Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism’s Indelible Mark

Product Description

For three decades, award-winning independent filmmaker Todd Haynes, who emerged in the early 1990s as a foundational figure in New Queer Cinema, has gained critical recognition for his outsider perspective. Today, Haynes is widely known for bringing women’s stories to the screen. Analyzing Haynes’s films including Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far from Heaven (2002), and Carol (2015), as well as his unauthorized Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar (1987), and the television miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), the contributors to Reframing Todd Haynes reassess his work in light of his long-standing feminist commitments and his exceptional career as a director of women’s films. They present multiple perspectives on Haynes’s film and television work and on his role as an artist-activist who draws on academic theorizations of gender and cinema. The volume illustrates the influence of feminist theory on Haynes’s aesthetic vision, most evident in his persistent interest in the political and formal possibilities afforded by the genre of the woman’s film. The contributors contend that no consideration of Haynes’s work can afford to ignore the crucial place of feminism within it.

Contributors. Danielle Bouchard, Nick Davis, Jigna Desai, Mary R. Desjardins, Patrick Flanery, Theresa L. Geller, Rebecca M. Gordon, Jess Issacharoff, Lynne Joyrich, Bridget Kies, Julia Leyda, David E. Maynard, Noah A. Tsika, Patricia White, Sharon Willis

Review

“I love Reframing Todd Haynes. It was an extraordinary experience to fall down the rabbit hole with this book and revisit the films I thought I knew so well! Each chapter brought something fresh and provocative to Todd’s work. I highly recommend it.”―Christine Vachon

“Todd Haynes is one of the most brilliant and innovative filmmakers working today, stretching the limits of genre, film form, and understandings of sexuality. Theresa L. Geller and Julia Leyda have provided us with a collection of incisive and probing essays by exceptional and influential scholars. The chapters trace the intersection of Haynes’s cinematic ‘thinking’ with constantly evolving feminist discourses and reveal the complex interweaving of politics, aesthetic form, affect, and critique that subtends his work.”―Mary Ann Doane, author of, Bigger Than Life: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema

“Reframing Todd Haynes sets out to assess the influence of feminism, primarily, on Haynes’s oeuvre. Wide-ranging in its themes, methods, and insights, Geller and Leyda’s collection dispels all doubts that a single-director focus might restrict scholarly ambition. . . . The contributors’ patient interpretations make clear that the most meticulous methods for deriving meaning from art often are the most pleasurable to encounter.”―Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Los Angeles Review of Books

About the Author

Theresa L. Geller is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The X-Files.

Julia Leyda is a Professor of Film Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and editor of Todd Haynes: Interviews.