Todd Haynes

Amore e guerra Il presente volume intende proporre, attraverso mirati case studies, una riflessione sulle varie stratificazioni intermediali che intervengono nel processo di adattamento di testi letterari per il grande schermo. La prospettiva adottata mira a far rilevare l'ampio spettro delle intersezioni fra media, codici e poetiche dello sguardo: dalle dinamiche performative enfatizzate nel passaggio dal teatro classico al cinema, alle strategie di transcodificazione che pongo-no l'accento su cromatismi e temperature ideologiche più o meno connotate nel passaggio dal graphic novel al film, o alla tematizzazione della fotografia nel percorso di traduzione/tradimento dal romanzo al racconto delle immagini, con un affondo specifico sulle dinamiche di trasposizione intersemiotica che agiscono nel transito della narrazione dalla letteratura al cinema. Nella scelta dei casi di studio emerge con chiarezza come genre e gender siano spesso strettamente interrelati e come il discorso sul genere, la forma e il codice possa essere funzionale, soprattutto a certe latitudini geografiche e sociali, alla messa in racconto di appassionati gender troubles, che vedono le donne protagoniste di un accidentato, ma deciso, itinerario di affermazione della propria agency e della libera rivendicazione di passioni e desideri imprevisti.

Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), this book reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, Living Screens contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualised as a ‘plastic’ form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. At the heart of melodrama, Living Screen argues, is our desire to see and be seen, hear and be heard, touch and be touched. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.

This chapter focuses on Velvet Goldmine (1998) and argues that Todd Haynes represents Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona as a series of phantoms in the Derridean sense. That is, figures that are both absent and present, material and immaterial— figures that affirm that no identity can ever be quite complete since the markers of identity are always enmeshed in a network of differences that can be continually re-coded. Haynes' original script contained several Bowie songs, which he was forced to replace when Bowie refused to give him permission to use the music (Bowie claimed he intended to make his own film about his Ziggy Stardust period). Undeterred, Haynes produced a movie that made no direct reference to Bowie by name, yet recoded Bowie's multiple personas and characters in a parallel cinematic world.  Haynes' film invites the spectator to re-think Identity in terms of 'contamination' and 'inauthenticity'. He also establishes a genealogical connection between Oscar Wilde (one of the film's many spectres) and Bowie by making several allusions to the parallels between 19th century aestheticism and Glam Rock. In short, I argue that Haynes' film facilitates a critique of the idea that Bowie's shifting identity is merely a question of aesthetic choice, or an expression of any kind of cultural logic. Rather, I argue that the figure of the Derridean phantom offers a new way to read Velvet Goldmine, and to identify the cultural work performed by Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona.

Three different directors working at different moments in film history shoot three movies loosely based on the same story: Douglas Sirk’s All that heavern allows, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear eats the soul and Todd Haynes’s Far from heaven deal with the same basic theme - how individual freedom is repressed by social conventions and overt discrimination - although treated differently: Sirk makes emotions "overflow" into the surrounding environment, so that all elements of the mise-en-scène become "living replacements" of what happens to the characters; Fassbinder is more directly interested in social critique, but, through his "distancing effects" is able to make us fully and painfully aware of the characters' emotions; and Haynes brings the classical melodramatic elements into new life, infusing them with a sensibility that can very well resonate with contemporary audiences. Taken together, such films witness the persistence of melodrama through changing times and social contexts.

For my summer 2015 film course, I wanted to compare Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story with the CBS biopic The Karen Carpenter Story. I feel that Superstar, by Todd Haynes, is a far superior film, even given its limited budget and use of unauthorized music from the Carpenters.

Bu çalışmada Sigmund Freud'un Bir Çocuk Dövülüyor 1 başlıklı psikanalitik çalışmasını kaynak metin alan Todd Haynes'in Dottie Gets Spanked (1993) isimli kısa filmi uyarlama açısından incelenmiştir.

In this study, Todd Haynes’s short movie Dottie Gets Spanked is analyzed in terms of adaptation, taking the
psychoanalytic study of Sigmund Freud titled “A Child Is Being Beaten” as source text.

This essay seeks to offer an analysis of Todd Haynes’ film Safe (1995) in light of the ripened theories of networking and assemblage one frequently finds in contemporary discourses of new materialism. By attending to both the thematic and cinematographic aspects of the film, I argue that Haynes offers a curious rendition on the dexterous capacity of the mind that allows us to freely associate with and dissociate from various kinds of surroundings. As the film progresses, one witnesses a transformation taking place in the mind of the protagonist Carol, as the exhaustion caused by external objects becomes mediated and reduced when she starts to regain the lost subjectivity. What the film celebrates is a Jamesian flexibility and freedom of mind, a human capacity that has been diminished and worn out by the consumerist and networking culture.

