از طرفِ
شهریار حنیفه

Describing how we are riveted to our cinema seats, feeling a desperate need to remain motionless for a few minutes and wait to return to reality when the creator is Andy Warhol—and here, as a mere case in point, his documentary The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound—is an utterly impossible task. Selecting a film from his archives not even for analysis, but for taking notes, is utterly pointless; because in many respects, there may be no necessity—in this particular instance, for example—to write about and analyze such a strange existence, a brief seventy minutes within the absolute realm of sound and image. We all know that it is nearly impossible to teach anyone how to love such works. So why write at all?
For now, I must say I had been looking for an excuse—the opening of a door toward texts that have rarely found space for expression in Iran’s written history; a doorway into American experimental cinema of the pivotal 1960s, toward Pop Art, toward the world of commerce, advertising, and consumerism, toward fashion, queer culture, reality and time, political avant-gardism… And how could one open this door and not see Andy Warhol—the mirror to all of these—standing authoritatively, having watched, listened, and created, ignoring the bewilderment of those around him, answering their query of “What on earth is this?!” with a confident smile, uttering his famous line—not to them, but to himself in their presence: “Oooh, That’s Fantastic!”
Although discussing the worldview of figures like Warhol has always been accompanied by social and ideological limitations—and not just in Iran—and bringing up such discourse demands masterful, experienced scrutiny from a theorist/critic, naturally requiring extensive knowledge and intuition on the author’s part; and well, who is more inexperienced than I to bring up such matters? True, but the intent of this piece—aside from resembling a child’s playful sampling (To eat? Or not to eat?) with the aim of both speaking of Warhol and not speaking of him (and well, such is childlike enthusiasm and its nibblings)—is primarily to spark a nudge to more qualified individuals (with all due apologies), so that perhaps they might finally realize: it is getting far too late to speak of many things.
I emphasize that I do not quite see speaking of this great artist within my capability, and my confidence in “speaking” is low, being bewildered in translating the very word “speaking” (for my own understanding) under such specific conditions… The choice of The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound began as a brief account of this very bewilderment—a film that, fortunately, stands slightly further away amidst Warhol’s overarching theories, moving from the depths of history more cautiously toward a more defined category; I suspected, and still suspect, that it offers me more of an escape route from having to speak about him in greater detail. So I proceed with caution and wait in hope of the changes that may await us.
The band plays, relentlessly; the camera, in its own fashion, warms up to the music, aiding Warhol’s ideas as they lean even more aggressively into the viewer’s prior awareness: when he engages in defamiliarization, refusing to drive the aesthetic aspects of rock stars and their performances according to our established habits, and instead—by capturing irrational and dizzying moments, drifting and out-of-focus framing, and neutral, occasionally oblivious faces—relentlessly strives to turn the promotional documentary into its own anti-promotion (a different kind of promotion); and when he engages in familiarization, repeatedly returning to Nico’s close-up and evoking a previously heard tempo, turning completely into a reminder of Screen Test: Nico 1966, and likewise Lou Reed’s face (Screen Test: Lou Reed (Coke) 1966), and perhaps even the faces of the others [1]; or the artistic lighting shift from black to white (and vice versa) on stage, recalling several other mind-boggling works of his (such as Chelsea Girls); or that senseless, entirely unnecessary cut that ruins the film’s brilliant single take for no apparent reason, which—if our memory serves us well—we realize we saw an exact equivalent of at the end of Vinyl; and other examples that function so thoroughly as signature signposts of his cinema that it feels as though, right in the middle of the documentary, you are simultaneously watching the creator’s other films.
