Cinema
Todd Haynes
Full retrospective | Original films | Masterclass | Encounters | Book
10 - 29 May 2023
The event is over
Born in California in 1961, Todd Haynes, along with Kelly Reichardt and Gus Van Sant, now belongs to a family of independent American filmmakers who grew up in the heart of the counterculture.
Although it amuses him to say he discovered film through the eminently popular figure of Mary Poppins, all his work (begun when he was only 17 with a short film with a deliberately provocative title, The Suicide) systematically turns the founding myths of America on their head.
As early as Superstar: The Story of Karen Carpenter, an unvarnished short documentary that used Barbie dolls to review the career of the iconic singer (completed in 1987, but banned as soon as it was released), and Safe, his second feature film, in which Haynes directed Julianna Moore for the first time (1995), the filmmaker, who is proud of his homosexuality, questions artistic, sexual and social norms in order to surpass them. Seeing film as the art of artifice, Todd Haynes directs in a flamboyant manner. Combining a fascination for the subject with the power of film, he questions the most eminent artistic figures of the 19th and 20th centuries – Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Genet, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground – but also glam rock in the feature film Velvet Goldmine (1998), and the genre of the melodrama, deriving his inspiration from Douglas Sirk in Far from Paradise (2002).
Through the prism of these figures, Todd Haynes focuses on how we relate to identity. In 2015 he directed Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Carol, which won the Queer Palm at the Cannes festival. He has directed sixteen films and is preparing to shoot a new feature film, May December, with Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman and Charles Melton. As a special guest of Centre Pompidou Cinemas, he presents his full oeuvre, including the mini-series Mildred Pierce, made for HBO with Kate Winslet, and made an original short film for the Où en êtes-vous ? (What Stage Are You At?) collection. At the same time, a volume containing an essay on his oeuvre, many original work documents and a vast interview, is published in French by De l’incidence.
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Todd Haynes, Carol
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