Enjoy All Tomorrow's Holiday Parties with Scenes and Bonus Materials Licensed from GME for Criterion's Blu-Ray Release of THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
/GME is happy to announce Criterion's DVD and Blu-ray release of Todd Haynes celebrated documentary THE VELVET UNDERGOUND, for which we have provided both numerous clip licenses (for the documentary) and additional films included in the Blu-ray bonus features. These extras include the complete Jonas Mekas film AWARD PRESENTATION TO ANDY WARHOL (1964, 9 min) and a 7 minute excerpt from Mekas' landmark 1969 diary film collection WALDEN: DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES.
Director Todd Haynes is no stranger to making unconventional, unforgettable films about rock musicians, from his debut short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988) which featured Barbie dolls, to his daring exploration of the '70s glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (1998), to deploying a cadre of famous people to play Bob Dylan stand-ins in the brilliant I'm Not There (2001). In 2021 he released his first ever documentary, about NYC's greatest experimental rock band of the '60s, The Velvet Underground, finally available for the holidays on disk from Criterion.
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City in 1964. The original band consisted of singer/guitarist Lou Reed, instrumentalist John Cale, guitarist Sterling Morrison, and drummer Angus MacLise, who was replaced by Moe Tucker in 1965. Pop artist Andy Warhol became their manager in 1966, and they became the band for the Factory, and Warhol’s traveling multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable from 1966-1967. They released 4 albums (“The Velvet Underground and Nico” (with German singer and model Nico) in 1967, “White Light/White Heat” (1968), “The Velvet Underground” (1969) and “Loaded” (1970).
Click image to link to the trailer for THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
According to Owen Gleiberman, writing in Variety, “Haynes appears to have vacuumed up every last photograph and raw scrap of home-movie and archival footage of the band that exists and stitched it all into a coruscating document that feels like a time-machine kaleidoscope. He draws [extensively] on the underground films of the period, which were often dream-play documentaries, and he divides the screen into sections, introducing the principals by playing their words off the flickering black-and-white images of their Warhol screen tests. As a collage of the period, “The Velvet Underground” is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage.…”
For this substantial production enriched with avant-garde movies from the era, GME provided clips from Jonas Mekas’ AWARD PRESENTATION TO ANDY WARHOL (1964), SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ANDY WARHOL (1963-1990), and WALDEN: DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES (1969), Warren Sonbert’s AMPHETAMINE (1966), Peter Emmanuel Goldman's ECHOES OF SILENCE (1964) Gideon Bachmann’s UNDERGROUND NEW YORK (1968). Included among these is the famous clip of the Velvet Underground performing at a psychiatrist’s convention in 1966.
Lou Reed and Edie Sedgewick in the Velvet Underground's first ever performance, at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry, in Jonas Mekas' WALDEN: DIARIES, NOTES, AND SKETCHES (1969)
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