Locarno's tribute is already sparking a flurry of articles that attempt to capture the essence of one of America's most internationally revered auteurs, the director of only seven features and one TV series, HBO's "Mildred Pierce." Haynes also aims to include interviews of the surviving members of the band and the contemporary 1960s artistic movement. So he is looking forward to "the thrill of the research and visual assemblage" and "getting in deep to the resources and material and stock and archival footage and the actual cinema and experimental work." It will also be "challenging" given there is so little documentation on the group, the director added. Haynes' new project, currently untitled and in development, will "rely certainly on Warhol films but also a rich culture of experimental film, a vernacular we have lost and we don't have, we increasingly get further removed from," he said. Haynes is in Locarno to receive the Pardo d'onore Manor award for career achievement, 26 years after the Swiss festival selected his debut feature, Poison, in competition, helping to launch the career of one of the U.S.'s most laureled indie filmmakers.Ĭonfirmation of his Velvet Underground documentary comes 50 years after the release of 'Velvet Underground & Nico'. Speaking to Variety on Monday at the Locarno Film Festival, Haynes also said that he is preparing a limited TV series with Amazon about "an intensely important figure of immense historical and cultural influence." independent films as Far From Heaven and Carol, is teaming with longtime producing partner Christine Vachon of Killer Films, as well as David Blackman and Universal Music Group, to direct his first documentary, on the Velvet Underground, one of the most seminal rock groups in history. LOS ANGELES () - LOCARNO, Switzerland - From Velvet Goldmine to the Velvet Underground: Todd Haynes, director of such acclaimed U.S. It left me with a real need to buy their records and buy something to play them on.You can stream Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine at SBS On Demand - scroll down for link Perhaps it’s the Spinal Tap factor, a reticence or self-consciousness about the potential absurdity of these private moments of drama.Īnd what about sex? The film is a little reticent here too, more about the underground than the velvet, and it leaves the issue of Reed’s own sexuality more or less untouched. Where perhaps it falls down is on the ordinary, gossipy sense of how exactly the band members could have fallen out so badly, and how painful that surely must have been. This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist. Then five long seconds of quiet, then an eruption as the crowd emerged, euphorically, from the spell. How great to see Jonathan Richman (a madeleine for my own record-buying past) talk about what would happen at a Velvet Underground gig at the end of a song: the crashing finality of silence for which no chord progression had prepared the audience. This was angry, confrontational, nerve-frazzling rock. But the Velvet Underground were not producing laidback hippy whale music: as drummer Moe Tucker points out, they hated hippies and (capriciously) hated Frank Zappa on that basis. Haynes gives a very good sense of what I can only call the transcendental quality of the Velvet Underground’s music, inspired as it initially was by the aesthetic of drones, sustained chords and chord variations, a sense that continuous immersion in the music will (at some stage) facilitate an epiphany that cannot be coerced or guaranteed. Haynes presents his movie in a more or less continuous split screen, juxtaposing a collage of thematically relevant found-object images, archival material about the band, and talking-head interviews with surviving band members and admirers or sometimes Warhol’s daringly static portrait-movie images of people like Reed who had to just stare into the camera lens.
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