THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO
Production: USA, 1966
Director: Andy Warhol
Category: Popular Music
70-minute film of the Velvet Underground performing an instrumental jam at Warhol’s Factory, with much zooming in and out – a sometimes frustrating but still exciting glimpse of this seminal rock and roll band at their very inception. The performance is eventually broken up by police after complaints from neighbouring buildings. It was actually filmed as moving “wallpaper” to be projected silently onto the band while they played live shows. Other footage of the band filmed for back-projection includes screen tests of Nico, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison, whip-dances by Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov, and The V.U. (1966), a short sound film in which drummer Mo Tucker is tied up by Reed, Morrison and John Cale and tormented by whips and food. Warhol also made The Velvet Underground Tarot Cards (1966), and a 33-minute colour concert film The Velvet Underground In Boston (1967). Another film from that year was Rosalind Stevenson’s Sunday Morning, a 6-minute silent document of Velvet Underground members John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed rehearsing in the director’s apartment, while Piero Heliczer’s 1965 Venus In Furs was a 16-minute colour film, silent with a soundtrack by The Velvet Underground on tape, featuring Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus Maclise and others – “A chess game under the bridge becomes a party in Hell. A must for lepidopterists”.
ANDY WARHOL’S EXPLODING PLASTIC INEVITABLE WITH THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
Production: USA, 1966
Director: Ronald Nameth
Category: Popular Music
A film with recordings from one week of performances of the EPI and Velvet Underground shows which were filmed in Chicago in 1966. Two versions are available, of 12 and 22 minutes duration respectively. Nameth filmed shows in both monochrome and colour, and also shot at 8 frames per second whilst printing at the regulation 24. This, combined with superimpositions and freeze-frames, gives the film a semi-slow motion effect, like a vision of strobic ghosts feeding at the carcass of cacophony. Songs include “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, “European Son”, “Heroin”, “Venus In Furs”, and Nico’s “It Was A Pleasure Then”, from her Chelsea Girls LP.
Posted by Lycanthrope and The Purple Gas
