THE CINEMA OF TODD HAYNES

From the trenches of independent American film of the 1990s, Todd Haynes has emerged in the twenty-first century as one of the world’s most audacious filmmakers. In a series of smart, informative essays, this book traces his career from its roots in New Queer Cinema to the Academy-Award-nominated Far from Heaven (2002), taking in along the way such landmark films as Poison (1991), Safe (1995) and Velvet Goldmine (1998). Contributors look at his films from many different angles, including his debts to the avant-garde or such noted precursors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his adventurous uses of melodrama, and his incisive portrayals of contemporary life.

January 2006
224 pages

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James Morrison is Associate Professor in Film in the Department of Literature at the Claremont McKenna College, California. He is the author of Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors (1998) as well as books on Roman Polanski and Terrence Malick.

‘[The essays] are of consistently high quality, fascinating, and provocative ... More attention of the work of Todd Haynes is not just refreshing but a reminder that queer film can be both vitally important and enormously entertaining.’
– Michael Bronski, The Guide 

'Todd Haynes deserves this book, and this book deserves praise as a comprehensive, dialogic engagement with his body of work to date. James Morrison and his wide range of contributors bring each film into focus through a set of finely ground lenses - postmodern, political, queer, generic - that also informed the work's conception. A collection as intellectually and emotionally generous as Haynes' films.'
– Patricia White, Swarthmore College

'Ordinarily a book of theoretically-besotted essays on the cinema offers little more than a long dull slog through the painfully obvious. You don't have to have read Lacan on ‘The Mirror Stage' to know that Hitchcock deals with sexuality at its most fetishized. In fact what the noted French mythomanic has to say may well work against any and all manner of understanding of Hitchcock's art. But you can't steer so easily away from theory when it comes to the works of Todd Haynes. Semiotics was his major at Brown university, and that fact informs every single one of his films... In the notes to the many well-crafted essays about these films that comprise The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows, you'll find citations of everything from the American Psychiatric Association's 1987 ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders', to Dr. Frederic Wertham's ‘Seduction of the Innocents' (a famous piece of 50's hysteria that claimed Batman and Robin would turn post World War II America's children gay) to James Baldwin's brilliant and sadly little discussed essay on African-American moviegoing, The Devil Finds Work, right on through to citations of such theoretical regulars as Jacqueline Rose, Laura Mulvey, and Mary Anne Doane. Add the queer likes of Wayne Koestenbaum and D.A. Miller to your footnotes and it's clear you've got yourself a book worth reading – and teaching.'
– David Ehrenstein, Screening the Past, Winter 2007/8