Nevertheless, the most vital element whose juxtaposition with other components brings about what we call “experimental” in cinema discourses is sound. The restless music played for nearly fifty minutes, trapped inside a repetitive scene (a specific frame) [2] to compel the viewer into a prolonged gaze; from a certain point onward, owing to its monotonous occurrence (content-wise: the documentary reaching a point where—until the end—it ceases to convey information), we begin to doubt whether there is a gap between what we see and what we comprehend. What if it isn’t like this, but like that? What if we ought to look at it differently? What if…? In the end, we are led astray and nudged deeper into thought, constructing our own film in our minds more than ever, becoming thinkers through Warhol’s aid. Yet, despite trusting what we have constructed and the solace we gain from its formation in our minds, we are still slipping on a cold, slick surface, overrun by a sense of helplessness; we are thinkers who still do not understand. Much like understanding the repeatedly recurring shot of the dāyereh (tambourine) and cha-cha (maracas), whose beauty we appreciate and whose function we discern (to me: a non-silent pause for the music’s continuation), yet we cannot claim it to be tangible (given it has no designated player and is handed around among several people multiple times, not to mention the instrument’s sound isn’t heard at all!) or evocative of the familiarity of reality; for it is not that at all, and the entire world of the film, self-reliant, is the conception of a poetics whose elements, while ordinary, seek an extraordinary meaning, merely influenced by reality.
Yet this poetics, for me personally, performs its primary task through a retrospective gaze toward the pre-film world—as Warhol constantly challenges our minds so that by watching the film [3], we return to its production process and pre-production stages. Can one watch the aforementioned documentary and not ask oneself whether what we are seeing is a live performance or not? One cannot, because the filmmaker does not want us to. If the performance is live, then why do we hear some dialogues and not others? Is not the recordist’s distance from the stage constant (given that the music’s tone/volume does not change)? Furthermore, the sound of certain instruments is sometimes heard and sometimes absent. And when we weigh the idea of post-dubbed audio against the real-time nature of the visual performance (even if music was simultaneously played on set via a tape recorder), in certain places we encounter sound and image sync so precise that we simply cannot accept such a premise. Of course, shot-by-shot analysis could reveal what is going on and what tricks we would need to employ were we to reconstruct it, but the point of this discussion is not to reach that discovery; rather, it is to arrive at the realization that The Velvet Underground and Nico: A Symphony of Sound is, in the most precise sense, a film—deliberate and focused, a work filtered through reflection, far removed from any form of haphazardness or cluelessness. When we sit to review the image and sound side-by-side—armed with sufficient cinematic literacy—we readily discern how the image anticipates the sound, and how its pans, zooms, and shakes—its dance as a whole—align in advance with what has not yet been heard; and from another angle, how the sound anticipates the image, readying itself for rhythmic synchronization. Such maneuvers, whether live or not, have been rehearsed over and over, pointing to a form of deception conveyed to us by Warhol within the very concept of documentary; and the question arises: how does this high precision degrade into a bundle of static noise in the final moments (behind-the-scenes of the music performance after its conclusion)? Where did the fault truly lie? Perhaps it is an intentional disruption by the filmmaker, unexplained (or perhaps there is an explanation we are unaware of). Could it even be a defect present in the copy in our hands! Here I confess I never figured out whether the copy I possess of his other film, Outer and Inner Space, is a bootleg recorded illegally off a theater screen [4], or whether the film’s philosophy itself was to project a film [5] on a cinema screen and capture another film from that act, making this secondary film the final version!
Indeed, it is out of these very unknowns that we dub figures like Andy Warhol avant-garde; it might even seem somewhat laughable, but for the author, this too is another crucial point worthy of examination, signaling the vitality of an authentic, creative intellect that has bravely charged across eras toward meaning and its charms to conquer its primary and ultimate truth… It is hard to speak of Warhol, and this sentence itself is perhaps the reason for this historical neglect.

Footnotes:
[1] In any case, not all works in Warhol’s Screen Test series are accessible to everyone (along with many of his other works), and well, who knows? Perhaps similar shots exist elsewhere that we are unaware of.
[2] Unlike another documentary Warhol made about this band: The Velvet Underground in Boston.
[3] “Film” in the sense of what we observe on the screen.
[4] Given that some of Warhol’s works are not even available for purchase and are only permitted to be screened in certain museums, this notion is not entirely far-fetched.
[5] As an explanation for those who have not seen Outer and Inner Space, the phrase “a film” might be somewhat misleading; in reality, two films are projected side by side simultaneously on the cinema screen—two images on a single screen.