Directed by: Ronald Namet, 1966
Music:
- (indistinguishable rumble)
- 'I'll Be Your Mirror' (cut)
- 'Venus In Furs' from the Columbus Valleydale Ballroom 1966-11-04 tape version
- 'It Was a Pleasure Then' from Nico's Chelsea Girl LP
- 'European Son' from The Velvet Underground & Nico LP
Cast:
- The Velvet Underground & Nico:
- John Cale (vocals, organ)
- Sterling Morrison (rhythm guitar)
- Maureen Tucker (bass guitar)
- Angus McLise (drums)
- Gerard Malanga: Dancer
- Ingrid Superstar: Dancer
This show was without Lou Reed who was at New York's Beth Israel Hospital for hepatitis, and without Nico who took off for Ibiza at the beginning of June (1966). John Cale on lead vocals and keyboards, Sterling Morrison on guitar, Maureen Tucker on bass, and Angus MacLise was on drums.
EPI is an experience, not an idea.
The ethos of the entire pop life-style seems to be synthesized in Nameth's dazzling kinaesthetic 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.
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, a mosaic, a tapestry, a mandala that sucks you into its whirling maelstrom.








