Scott MacDonald, “From Underground to Multiplex”
1. In what ways did experimental film and filmmakers inform Haynes’s film education and early filmmaking?
During Haynes early years in High School, he was exposed to the experimental style of Stan Brakhage. He began studying feature length feature, yet experimental such as Riddles of the Sphinx. He and two other started Apparatus Productions to help others who created experimental move toward the shift of genre and commercial work.
To what degree did Superstar fit or not fit into trends in experimental filmmaking in the early 1980s.
Haynes experimented in Superstar by using plastic dolls as the main characters and carefully followed all the rules of narrative structure. It was a hybrid film that fit between experimental film venues and broader arts and semi- theatrical venues.
2. Haynes says, “I’ve never felt that anything I’ve done was particularly original. My work is about appropriating and responding to cultural influences and stimuli and ideas, and recombining those elements in ways that make you think about them or see them differently.” How does this relate to our discussion of authorship so far in this course?
Gus Van Sant would recombine many movies with his own thoughts to make a new meaning. In My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant used scenes from Chimes at Midnight, which was also a play on Henry IV. Van Sant played on the fact of Scott and Falstaff being gay lovers as a recombination from using the known usage of all boys in Henry IV. He also used inversion with the remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Homosexual Perkins played Norman Bates character in Hitchcock’s version, and heterosexual Vince Vaughn plays the Bates character in Van Sant’s version. Van Sant made this obvious switch to play on the character psychology of Bates. Also, Van Sant used Anne Heche (a “lesbian” at the time) to enforce the “male gaze” of Vince Vaughn. These were not the original meanings of Hitchcock, but knowing that Van Sant is a gay man, he put his personal thumbprint of playing with a gay role in Psycho through recombination.
3. What are some observations that MacDonald and Haynes make about popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s? (In relation to Lucille Ball, Douglas Sirk, etc.)
Haynes experienced the duality of Lucille Ball’s character of child woman, fascinated he mirrored a different duality of his life and his fantasy world. Haynes learned about the 1950’s from the films of that time period. Haynes feels that his films are different from Sirk’s when Haynes would use actors that looked too much like real people. Sirk’s films were first presented to Haynes at college positioned as something of intellectual value.
4. Which experimental filmmakers are discussed in relation to Poison?
Haynes uses the influence of Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’ amour as a ghost text that inspired him to create Poison. The scene of the men getting married in the “Homo” section of Poison depicts the rustic courtyard referred to in Genet’s depiction of Metray in Miracle of the Rose. Also, Scorpio Rising and Fireworks are brought up as being “multifarious and composite,” themes of Haynes.
What controversies developed around Poison?
A review by the Hollywood Reporter misdescribed the film as if it were “Homo” and the entire film was about anal sex in prison. Donald Wildman of the American Family Association and a couple senators took up cause. Poison was given a $25,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Arts, thus the AFA felt this homo movie and others that would offend the American sensibilities should not have money put into.
James Morrison, “Todd Haynes in Theory and Practice”
5. What is the theoretical tension between the post-structural idea of “the death of the subject” and Haynes’s interest in “the status of emotion in the formation of cultural identity”?
“’Death of the subject’ holds that coherent selfhood is the fictions of a suspect humanism, and that modern strategies of instrumental rationality and systematization in social organization render the notion of individual agency outdated. The split self, the alienated subject, the interpellated body, …even the literal zombie are the figures that populate the post-structuralist landscape and, in turn, make up the casts of Todd Haynes’ movies. Haynes’ characters describe a spectrum of ‘dead subjects’ duly coordinated with appropriate theoretical cognates like Karen Carpenter in Superstar. Though a certain corrosive, mordant detachment has earned Haynes the moniker (nickname) of ‘post-humanist’ in some quarters, he remains concerned throughout his work with the status of emotion in the formation of cultural identity. Without denying the force of Theory’s claims regarding ‘the death of the subject’, Haynes seems aware that such assertions might come as new to populations outside the spheres of their immediate audiences. What seems to interest Haynes above all is that dead subjects often do not know they are dead.”