I am excited to share with you the table of contents for the forthcoming volume from Duke University Press: _Reframing Todd Haynes--Feminism's Indelible Mark_. Co-edited with Julia Leyda, this collection is part of Camera Obscura book series.

In this paper, Lacanian psychoanalysis is employed to critically discuss notions concerning the subject's desire in the era of neoliberalism. To do so, a quote by Margaret Thatcher is analysed through Lacan's University discourse. By critically reflecting on this quote, neoliberal narratives surrounding accountability, 'perfectibility' and consumerism are explored through Lacanian theory. Parallels between Todd Haynes' movie [SAFE] and Lacan's notions of 'divided subject' and desire are critically reviewed within the neoliberal-University frame. The paper focuses on investigating how desire is exploited and manipulated by neoliberalism. It is argued that, in the neoliberal-University discourse, Lacan's divided subject ($)-identified in Haynes' movie with the character of Carol-deals with a particular type of alienation resulting from the demand of the neoliberal master for a whole, perfect subject (a). The Carol/$ is silenced within the modern neoliberal-University discourse, drowned by a constant noise (voice). In the final section, Kristeva's and Ettinger's notions of abjection and matrix respectively are discussed to forward both ways in which it is possible to resist the master signifier of neoliberalism; and to criticize Lacan's conception of subjectivity.

ABSTRACT

This chapter explores ‘essence’ and ‘originality’ in screenwriting adaptation practice. It investigates the ‘translation’ of a source text into a new form, and argues for creativity and risk-taking in order to produce original work.
Case studies examine decisions made by screenwriters to move away from a source text and make the story their own. Greta Gerwig’s reframing of Little Women (2019) meant changing the structure and the ending. Kelly Reichard adapted three unconnected short stories into Certain Women (2016). Rainer Werner Fassbinder radically transformed Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) into Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Tod Haynes was inspired by both films to create Far from Heaven (Haynes 2002), which referenced both films and paid homage to Sirk and Fassbinder.

This Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference presentation (2019) (for a panel I organized, chaired by Lynne Joyrich) is excerpted from my forthcoming essay on _Safe_ in the volume I edited with Julia Leyda, _Reframing Todd Haynes--Feminism's Indelible Mark.

En Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), el deseo entre Therese y Carol viene marcado por su separación, por la asunción de una distancia. El siguiente artículo se pregunta alrededor de la figuración del gesto que se construye entre la mirada de ambas heroínas a partir del plano/contraplano con el que Haynes abre y cierra el film. Tomando prestadas las posibilidades del melodrama clásico para ello, Haynes sitúa al espectador frente a una idea renovada del plano/contraplano en la que no hay una mirada que someta a la otra, sino que cada una posee su propia subjetividad. Mirar se convierte en Carol en un «cara a cara» en términos de Emmanuel Levinas, donde el Otro toma la significancia y la infinitud del discurso del yo. Mirada, deseo, cara a cara, rostro, caricia. Los conceptos con los que Levinas define la fenomenología de Eros emergen en Carol como las figuras que permiten una relectura del sistema construido por Hollywood a partir del deseo y la invención de un gesto erótico forjado en el tiempo de la visibilidad del Otro.

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In Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), the desire that Therese and Carol feel for each other arouses in the events of separation, whenever there is a (physical) distance between them. The following paper addresses the figuration of the gesture that is built between the gaze of both heroines in the shot/reverse-shot, which Haynes draws upon at the beginning and at the end of the film. Borrowing the possibilities of classic melodrama for this purpose, Haynes confronts the viewer with a renewed idea of the shot/reverse-shot in which there is no look that submits to the other, but each one possesses its own subjectivity. The act of looking becomes in Carol a «face to face», in terms of Emmanuel Levinas, where the Other takes the significance and infinity of the discourse of the self. Gaze, desire, face to face, face, caress. The concepts with which Levinas defines the phenomenology of Eros emerge in Carol as the figures that allow a rereading of Hollywood system concerning desire and the invention of an erotic gesture wrought in the time of the visibility of the other.

A massive part of the production of ‘David Bowie’ was, and remains, the deft employment of an aesthetics of absence. The ‘killing’ of Ziggy Stardust in 1973, the passage across the silence between one side of a vinyl album and another – most notably on Low and Heroes (1977) – were all employments of the power of what was suddenly no longer there or the force of empty spaces. This essay explores Bowie’s relationship to absence by reading two texts from which he is himself absent – Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers (1888) and Todd Haynes’s  lm Velvet Goldmine (1998). It argues that Aspern provides an uncanny aesthetic, sensuous and formal template for Hayne’s cinematic exploration of glam rock and its legacies. In making this argument, it explores the extents to which absence is a generative energy in James’s work and Bowie’s. Using close reading, the essay examines how the novella and the  lm explore questions such as a ective (mis)placement in time and the relationship between absence and resistance. It also reads the role of sensuous phenomena – most notably sound,  re and colour – in making, for both texts, the past amenable to touch and visitation.

