another one of my very favourites
article from www.sensesofcinema.com
article from www.sensesofcinema.com
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Todd Haynes[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
b. January 2, 1961, Los Angeles, California, USA.
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]by Keith Uhlich[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Keith Uhlich is a movie buff and critic residing in Brooklyn, NY. His e-mail is [email protected][/SIZE][/FONT]Threes are key to understanding Todd Haynes’ cinema. As of this writing, his body of work consists of two movements of threes – three shorts, three features. The two movements overlap each other, the final short, Dottie Gets Spanked (1994), coming in-between Haynes’ first and second features, Poison (1991) and Safe (1995). On the outskirts, in the far past, lie Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud (1985) and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). In the more recent past is Haynes’ glam-rock feature Velvet Goldmine (1998). Six movies in total, with a seventh, Far From Heaven (2002), on the way. It’s a smaller output than most of the great directors, but cinema has never been solely about quantity, and Haynes’ meticulously planned and executed cinema is of such high quality that each film is worth analysis and consideration.
The overlap in Haynes’ narrative storytelling, between the shorts and features, is akin to the experiences his movies provide. I can think of no clearer illustration of this than an opening sequence of Poison wherein the character John Broom (Scott Renderer), imprisoned for homosexual acts, is asked bluntly about the term that supposedly defines him. "Is that written as two words?" a clearly discomfited guard questions as he points to the hand-scrawled homosexual on the prison admittance form. Look closely and you can see the guard’s finger bisecting the word into homo sexual. Divided, the two words stand on their own as concrete categories. Joined together it’s a likewise definable term. Yet there’s the matter of that empty, bottomless space in-between, the gray area that people and their natures are subject to, but rarely address. The third category. The ineffable.
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Safe[/SIZE][/FONT]Haynes addresses the ineffable. He goes out of his way to make us aware of that bottomless space beneath the categories, sexual and otherwise. As in Yeats, the center does not hold – Haynes’ stories, his characters, his visual palette, every single element of his movies coalesce to give a sense of the anarchy loosed within his characters, regardless of the emotional repression they necessarily experience at the dictates of the movies’ structures. The people in a Haynes film move less on straight lines than in endless concentric circles, their internal states forever affected by their environments and other external stimuli, for better, for worse.
From Haynes’ movies, in addition to his own writings and interviews given, one gets a sense of a well-educated man with an imposing vernacular. The academic nature of his conversation comes across doubly so in the structure of his movies, where characters, dialogue and cultural references, camera movement, etc, comment on the action as in an essay. One can nearly sense the indentations between paragraphs. It’s a very literary experience, a cinema where you feel (or read) through the ideas, as opposed to the more commonplace occurrence where viewer passivity is the order of the day. I must therefore state bluntly that Haynes’ movies are not for everyone. I recall New York movie critic Armond White dismissing Velvet Goldmine as "a desiccated thesis-film," and I can’t help but think that the didactic nature of Haynes’ work, something I personally find tremendously engaging, will turn off those who believe cinema to be, at its purest level, a wholly visceral experience.
No doubt Haynes’ method comes somewhat from his education at Brown University, where he graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Art and Semiotics. That same year he moved to New York and launched Apparatus Productions whose aim was the support of independent film. Already he had made the first of his shorts, Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud. The film is not available for rental as far as I’m aware, but I was able to view it at Haynes’ 1998 American Museum of the Moving Image retrospective. Certainly this is a rough work, amateurish in certain aesthetic and technical respects, yet Haynes’ confidence in his storytelling and subject comes across so strongly that the shortcomings become part of the charm. Already the academicism is in place. The first shot is of an actor being made up as Arthur Rimbaud and relating his impressions of the infamous poet. This takes place in front of a white backdrop with disembodied hands applying the makeup from off-screen. The acknowledgment of artifice helps ease us into the story of the violent love affair between Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Haynes casts both roles with actors of the same youthful appearance, even though Verlaine was quite older than Rimbaud. Plus Haynes has the actor playing Verlaine wear an obviously fake beard that does little to disguise the adolescent voice and gait. To an extent, this can be attributed to the usual vagaries of student film production, but it also feels, for the most part, quite right. As a result, the nature of the Rimbaud/Verlaine relationship becomes adolescent and vampire-like, each character trying to suck the life, and the art, out of the other. Assassins is also a smorgasbord of anachronisms – an absinthe bar plays Iggy Pop’s "Nightclubbing," Rimbaud spray-paints graffiti on walls – so much so that the essences of the characters take to the fore and subsume any need for realism. Indeed, realism is not what Haynes is after in any of his movies. The following exchange of dialogue in Velvet Goldmine perhaps expresses one of Haynes’ cinematic beliefs, and also describes the ultimate experience of Assassins, "…we prefer impressions to ideas – brief flights to sustained ones – exceptions to types – situations to subjects – and yourself?"
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Superstar[/SIZE][/FONT]That last question is important in Haynes’ cinema, for his movies always make us consciously aware of our beliefs, and then challenge us to rethink them and consider others. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story does as much and more, and it’s a shame that it can only be seen through bootleg video, blocked from distribution by Karen Carpenter’s family. One can understand why, because the film is a distressing examination of public versus private personas. For the most part, the film is shot with Barbie dolls playing the roles of the ill-fated ‘70s singer and her family. This is a perfect choice, because the mass influence of Barbie dolls in a young person’s life cannot be denied. They stress an ideal of beauty that, in most subtle ways, engrains itself in a young person’s mind. Haynes is not criticizing the dolls themselves so much as presenting the ideal beauty that they support and showing how naïve adherence to such a mindset can drive certain among us on a hellish downward slope. Using a popular entertainer as the central character further imbues the story with tragedy, for it plays on the false innocence that the media builds up around its celebrities and exposes the humanity beneath. Using the cheeriness of the Carpenters’ songs as juxtaposition, Haynes also relates the confusion of an era – video images of Nixon in office and the Vietnam conflict add political resonance, while reflective tracking shots of a suburban neighborhood remind us that there are stories behind each and every door. Karen’s is merely one in several billion.