6. What are the characteristics of post-modern melodrama?
“Postmodernism is often associated with difference, separation, textuality, skepticism. ‘Postmodern melodrama’ is something of a paradox in the sense that post-modernism proclaims not just the death of the subject but ‘the waning of affect’. Once subjects are dead, after all, they can hardly be expected to go on upholding such an inner-directed project as emotion- at least not in the ways they presumably once did - and in turn, the genre of melodrama. By the same token, however, if subjects continue to feel, they may not be dead – and it is this possibility that draws postmodern filmmakers again and again to the materials of melodrama.” A metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes. Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts.
For Haynes’s work a defining feature of postmodern melodrama is that such suffering remains ‘real’.
Which filmmakers are associated with melodrama and why?
Sirk, Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar.
Douglas Sirk is said to create postmodern melodramas because they laminate techniques of distanciation over the template of standard melodrama without subverting to the latter. Sirk presents many of his characters as vapid non-entities, but insists that we weep for them all the same. Fassbinder or Almodovar, pathos is often a casualty of the texts’ ornery, acrimonious self-consciousness, laying melodrama bare as an expired genre, an empty category that is put through the performative paces nonetheless.
Side notes: Pathos thus refers to both the emotional and the imaginative impact of the message on an audience, the power with which the writer's message moves the audience to decision or action. Accomplished by a metaphor or story telling, common as a hook. Pathos represents an appeal to the audience's emotions. Interpellated is to identify with a particular idea or identity. For example, if someone were to shout your name at you in the street, you would recognize that salutation to mean yourself. It is basically thinking 'that means me'. It is the process by which you recognise yourself to belong to a particular identity.
7. Why does illness play an important role in Haynes’s films?
Haynes’ treatment of illness in films like Superstar and Safe illustrates this peculiar interplay of postmodern theory and melodramatic pathos. A common spur to pathos in traditional melodrama, illness appears there in a nexus of chance and character.
Sam Ishi-Gonzalez, “To Appear, to Disappear: Jean Genet and Poison”
8. Why was Un Chant d’Amour an important turning point in Genet’s career?
It is with the mark of this movie that Genet begins to disappear from the text. It was made during a six-year gap between Genet’s first period of literary activity and his second.
Why was Genet’s view of the “homosexual life” incompatible with the Gay Liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s?
The 1960s and 1970s was a time of Gay Liberation, “consciousness raising and direct action urging lesbians and gay men to “come out”, and publicly revealing their sexuality to family, friends, and colleagues as a form of activism”. Genet could not comprehend its affirmation of a gay identity or the demand for positive gay images. Genet would be involved in gay subjects but refused to be taken in by it.
9. How does Ishi-Gonzalez characterize the structure of Poison, and the relationship between the three stories within the film?
“Horror” tells the store of Dr. Thomas Graves that accidentally swallows a serum that can harness the sex drive. 1950s b-movie thrillers
“Hero” is about a 7-year-old, Richie Beacon, who according to his mother, shoots his father and then takes off through the bedroom window into the sky. Flat lighting, talking heads and fictional reactions
“Homo” is told from the perspective of a prisoner, John Broom, who explains to us and himself his growing obsession for a fellow prisoner, Jack Bolton. John Broom being an English translation of Jean Genet. Shot partly on sound stages, has lushness of Hollywood melodrama.
Haynes relates the structure of Poison to both to his earlier formal experiments and to Genet’s novels, ‘the way he’s constantly paralleling different stories’. These stories spiral in and out of each other and the borders become permeable.
What traditions of montage are drawn upon in the film?
D. W Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), the director’s most extreme experiment in parallel editing or montage. This parallel editing is used to establish simultaneity, temporal contiguity, between events occurring in different locals and to construct thematic relations, forging links between characters and actions taking place in different historical moments. The second tradition is the theory of montage proposed by the Soviet theorists and filmmakers of the 1920s.
Cinematic meaning is not contained in an individual shot but in the relation between shots.
10. Why does Michael Laskawy make a connection between linear logic, causality, and narrative closure with a homophobic reading of the text?
To bring the film to a coherent whole, weaving for ourselves the philosophic net that unites all three stories.
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