This essay investigates identity politics in Todd Haynes’s 2002 film, _Far
from Heaven_, and in two of its precursors, Douglas Sirk’s _All that Heaven Allows_ and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s _Ali: Fear Eats the Soul_. It takes as its starting point two puzzling features of Haynes’s film: the oddity of setting a remake in the same time and place as its original, and the film’s banal representation of racism and homophobia. The essay proposes a reading of _Far from Heaven_ in which the film questions the ability of melodrama to plausibly address contemporary forms of social injustice.

L’articolo intende discutere come il cinema (in particolare quello di Todd Haynes) e la serialità televisiva (in particolare il caso di Mad Men) degli ultimi decenni abbiano ripreso, attualizzato, rielaborato i melodrammi realizzati a Hollywood da Douglas Sirk e, quindi, le categorie di family e woman’s melodrama che proprio in relazione (seppur non esclusiva) all’opera di Sirk la critica accademica ha elaborato. Esaminare le forme del melodramma nella produzione (soprattutto seriale) contemporanea può risultare fondamentale per misurare la complessità di un dibattito, quello sul melodramma, che continua ad apparire irrisolta e proprio per questo ancora produttiva.

Locating in Todd Haynes's (1995) film Safe an example of " ecological art, " this essay demonstrates how formal and narrative elements of the film generate an " atmospheric rhetoric " within which audiences are invited to attend and attune to both the protagonist's and their own ecological enmeshment. These forms of attention—to the banal details of coexistence—and attunement—to the strange sounds of everyday life in postindustrial societies—provoke a mode of " ecological thought. " As this essay argues, thinking ecologically engenders a meaningful mode of political engagement that invites reflection on the consequences of impure relations.

This monograph considers the ground-breaking Todd Haynes film in several ways: as a model of storytelling dependent on an eclectic style and pop culture referencing; as a media controversy illuminating how such controversies are constructed and how they influence the reception of the work; and as an example of gay cinema, one of the first of the New Queer Cinema.

[Dark Waters (2019) is the story of a corporate defence lawyer who is fighting a case to prove that DuPont, a chemical manufacturing corporation, is indeed responsible for cancers and other diseases among a lot of people in West Virginia. While reviewing the movie Muhammad Kamruzzamann urges that this is high time that people Bangladesh questions governing bodies and the companies that are responsible for taking our country at the top of every pollution rating]-- New Age

Filme sind Formen von Erfahrung. In ihrer Vielfalt vermitteln sie uns einen Sinn für die Veränderlichkeit von Lebensweisen: für Geschichte. Sie projizieren Vorstellungen von Freiheit und Festgelegtem, spüren dem Faszinierenden und dem Fremdgewordenen im Urbanen nach – der Strahlkraft der Stadt.
Ein ebenso liebevolles wie theoriefreudiges Verständnis von Kino inspiriert die Film-Schriften von Siegfried Mattl (1954–2015); sie waren ein wesentlicher Teil der Arbeit dieses herausragenden Wiener Historikers. Vom »Historienkino« eines Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott oder Todd Haynes zu Körperbildern bei David Cronenberg oder in Koreakriegsfilmen; von Wien-Ansichten von Ernst Schmidt jr. und den Lumières über Amateurfilme mit »Führerkonvoi« und »Bubenwallfahrt« bis zu Auftragsfilmen über Stadtplanung und Wäschewaschen: Mattls Essays und Studien (von denen einige hier erstmals publiziert werden) sind reich an Deutung, Material und Kontext, an Witz und Kritik.
Quer durchs Rote Wien, Hanekes Weiß und Dylans Blues lädt uns Mattl ein, zurück und voraus zu schauen – auf Ephemeres, das zu Geschichte wird.

Siegfried Mattl wurde 1954 in Mürzzuschlag (Steiermark) geboren. Nach dem Studium der Geschichte und Politikwissenschaft war er als Zeithistoriker, Universitätsdozent und kritischer Essayist (sowie als zeitweiliger Rock-Gitarrist) tätig. Darüber hinaus kuratierte er diverse Ausstellungen, so etwa zum austrofaschistischen Ständestaat oder zu Felix Salten. Neben der Mit-Herausgabe mehrerer geschichts- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Sammelbände und zahlreichen Aufsätzen zählt der Band Das 20. Jahrhundert der Geschichte Wiens aus dem Jahr 2000 zu seinen wichtigsten Publikationen. Mattl gehörte seit 1986 dem Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Gesellschaft an, das sich unter seiner Leitung (ab 2005) in den Forschungsgebieten urban history und visual history, vor allem in der Arbeit zu und mit Film, profilierte. Er verstarb 2015 in Wien.
https://www.filmmuseum.at/kinoprogramm/schiene?schienen_id=1457933994123
https://www.filmmuseum.at/aktuelles/fotos_unserer_gaeste/gaeste_detail?gaeste_id=1462529399129