“In that sense, all of Haynes’s previous films can feel like a warm-up to Velvet Underground. Here there is nothing that doesn’t feel it’s not part of his ordinary cinematic speech: his own filmed interviews with those still living (Sterling Morrison died in 1995, Lou Reed in 2013), archival interviews used as voice-overs, performance footage of everyone from the Velvet Underground to the Everly Brothers, bits of gay porn movies, sequences from the anthropologist and idiosyncratic record collector Harry Smith’s 1950s painted-frame films and his 1962 all-manipulated-image-objects movie Heaven and Earth Magic, Andy Warhol screen tests, footage from Warhol’s Factory, abstract designs and frames with dancing lines, still photos fixed and panned, stock footage, and dozens if not hundreds of other sorts of images, usually presented in double or triple or quadruple split screens.”
– On Todd Haynes’s Velvet Underground, in New York Review of Books. Subscription required to read full review.
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