Similarly playing with the form's conventions, The Velvet Underground throws the viewer headlong into a series of split screens, half with contemporary commentaries and half with an ongoing explosion of imagery from a fertile period of mid-60s New York City. Wright's The Sparks Brothers utilises self-awareness with its talking heads sections – lighting its subjects in a consciously stagey way, seating them farther apart than usual, adding tangential animation scenes and amusing asides to capture the playful misfit spirit of Russell and Ron Mael.
These films have each transcended any staid conventions of what a music doc should be. Happily, 2021 has felt like something of a banner year for the engaging, complex, and visually inventive music documentary, and Haynes' film joins the ranks of Edgar Wright's The Sparks Brothers and Questlove's Summer of Soul as some of the best. A few have become touchstones for what can be done when great musical artists are captured by correspondingly great filmmakers, and it doesn't feel premature to say that The Velvet Underground is one of those. Recent films, like Amazing Grace (2018) and Beyonce's Homecoming (2019), have swiftly climbed to the top of the tree. There are riotous fly-on-the-wall contemporary tour documentaries, giving us access to pop personalities in riveting detail, from Let's Get Lost (1988) to Gimme Shelter (1970) to In Bed with Madonna (1991). There are the anthologised histories of entire genres, like Ken Burns' opus-length Jazz series or his more recent Country Music. There's the concert film, like DA Pennebaker's Monterey Pop (1968), Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978) or Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense (1984).
In the long and colourful history of the music documentary – and its many subgenres – there are some exemplary standouts.
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