Saturday Night and Sunday Morning For Lou Reed

"I never said I was nice," Lou Reed once wrote in a song. His attitude towards the media often seemed to prove that point. In their obituaries, in October, 2013, the local papers focused on this aspect: how arrogantly Reed would behave towards journalists and how fed up he had become with the world during his later years. What they mostly ignored were the actual qualities of Lou Reed as an artist, spanning nearly 50 years of music history – his ability to introduce extremes, experiments, new musical idioms and themes to the world of pop music, and to make them cohere into a ground-breaking, singularly complex work.

 

The tribute to Lou Reed at the Austrian Film Museum (on the eve of what would have been his 72^nd birthday) takes moving images as a point of departure, acknowledging that the film medium was always a component of his creative process and public image. The moderated 4-hour program will present a rich selection of works (and clips) from the mid-1960s to the present: from Reed's first appearances with his band, The Velvet Underground, in films by Danny Williams, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, to the world premiere of new digital works by Austrian filmmaker and painter Dietmar Brehm, for whom Reed's music has been a lifelong inspiration. Reed's savvy role-playing games – as “transformer” of gender identities, as "Rock'n'Roll Animal", as interpreter of Edgar Allen Poe and Frank Wedekind – will also be represented.

 

To round off the evening, the Film Museum presents live performances by Soap & Skin, Schmésier and Sir Tralala, all providing their personal homage to the music of Lou Reed. 

 

The evening, curated by Christian Höller, is organized in collaboration with FM4 – Im Sumpf. The station's March 2, 2014 broadcast (9-11 pm) will also be dedicated to Lou Reed.