Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar

Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar PDF Author: Todd Haynes
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 1555847773
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Three acclaimed screenplays from one of today’s most provocative filmmakers, including the Oscar nominated screenplay Far from Heaven. An award-winning auteur and a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement, Todd Haynes has achieved both critical acclaim and box office success with his original, intelligent, and often controversial films. Collected here are three of his most celebrated screenplays. Far from Heaven: Winning fifty critics’ prizes and appearing on two hundred Top Ten lists, Far from Heaven was also nominated for four Academy Awards. Inspired by the films of Douglas Sirk, it tells the story of a 1950s housewife who is alienated by her neighbors when she pursues an affair with her African American gardener after learning of her husband’s homosexuality. Safe: Haynes’s breakthrough feature was voted Best Film of the 1990s by the Village Voice Film Critics Poll. It tells the disturbing story of an affluent suburban housewife whose life is shattered by a mysterious illness. One character suggests that perhaps she is “allergic to the twentieth century.” Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story: Told with a cast of Barbie dolls, this short film about Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Cult Movies in 2003. Though the film was ordered destroyed after a lawsuit by the Carpenter estate, it remains an underground classic and “the most talked-about, least-seen film of the ’80s” (The A.V. Club).

Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar

Far from Heaven, Safe, and Superstar PDF Author: Todd Haynes
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 1555847773
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Three acclaimed screenplays from one of today’s most provocative filmmakers, including the Oscar nominated screenplay Far from Heaven. An award-winning auteur and a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement, Todd Haynes has achieved both critical acclaim and box office success with his original, intelligent, and often controversial films. Collected here are three of his most celebrated screenplays. Far from Heaven: Winning fifty critics’ prizes and appearing on two hundred Top Ten lists, Far from Heaven was also nominated for four Academy Awards. Inspired by the films of Douglas Sirk, it tells the story of a 1950s housewife who is alienated by her neighbors when she pursues an affair with her African American gardener after learning of her husband’s homosexuality. Safe: Haynes’s breakthrough feature was voted Best Film of the 1990s by the Village Voice Film Critics Poll. It tells the disturbing story of an affluent suburban housewife whose life is shattered by a mysterious illness. One character suggests that perhaps she is “allergic to the twentieth century.” Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story: Told with a cast of Barbie dolls, this short film about Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Cult Movies in 2003. Though the film was ordered destroyed after a lawsuit by the Carpenter estate, it remains an underground classic and “the most talked-about, least-seen film of the ’80s” (The A.V. Club).

Far from Heaven

Far from Heaven PDF Author: Todd Haynes
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802140272
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Collected in this volume are three highly acclaimed screenplays from one of today's most provocative writer-directors. With exquisite subtlety, all three films demonstrate Haynes's concerns as a pioneer of the "new queer cinema" who is winning increasing acceptance by the American mainstream.

Far from Heaven

Far from Heaven PDF Author: Glyn Davis
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748688706
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This book is a study of Far from Heaven, a commercially successful film that nevertheless sits rather ambiguously on the boundary between independent and mainstream cinema, operating as an alternative to 'blockbuster' fare.

Melodrama

Melodrama PDF Author: Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374048
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Offering a new queer theorization of melodrama, Jonathan Goldberg explores the ways melodramatic film and literature provide an aesthetics of impossibility. Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.

Todd Haynes

Todd Haynes PDF Author: Julia Leyda
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626741387
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A pioneer of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes (b. 1961) is a leading American independent filmmaker. Whether working with talking dolls in a homemade short (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) or with Oscar-winning performers in an HBO miniseries (Mildred Pierce), Haynes has garnered numerous awards and nominations and an expanding fan base for his provocative and engaging work. In all his films, Haynes works to portray the struggles of characters in conflict with the norms of society. Many of his movies focus on female characters, drawing inspiration from genres such as the woman’s film and the disease movie (Far from Heaven and Safe); others explore male characters who transgress sexual and other social conventions (Poison and Velvet Goldmine). The writer-director has drawn on figures such as Karen Carpenter, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Bob Dylan in his meditations on American and British music, celebrity, and the meaning of identity. His 2007 movie I’m Not There won a number of awards and was notable for Haynes’s decision to cast six different actors (one of whom was a woman) to portray Dylan. Gathering interviews from 1989 through 2012, this collection presents a range of themes, films, and moments in the burgeoning career of Todd Haynes.

