Todd Haynes, The Velvet Underground (Criterion Collection)

Two poles of Todd Haynes's documentary film on the Velvet Underground, a band—Lou Reed, prin­cipal singer and guitar; John Cale, viola and other instruments; Sterling Morrison, guitar; Maureen "Moe" Tucker, drums—that formed in New York City in 1965; came under the sway of Andy Warhol and the deni­zens of his Factory; released its first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, in huge letters "PRODUCED BY ANDY WARHOL," in 1967 its fourth and last, Loaded, in 1970; and disbanded that year, after Cale had already been excluded from the group in 1968:

One pole is John Cale, first shown in footage of a 1963 episode of the CBS quiz show I've Got a Secret. His secret was that he was one of eleven musicians to take part in an eighteen-hour, eight-hundred-and-­forty-part performance of Erik Satie's Vexations (with him on the show was Karl Schenzer, whose secret was that he sat through it). He speaks now about composing with the sound artist and critic Tony Conrad in an apartment on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side that Conrad ("I didn't want to be part of the economy") rented for S22.44 a month: "The most stable thing we could tune to was the sixty-cycle hum of the refrigerator. Because to us, the sixty-cycle hum was the drone of Western civilization." On Haynes's split screen: Cale himself; a view of New York pedestrians as seen from above, crossing the street in a diagonal pat­tern; cars; apartment buildings; telephone poles; tall buildings.