Todd Haynes’ Velvets doc presents unseen film and Jonathan Richman!
“Jonathan Richman said, ‘Mr Warhol, I don’t really think I understand your art.’”
IF LOCKDOWN HAS taught us anything, it’s to appreciate the escape and succour well-crafted entertainment can deliver. But next year, with its hopes of a restoration of something approaching normal life, an outstanding array of music films will make leaving the couch harder than we imagine.
One of the most enticing is Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground, which will be shown on Apple TV+. He discussed the film at MOMA in New York in August with film curator Rajendra Roy, revealing that he completed his interviews for the film in 2018 before working on his legal thriller Dark Waters in 2019. He picked it up again in time for Covid, and finished it in Venice with his editors Affonso Gonçalves and Adam Kurnitz, who also worked on Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 Stooges movie Gimme Danger. Haynes said he hadn’t “had his hands on a film to this degree” since 2007’s multi-actor, Dylan-inspired bio-drama I’m Not There.
Promising first-hand testimony from the key personalities of the group and wider Warhol milieu, it will also feature, “a treasure trove of never-before-seen performances and a rich collection of recordings, Warhol films, and other experimental art.” As the director said at MOMA: “The amount of archives that we’ve collected for the film are remarkable. The closing credits sequence alone is about nine minutes long.”
Warhol’s films and his questioning of dominant norms are, Haynes explained, critical to the film. A similar spirit infused his 1998 glam drama Velvet Goldmine, which Haynes explained as “the gayness, the queerness, the sense of camp and what that sort of raises in terms of the way, artists, particularly Warhol, were calling into question all kinds of attitudes and assumptions…
I insist that there is something essential about that queerness too, or gayness [Haynes also used the words “faggotiness” and “swishiness”] that I think is an essential aspect of this music.”
The Modern Lovers’ Jonathan Richman, the super-fan who saw them dozens of times, is one devotee who appears in the film. “I never expected to be able to meet them or see [The Velvet Underground],” Richman recalled, to San Francisco’s Radio Valencia in 2014, of meeting his heroes, “[but] I was magnetically drawn there, and I had to be there… they knew, obnoxious as I was, that it was life and death, they could see, they could see in my eyes that it was life and death for this little high school squirt.”
At MOMA, Haynes recalled an anecdote when Richman, already an obsessive, saw the group for the first time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “They were just about to break with Warhol, but Warhol was there, and so was Nico, she wasn’t even allowed on-stage at this point,” Haynes said. “So little Jonathan Richman, awkward teenager… went up to Warhol and he said, ‘Mr Warhol, erm, I don’t really think I understand your art.’ And Andy said, ‘Yes you do.’”