MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Went to the Secret Cinema‘s Velvet Underground Film Festival last night, which included 2 long and a bunch of short VU/Warhol related films. Two sets of screen tests featuring Nico, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Susan Sontag, Helmut Newton, Salvador Dali, and a few Factory regulars, wherein the subjects sit in front of a (mostly) unmoving camera for a few minutes. The projectionist played some VU songs in the background, which made the screentests very much like a music video. Another section of the film consisted of Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronov’s “whip dance”, which was part of the original VU Exploding Plastic Inevitable show (some of the films in this show were also projected in the background of the show. The first longer film was called “Moe Gets Tied Up” and consists of Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison tying Maureen Tucker to a chair. They drink and eat and crack a whip a couple times. John Cale makes an appearance which mostly consists of sharing a beer with Morrison. The second film was an hour long jam by the VU (with Nico on tambourine, looking supremely bored). The cops show up because of the noise and then we see a few minutes of people chatting in the Factory. The films are, typical of Warhol, rather banal, which is not a problem in itself. What was problematic to me, and severely hindered my enjoyment, was the camera work, which really looked like it was done by a child playing with the camera on its tripod. The camera would sit still for a while and then, as if the cameraman were bored, suddenly starting moving very quickly, back and forth, up and down, zooming in and out, focusing in on different elements of the scene. The movement was rather nauseating, moving so quickly as to just make a big blur out of everything. I prefer the unmoving camera that allows people to move in and out of the scene as they will and the viewer to focus in on what he wishes (much like the work of Ozu, Jarmusch, or Ming-Liang. Still, it was nice to see some of these films, and what, I am told, is the only simultaneous sound film recording of the VU in action.