Sappho

Sappho PDF Author: Jonathan Goldberg
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
In Sappho, Jonathan Goldberg takes as his model the fragmentary state in which this sublime poet's writing survives, a set of compositional and theoretical resources for living and thinking in more fully erotic ways in the present and the future. This book thus offers fragmentary commentary on disparate (Sapphic) works, such as the comics of Alison Bechdel, the paintings and cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Reid-Pharr's "Living as a Lesbian," Madeleine de Scudéry's Histoire de Sapho, John Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," Todd Haynes and Patricia Highsmith's Carol, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, writings by Willa Cather, and the paintings and writings of Simeon Solomon, among other works. Goldberg challenges readers to imagine and experience what Sarah Orne Jewett named the "country of our friendship," a love both exceedingly strange and compellingly familiar. Just as Sappho's coinage "bitter-sweet" describes eros as inextricably contradictory - two things at once, one thing after another, each interrupting, complicating, each other - the juxtapositions in this book mean to continually call into question categories of identity and identification in the wake of a quintessential woman writer from Lesbos. Over and over again, Goldberg's Sappho: ]fragments inquires into how race, sexuality, and gender cross each other. The theoretical genius of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick presides over this set of meditations and mediations on likeness and desire. Rather than homogenizing its many subjects, it invites the reader to explore and inhabit new transits within and through what Audre Lorde called "the very house of difference." With an Afterword, "After-Party: Sappho Meets Freud," written by L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy.

Voices of Mental Health

Voices of Mental Health PDF Author: Martin Halliwell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813576792
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
This dynamic and richly layered account of mental health in the late twentieth century interweaves three important stories: the rising political prominence of mental health in the United States since 1970; the shifting medical diagnostics of mental health at a time when health activists, advocacy groups, and public figures were all speaking out about the needs and rights of patients; and the concept of voice in literature, film, memoir, journalism, and medical case study that connects the health experiences of individuals to shared stories. Together, these three dimensions bring into conversation a diverse cast of late-century writers, filmmakers, actors, physicians, politicians, policy-makers, and social critics. In doing so, Martin Halliwell’s Voices of Mental Health breaks new ground in deepening our understanding of the place, politics, and trajectory of mental health from the moon landing to the millennium.

Slow Movies

Slow Movies PDF Author: Ira Jaffe
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231850638
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"In all film there is the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility," Agnes Varda has noted. But to capture the reality of human experience, cinema must fasten on stillness and inaction as much as motion. Slow Movies investigates movies by acclaimed international directors who in the past three decades have challenged mainstream cinema's reliance on motion and action. More than other realist art cinema, slow movies by Lisandro Alonso, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-ke, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristian Mungiu, Alexander Sokurov, Bela Tarr, Gus Van Sant and others radically adhere to space-times in which emotion is repressed along with motion; editing and dialogue yield to stasis and contemplation; action surrenders to emptiness if not death.

Black is Beautiful

Black is Beautiful PDF Author: Paul C. Taylor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118328698
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Black is Beautiful identifies and explores the most significant philosophical issues that emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of black life, providing a long-overdue synthesis and the first extended philosophical treatment of this crucial subject. The first extended philosophical treatment of an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art Takes an important step in assembling black aesthetics as an object of philosophical study Unites two areas of scholarship for the first time – philosophical aesthetics and black cultural theory, dissolving the dilemma of either studying philosophy, or studying black expressive culture Brings a wide range of fields into conversation with one another– from visual culture studies and art history to analytic philosophy to musicology – producing mutually illuminating approaches that challenge some of the basic suppositions of each Well-balanced, up-to-date, and beautifully written as well as inventive and insightful Winner of The American Society of Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize 2017

Far From Heaven

Far From Heaven PDF Author: John Gill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838715630
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been hailed as a homage to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, although anyone tempted to take the film at face value should be warned that it aims to subvert as much as celebrate that genre. Impeccably constructed, with a care for detail unknown in films from the era, it sets out to make key themes from the genre – romance across racial barriers and class lines, and perhaps the period's greatest taboo, romance between members of the same sex – utterly explicit, when half a century ago those themes had to be encoded in allusion and metaphor. Haynes took as his main source Douglas Sirk's 1955 classic, All That Heaven Allows, although Far From Heaven also references Rainer Werner Fassbinder's bleak portrayal of inter-racial love, Fear Eats the Soul (1974). In the context of Haynes's background in the New Queer Cinema movement, with films such as Superstar, Poison and [safe], this admixture makes Far From Heaven a rather more complex film than just another well-dressed period pastiche. John Gill provides a revealing insight into how Haynes confronts issues of race, sexuality and class in a suburban 1950s American neighbourhood. Haynes has been evasive when pressed for a definitive explanation of his film, although as Gill contends, he has left enough evidence lying around on screen for the keen viewer to pick up on numerous disturbing strands at work beneath the glossy surface of this sumptuously presented weepie. While it may affect to pass as a classic of the genre, Haynes's ultimate aim, Gill contends, is to undermine the nature and notion of cinema and storytelling.