynes uses a split-screen technique for virtually the entire two hours, an effect that is much more than technical. He seems, in his idiosyncratic, non-linear style, to be trying to create the documentary version of a Velvet Underground show. His aim is not merely to tell the story of the Velvet Underground, through interviews and an astonishingly vast collection of archival material (all shot before the early ’70s), including generous snippets of avant-garde filmmaking. Whatever your level of familiarity, Haynes’ doc - the first for this accomplished director - is so stylistically compelling, it doesn’t really matter what you knew coming in. But such is the regard in which the Velvet Underground is held by many, who point to its influence on punk and other styles - even though it lasted some six years before the mercurial Reed walked away in 1970, and never achieved real mainstream success. The mystery is then kept, and an invisible veil still shrouds The Velvet Underground like a religious dogma you’re supposed to have blind faith on-not understand.Unless you are, like Haynes, a diehard fan of the band that launched the career of Lou Reed and was managed by Warhol, you might find it surprising that some refer to it in the same breath as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. As the film speed-jumps and accelerates towards the end like something has been inexplicably cut, we realise the most brilliant exposés actually uncover nothing. The biggest trick time has ever played was managing to convince us it’s elastic, when it’s in fact non-existent. Tension was, after all, what kept them together friction would prove indispensable for their legacy. And even if Doug’s entrance would mean following the era’s trend and going roots, a different sort of tension still hovered the scene. Nico’s instinctual anti-beauty agenda (whose outrageousness remains discreetly side-eyed in a society increasingly brainwashed by a tyranny of image) might have landed as eccentric at best, but the truth is that The Velvet Underground candidly caught the somber zeitgeist before anyone else could catch up on it. Haynes captures The Velvet Underground’s ability to soundtrack the wildest astral tourism while enabling us to form a connection with what is, by nature and by default, collective dissociation. If creating is channeling, then self-contemplation is interference and yet it’s precisely this white noise discomfort that runs amok in our subconscious, provoking the purest of the obsessions towards our favourite band. Once liberated from the constraints of uniqueness, one can finally accept that every copy is an original, and every intention of innovation a dreadful fallacy. This is what happens with The Velvet Underground. Ironically, it retains an aura of innocence. To a certain degree, all art is intrinsically vampiric because it seeks perennity it exists both because and independently of bodies, trespassing solidity. Commerce and factory may be irrevocably linked to a glorification of the marchandise-at least in the liberal fantasy instigated by Western capitalism-, but Danto’s reflections on this certainty also extended to the art world. In order to adequately permeate Haynes’ vectorial tale, it’s imperative we address the insidiousness that comes with the commodification of time. This anachronistic notion of time transpires throughout the film to show us how the almost entirety of our existence relies essentially on the perception and projection of experience if Warhol’s silent films hadn’t been shown rhythmically out of sync with our own heartbeats, would they appear so radically normalised? Or is this – like any view we may be inclined to share on the Velvet Underground in 2021 – a result of the inevitability of hindsight? It can make trauma last a second it can make ecstasy last an eternity. Time is a valuable currency because it can make a flash last forever. Both defy our preconditioned attachment to a generally accepted reality by bending its limits and prolonging the experience of experiencing, the sense of sensing, the gullibility of grasping. In a way, this concept is similar to the story of The Velvet Underground. A central notion of Todd Haynes’ new documentary on The Velvet Underground is the concept of extended time, which appears to encapsulate the narrative of a band we often find it difficult to have a consensus on by juxtaposing immediacy and endurance.
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