The Velvet Underground, the group that said no to everything

• Criticism Todd Haynes recovers the infinite voices and prophecies of Lou Reed intact

"Music probes the sky," reads the frontispiece of

documentary

determined to put an image to what The Velvet Underground was, still is and will be. Baudelaire's phrase wants to be both a warning and a style book. If the sound of the New York band reordered the energy of a convulsive and electric time from which it emerged, like Athena from the head of Zeus, the promise of a future not necessarily better but infinitely more desirable (and even desired), the film that was presented at Cannes and now premieres on Apple TV offers the perfect synaesthetic image of that outburst.

But how to represent what has no face? How to reimagine the past of a group of which, despite the myth that keeps it intact, hardly any traditional graphic material is preserved? Yes, there are countless photographs and films collected at random as in a shipwreck, but nothing more. In fact, the reason that a work like this has never been approached before lies in a reason as routine and lazy as that hardly anything shot of their performances or memory is preserved beyond the legend of the famous

with the that

revolutionized the concept of a live performance.

“Unlike any other band, in this case, the idea of ​​just making a documentary was impossible.

The experimental or period archive material that we finally use is not there to decorate the story but is the very firmament that music, as Baudelaire would say, excavates and probes, ”says Haynes, aware of having made a virtue of necessity.

And he continues: «The real argument is not so much the band as the space itself in which it first emerged and soon afterwards completely transformed.

Seeing the New York before Velvet and seeing what was left of that city after the emergence of the phenomenon led by

is as much as seeing the group's own face ».

Maureen Tucker, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed.APPLE TV

The film, which can only be called what it is called (

, is a collage that like a kaleidoscope of acid and sleep explodes in the viewer's gaze through the splinters left by

And in the middle, the testimonies of the survivors, with John Cale at the head, and of the great absentee, Lou Reed (who died in 2013), whose presence is summoned in a hypnotic ouija through the infinite recordings of his always-broken monotone voice. .

The first to appear is John Cale. Haynes makes no secret of her unveiled preference for him. In 1962, the musician appeared on the CBS show

His secret was a concert in which, to the amazement of spectators and passers-by, he performed the same piece on the piano over and over again for 18 hours. The Welshman with the disheveled skeleton and dull hair came to New York to revolutionize everything. And do it from the first moment and from the apartment that he shared with the filmmaker and artist of more things

and the actor, in addition to multimedia genius,

They say that the three of them spent a good part of their time feeling from within the intense pleasure of a single sustained note that was far beyond what was bearable by any other than any of the three.

Perhaps only one more could be capable of so much: Lou Reed. He and Cale met for the same reason the killer flirts with his victim: to get a closer look at the color of someone else's blood. One was the pure, radical and mystical artist. The other, the black angel of all sins, violent, capricious and proud of each of his weaknesses. It is told in the documentary that it is a lie that as a child his father had

applied to him

to cure his incipient and persistent homosexuality. His sister tells it and in the denial there is

It is said that one fine day, a stubborn vocational suicide, the man who turned heroin into a flag of redemption deliberately cut his hand with a crystal because he simply wanted to do it and thus stop playing.

But all are nothing more than memories spun in a puzzle that becomes great in each of its voids, in the detailed description of the voids.

Lou Reed and the rest of the group The Velvet Underground.

«They», speaks the director, «functioned completely on the fringes of everything from the first second. They wanted to be an exception in the 1960s, which was already an exceptional exception in itself. Reed read

,

,

and

and from there, from his convinced walk into the abyss, the night, the dark tight leather gambling dens and, again, the heroine knew from the first second a star of rock. And the already cacophonous mix between the elegant form experimenter and the aggressive self-experimenter was embodied in the sour sound of an impossible miracle.

It was Paul Morrissey's idea to bring Nico into the band. It is said that Andy Warhol, the presumed producer of that first album with her (

1967) actually did nothing. Or rather, he did nothing but fall in love with Lou exactly like Nico. On the screen, the footprints, which are also wounds, from that time parade and everything, little by little, makes sense. The filmmaker

speaks

and next to him is the unclassifiable inventor of silent sounds and blind roars,

This is film critic

and, of course, the drummer of the group

who transformed percussion into a sleepwalking threat.

When you get here, it becomes clear that a Todd Haynes documentary cannot just be a documentary. In fact, strictly speaking, it is his first documentary. But it doesn't seem like it. And it is not for the same reason that his film about

ended up being the opposite of a film about nobody's life, and his film around the busy

of

it became the strident narration of the strident spirit of an essentially strident time. «The capacity of rebellion and revolution of an artist depends to a great extent on his conviction to say no. And Velvet said no to everything, placing herself in a completely unprecedented place and ultimately desired by all, "says the director, perhaps wanting to make the group's revolutionary denial of their obsessions coincide with his own. All The Velvet Underground is nothing more than a documentary that refuses to be built from anywhere other than the wrecks of an era that no longer exists and through images lost forever. And so.

By the time the next album arrives,

1968, all is said. The yellow and sweet sound of that banana that invaded the cover of his debut has changed everything. The miracle is accomplished and everyone is clear that the world has just been split in two. There is only a rapt drunk on amphetamines that, the tape says, was the breeding ground for that second album. They were the ones who introduced into rock and roll the desire to experience everything and the idea that rock and roll could and should either be an art form or be nothing more than nothing.

Reed's self-destructive drive, in Haynes's narrative, can do anything.

Who knows if it wasn't really all the result of a meticulous exercise in creative suicide. Who knows if the supposedly uncontrolled fury with which Haynes draws every Reed decision did not follow a calculated perfect plan. And satanic. The truth is that, contrary to the thesis of the film, the replacement of Cale by Doug Yule did not translate into anything other than the band's prodigious third album. In 1969,

(always the same title) was, as it becomes clear, a deeply passionate, deeply mystical and deeply dirty work. Pure Reed. By the time the last album,

, 1970,

is reached

, the film is exhausted, tired of its intensity. And Cale retells the old story of the reunion with Reed, of the friendship (or almost) recovered. And from the convulsion of the beginning one arrives at the calm of the eternal myth.

Haynes says that the first time he arrived in New York he was barely 11 years old.

It was a family trip.

It was, if the accounts are correct, the year 1972. The Velvet for him was hardly anything then.

But the city impressed him so much that he decided at that very moment that he would leave his native California to move there.

Then he discovered that New York was what it was then because of

five guys convinced that music probes and excavates the same sky.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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