The retrospective film series “Todd Haynes: Far from Safe,” currently up and running at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, is now more or less into its discovery phase, screening some of filmmaker Haynes’ lesser known works alongside a few of his most wide-ranging provocations.
The 1991 release Poison, a startling homage to French playwright-novelist-leftist Jean Genet (1910-1986), fits decisively into both halves of the above description: it’s both relatively obscure and socially provocative. As Haynes’ feature directorial debut, the frenetic dramatization of three Genet novels announces the young filmmaker’s obsessions clearly, in appropriately murky black-and-white.
The first episode, in which a boy murders his father, has a mythological flavor. In the second, a young man in prison emerges as a homosexual martyr—at one point, he is “executed” by a firing squad of spittle. The third story indulges Haynes’ appetite for grim parody, in the case of a misunderstood scientist with a difference, à la 1950s sci-fi.
All three parts are vividly, even luridly, expressive as well as rebellious, very much in keeping with Genet’s fiction. Poison established Haynes as a leading voice for Queer film, with literary and historical credentials to go along with his cinematic sense of urgency. After viewing Poison in its first run, a bigoted U.S. senator in those pre-AIDS days, investigating the use of federal funding to arts orgs, condemned the film as “an abomination and a waste of taxpayers’ money.” What better recommendation do we need for Haynes’ outraged homo-agitprop? Poison screens April 5.
Haynes’ best film is a documentary. It’s also probably his most entertaining—if the audience is willing to leave its artistic preconceptions behind and venture into the realm of The Velvet Underground, on the late rock band’s own terms.
Those “own terms” belong to a cabal of some of the most challenging musical, filmic and visual arts progenitors of the 20th century, from singer-composer Lou Reed and pop art icon Andy Warhol to bandmates John Cale, Nico, Maureen Tucker, Sterling Morrison and Doug Yule. The Velvets (1964-1973 and with sporadic reunions) obviously hit filmmaker Hayes in his sweet spot, the spot in which gutter bohemia aspires to high-art pretensions, methamphetamine leads to opiates, droning dirges erupt into atonal sonic chaos, and a misfit teenage rock ’n’ roller from Long Island becomes a world-class poet in black leather.
If, as one of the doc’s talking heads suggests, it would take a degree in physics to explain the Velvets’ music, it would take an encyclopedic knowledge of rock ’n’ roll tunes, avant-garde pop culture and the netherworld of New York City’s mid-century art scene to map out all the images that Haynes sets loose in defense of this band that never managed to get played on the radio. The bits of information swarm, multiply, divide and fly past our eyes in a dizzying blizzard, each one of them indicating danger. See The Velvet Underground for the first time, or the 21st, on the BAMPFA big screen, April 11.
Carol (2015) is the result of a curious trifecta, made in—pick one—hell, purgatory or that peculiar heaven of repressed desire mixed with emotional cruelty: novelist Patricia Highsmith, actor Cate Blanchett and filmmaker Haynes at his most silky-seductive. A predatory Manhattan matron (Blanchett) with a taste for young blood zeroes in on a mousy department store clerk (Rooney Mara) during the Christmas shopping season and all ecstasy breaks loose, on March 26.
There are other Haynes films in this latter half of the series: Dark Waters, a disappointing ecological drama about the crimes of polluting chemical company Dupont, starring Mark Ruffalo (March 22); Wonderstruck, a difficult-to-admire “children’s story” from a dreamlike perspective (March 29); and May December, a faux-gossipy character study about an infamous matron (Julianne Moore) and a reporter (Natalie Portman), on April 12. Alas, Haynes’ banned masterpiece, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, cannot be included. Catch it on YouTube.
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Through April 12 at BAMPFA
