Metrograph

Playing together on-stage for the first time since 1968, Lou Reed and John Cale perform a 15-song biography of a departed friend, foil, and collaborator. “Drella,” a portmanteau of “Dracula” and “Cinderella,” is an old nickname for their subject, Andy Warhol, dead for three years when Lachman filmed this performance, by turns a fond and cutting send-off featuring Reed on guitar and lead vocals, and Cale on electric viola and keyboards. Director Lachman, who frequently works as Todd Haynes’s cinematographer, uncovered the negatives for his haunting concert film while doing research for Haynes’s The Velvet Underground (2021), allowing Songs for Drella to be restored and seen again in all its austere majesty. Preceded by Scenes of the Life of Andy Warhol, one of Mekas’s famed rapid-fire diary films, which portrays Warhol alongside other NYC counterculural icons and features footage from the Velvet’s first public performance.

Scenes of the Life of Andy Warhol 16mm print courtesy of The Filmmaker's Cooperative/The New American Cinema Group

Q&A with director Ed Lachman, moderated by writer Sasha Frere-Jones, on Saturday, August 24th