Films

Featuring : Julie Garfield, Barbara Rubin, Chas Stanley and Margaret Boyce Cam, Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus MacLise and others.

Original soundtrack by The Velvet Underground. Tape speed: 7.5 ips.

Notes: The Making of an Underground Film, a report about Piero Heliczer's film Venus In Furs, with the Velvet Underground performing Heroin, Heliczer joining in on saxophone was broadcasted on December 31, 1965 in the CBS Walter Cronkite Show.

"Sound engineer: CBS-TV News. This companion film to Satisfaction is set as the opposite solstice and recapitulates part of Dirt. With Julie Garfield and Barbara Rubin (as Nuns), Chas Stanley (as Death) and Margaret Boyce Cam (as the Nurse), Lou Reed, John Cale, Angus MacLise and others. A chess game under the bridge becomes a Christmas party in Hell. A must for lepidopterists" - Piero Heliczer

"Previously shown one night per week to club or subscription audiences, 'The Bridge' attractions become Gotham's 'hip evenings at the bijou', as jet setters smuggled friends into screenings to watch each other. Whether or not regular full week showings will trim the glamor now that 'anybody' can viaw Venus In Furs Meets The Velvet Underground is conjonctural. Latter sample is part of the Bridge's first program dubbed 'Obsessions' skedded March 9 through 15 and is described as 'where a nun and nurse go to hell because of their sinful life in St. Vincent's Hospital." - Variety

Featuring: Mario Montez, Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga, Jack Smith.

Music: John Cale and Lou Reed.

Notes: musical excerpts are available on Screen Test bootleg LP and CD. The complete 70-min soundtrack circulates as audio tape.

Featuring: Mario Montez.

Music: The Velvet Underground is usually credited but More Milk Yvette does not have the Velvet Underground in it, nor their music. This is a mistake traceable to the original Cinematheque ad in the Village Voice from Feb. 1966 - the copy for which was apparently provided by some uninformed Factory person who mixed up Hedy and More Milk Yvette.

Featuring: The Velvet Underground, Gerard Malanga, Ingrid Superstar, Susan Pile, Edward Walsh.

Music: The Velvet Underground, Nico: I'll Be Your Mirror and European Son from The VU & Nico LP and It Was A Pleasure Then from Nico's Chelsea Girl LP, and two live songs from E.P.I. in Chicago 1966, Heroin and Venus In Furs, sung by Cale.

Notes: A black and white Quicktime™ version is available on A Walk With The Velvet Underground Volume 2 unofficial CD box set. An alternate version of this film was broadcasted on french TV channel Canal + on August 26, 1990. That version is edited to 12 minutes and the soundtrack is different: Venus In Furs and Heroin are not the versions sung by Cale but those from the Columbus 1966 tape. Credits titles are also different (John Cale's name appears correctly spelled even though it was mispelled as 'John Cahill' in the 22-min version). I think that it was this shortened version which was shown at the Fondation Cartier exhibition in 1990.

Review:

"To some extent the so-called psychedelic discotheque was to the cinema of the sixties what the Busby Berkeley ballroom was to the thirties. In a larger sense, however, they are by no means in the same class either socially or aesthetically. The Berkeley extravangazas, like Hollywood, were not places but states of mind. They generated their own ethos, their own aethetic. They answered an obvious need for escape from the dreary hardships of the times. Lifes imitated art. But thirty years later Hollywood had degenerated to the point that it was, at best, an initiation of an imitation. The spate of "hip" Hollywood films, which began to appear after 1966, was about as socially significant as the various Kennedy assassination "souvenirs", and was proffered with the same exploitive street-vending zeal. Like all commercial entertainement, these films were about something rather than being something, and so were the discotheques they imitated.

Andy Warhol's hellish sensorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similarly, Ronald Nameth's cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show ganre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol's show, Nameth's EPI is an experience, not an idea.

In fact, the ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized in Nameth's dazzling kinaethetic masterpiece. Here, form and content are virtually synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding what we see. It's as though the film itself has exploded and reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard malanga and Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol's Vinyl projected on a screen behind. There's a spectacular sense of frantic uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nameth's exquisite manipulation of the medium.

EPI was photographed on color and black-and-white stock during one week of performances by Warhol's troupe. Because the environment was dark, and because of the flash-cycle of the strobe lights, Nameth shot at eight frames per second and printed the footage at the regular twenty-four fps. In addition he developed a mathematical curve for repeated frames and superimpositions, so that the result is an eerie world of semi-slow motion agaisnt an aural background of incredible frenzy. Colors were superimposed over black-and-white negatives and vice-versa. An extraordinary off-color grainy effect resulted from pushing the ASA rating of his color stock; thus the images often seem to lose their cohesiveness as though wrenched apart by the sheer force of the environment.

Watching the film is like dancing in a strobe room: time stops, motion retards, the body seems separate from the mind. The screen bleeds onto the wall, the seats. Flak bursts of fiery explode with slow fury. Staccato strobe guns stitch galaxies of silverfish over slow-motion, stop-motion close-ups of the dancers' dazed ecstatic faces. Nameth does with cinema what the Beatles do with music: his film is dense, compact, yet somehow fluid and light. It is extremely heavy, extremely fast, yet airy and poetic, amosaic, a tapestry, a mandala that sucks you into its whirling maelstrom.

