The Velvet Underground and Nico

There are a few other bits of footage of the band, but this is the only rentable film known to exist. Anyone have home movies with synched sound? ... If so, want to make some money? (well, don't look at me, others have deeper pockets).

Yes, there is footage of Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable with VU, but the sound isn't from *that* performance. More accurate is the footage of the band tying up Moe. Like this film (VU & Nico), you actually hear the band members speaking and such in the tie-up-Moe film, but they aren't playing instruments, and there's no Nico.

Therefore, fans simply MUST see this film is all its wandering, unfocused glory. Lay back and let the noise wash you away.

It's the Velvet Underground in 1966 so it would be difficult to make this bad. Pretty much the only way it could be ruined is if the cameraman zoomed in and out rapidly for 10 minutes... 20 minutes... 30 minutes... which, in fact, is the case. It's absolutely nauseating. While this might not bother some, it certainly bothered me.

I guess what the cameraman was trying to do was treat the camera like it was an instrument. The other effects don't detract from this document, and the zoom wouldn't even be that bad if it was used a little more sparingly. On occasions, though, I really wish the camera was strictly used as a means to record this moment in time. John Cale plays something really wicked looking at one point, but you never really get a good look at it with all the zooming in and out and the tendency to not be focusing on what you want to see.

It is still a film worth seeing for any Velvet Underground fan, and if you're a fan of Warhol's films, well, I guess you're used to things that are difficult to watch, so go for it. I definitely understand why this isn't commercially available. I'm glad I saw it, but I wouldn't be disappointed if I never saw it again.

I had access to a print of this back in highschool days, and would steal away with friends to screen it whenever possible.

Great document.

But it's not the only film on the subject that should be listed at IMDb.

Someone's neglected to enter the 12-22 minute (depending on the version) "Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable with The Velvet Underground" mini-featurette ...if I've tagged it right! What I've recently seen is a fragment of live 'performance' footage... as in dancer-performers against lightshow and bits and pieces of Velvets' soundtrack further edited into stroboscopic oblivion. The "look" is that of the stills from the show reproduced on the band's first LP.

It's very much a "Morrisey with Warhol" product of the times, a real film in itself, and explains a LOT about how the band worked as an extension of the Warhol Trip in the great man's own fantasizing Svengali imagination. Heard this way (which means heard only but seen 'enacted' with fractured clips of dancers and ecstatics whippers and whippees), the onslaught is a sensual barrage of drugged out cool, Heroin on Speed.

Vocal roles go to Cale doing the one about "boots of shiny, shiny leather", Venus in Furs, and just possibly European Son (where was Lou that night?), and Nico in the middle on a snatch of It Was a Pleasure Then. Gerard and Inga fling themselves around with abandon. Great stuff!

I believe this film has some good things going for it, but within narrow parameters. So I will try to define those, as I see them, and you can decide to make the effort to see it yourself (or not).

The screening I went to was greatly enhanced (in my opinion) by an introduction by Nico's biographer, who had also interviewed everybody appearing in the film. He explained that, when Warhol had been persuaded to take on the management of a nightclub – and a rock band (that band being the Velvet Underground), one of the first things he did was get Nico onboard as a lead singer. Another thing he did was decide to have some film projected behind the band as they were performing onstage. To that end, he filmed them jamming – vanilla footage of about seventy minutes. This is what this film was intended for.

Now it will appeal to die-hard Velvet Underground fans cos if you are a fan you can never get enough of your favourite band. But casual listeners might not be quite so thrilled. You probably know a track called Sister Ray - this is a song by the band that has a few opening lyrics and then a long (instrumental) jam session. Well, if you were to cut out the lyrics and extended the jam for over an hour that's more or less what you've got here. No famous songs. No-one sings in it. But the Velvet Underground brand of jamming can get quite hypnotic. If you're in the mood (with or without drugs) you can probably dig it and really get into it.

A second group it might appeal to is those people who are interested in film history – either professionally or from a deep interest in film. If you think of the original remit (a backing film for a live performance) and think how much money and techno-wizardry would probably be expended on that today, and then look at this . . . Well I think you might agree that it is very effective at very little cost. Watching it in the originally intended setting would be exceedingly cool. Much better than a film of them doing specific tracks (which might clash with the onstage stuff) or something technically complicated (which would possibly distract). It was a good idea that could perhaps usefully be employed by band promoters today. It gives a whole new dimension to the idea of a music video, and a very simple one at that.

A third group it will appeal to is dedicated Warhol fans and historians. How often do you get a chance to glimpse inside one of his workplaces? This film is shot in his first 'Factory' and is a nice down-and-dirty view, complete with police walking in towards the end to get them to turn the noise down (following complaints from neighbours). You can have fun spotting the various personalities and also maybe (as I did) comparing the camera techniques with those used in Chelsea Girls.

I don't see it really appealing to anyone else, but I may have missed something. At any rate, this is minimalist film at its best, exploring technique in the 60's when there was so much waiting to be explored and Warhol was determined to explore (and exploit) it. I admired and enjoyed it. A lot of people didn't.

Even ardent fans of the velvet underground will probably move uneasily in their chairs during this picture. The movie includes everything, except for a VU performance. The band IS there, and they are playing, but it is an incoherent jam session from hell rather then something familiar. Warhol accompanies the music with repeating focus shifts, lighting experiments, bizarre camera movements, etc., all of which combined create an hypnotic trance-like effect, not to be forgotten soon. Warhol also chooses to let only the diegtic sound from the amplifiers be heard, and thus whole sequences, such as the cops who arrive to stop the show on account of various complaints from neighbors, remain unheard and eluded to instead of crudely "shown". This is a revolutionary experiment in rock videos, even in today's standards.