The most striking aspect of Nameth's work is the use of the freeze-frame to generate a sense of timelessness. Stop-motion is literaly the death of the image: we are instantly cut-off from the illusion of cinematic life - the immediacy of motion - and the image suddenly is relegated to the motionless past, leaving in its place a pervading aurea of melancholy. Chis Marker's La Jetée, Peter Goldman's Echos of Silence, and Truffaut's 400 Blows are memorable for the kind of stop-frame work that Nameth raises to quintessential beauty. The final shots of Gerad Malanga tossing his head in slow motion and freezing in several positions create a ghostlike atmosphere, a timeless and ethereal mood that lingers and haunts long after the images fade. Using essentially graphic materials, Nameth rises above a mere graphic exercise: he makes kinetic empathy a new kind of poetry."

by Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1970

Notes: brief silent shot of John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Lou Reed rehearsing in Rosalind Stevenson's apartment. This film was broadcasted during the 1994 Peel Slowly And See BBC TV program with Sunday Morning as soundtrack. A Quicktime™ version is also available on A Walk With The Velvet Underground Volume 2 unofficial CD box set, with a live version of Pale Blue Eyes as soundtrack.

Featuring: Mary Woronov.

Music: The Velvet Underground.

Featuring: Ondine, Nico, Brigid Polk, Mary Woronov, Eric Emerson, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Gerard Malanga and Marie Menken.

Music: The Velvet Underground. The 70-minute portion which includes the Velvet Underground music is known as "The Gerard Malanga Story". The Velvet Underground also provides the music for Reel 12, "Nico Crying" (as well as Reel 8, "Marie Menken" or "The Gerard Malanga Story"). Although the sound is off on reel 12 until the last ten minutes (while you listen to Pope Ondine on Reel 11 on the other screen), the instructions say "After Reel #11 ends, turn light off on Reel #12 but continue sound as exit and intermission music." If you rent the 16mm film, it comes with a full 33 minutes of music, but the projection instructions tell you to turn the sound off during most of it. Audio excerpts are available on Screen Test CD/LP, Shiny Leather In The Dark LP, and A Walk With The Velvet Underground Volume 2 3-CD set.

The Chelsea Girls has been released on DVD by Rarovideo (RVD 40011, Italy, 2003)

Featuring: The Velvet Underground & Nico, Ari Boulogne (Nico's son); appearances by Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, Stephen Shore, Andy Warhol, the New York Police, and others.

Music: The Velvet Underground & Nico.

Notes: this film was shown at the 1990 Fondation Cartier exhibition. A 6'20 excerpt was broadcasted June 8, 1991 on french cultural TV channel La Sept after the Songs For Drella video. Unofficial video copies of this film are circulating.

Review:

"The Velvet Underground and Nico is a portrait of the band, recorded during a practice session at the Factory; apparently shot in January1966, it shows the goup rehearsing for what was probably their opening at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque in February. The music is an instrumental number; Nico, the German singer and actress whom Warhol introduced into the band, sits on a stool and bangs a tambourine, while her son Ari plays on the floor at her feet. The two reels contain a great deal of wild camerawork and psychedelic zooming, which indicates that this film was intended for exhibition, probably in double-screen, behind the Velvet Undergound on stage. It is easy to imagine how this footage might have looked projected in a large, crowded theater in an atmos phere of deafining music, wild dancing, and strobe lighting.

As if to authenticate the film's countercultural status, the second reel documents the arrival of the New York City police during the filming, apparently in response to a telephoned complaint about the noise level at the Factory. After a disarmingly self-conscious cop appears on screen to adjust the amplifier, the rehearsal is stopped, and the camera pulls back to show the deep space of the studio-one of the few documentary of the Factory in Warhol's films-where Warhol is seen talking with the police while the Velvets, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name, and other Factory regulars mill around."

by Callie Angell, The Films of Andy Warhol: Part II (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), p. 27. Copyright 1994 Whitney Museum of American Art; used with permission

Notes: this is a two-reel set for double screen projection. In this film, Moe sit tied up with ropes, while Lou, Sterling and John play with food and monkey around. Unofficial video copies are circulating.

Featuring: Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, The Velvet Underground, Nico, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, Jack Smith, Naomi Levine, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono.

Music: The Velvet Underground, Nico (including I'll Be You Mirror and a long jam track, both recorded at The Dom, April 1966).

Notes: the VU are shown briefly, playing at the 1966 Psychiatrists Convention. A 7 minutes excerpt was shown at the 1990 Fondation Cartier exposition.

Video copies available at Arthouse Inc.

Review (Source & author unknown):
Five years in the life of film-maker Jonas Mekas. A documentary featuring The Fugs, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground, Nico etc. Over three hours long, it was later distributed in four separate part.

Special thanks to Callie Angell, Adjunct Curator, Andy Warhol Film Project, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Information on Warhol's films is also available at The Andy Warhol Museum Home Page.

Hedy, The Velvet Underground And Nico, Chelsea Girls and The Velvet Underground are available for rental from The Museum Of Modern Art in New York.