Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism's Indelible Mark with Theresa L. Geller

Join us as we delve into Todd Haynes' films through a feminist lens with Theresa L. Geller, editor of at Womb House Books. Theresa will be in conversation on the films of Todd Haynes in celebration of his retrospective at BAMPFA.

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For three decades, award-winning independent filmmaker Todd Haynes, who emerged in the early 1990s as a foundational figure in New Queer Cinema, has gained critical recognition for his outsider perspective. Today, Haynes is widely known for bringing women’s stories to the screen. Analyzing Haynes’s films including Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far from Heaven (2002), and Carol (2015), as well as his unauthorized Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar (1987), and the television miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), the contributors to Reframing Todd Haynes reassess his work in light of his long-standing feminist commitments and his exceptional career as a director of women’s films. They present multiple perspectives on Haynes’s film and television work and on his role as an artist-activist who draws on academic theorizations of gender and cinema. The volume illustrates the influence of feminist theory on Haynes’s aesthetic vision, most evident in his persistent interest in the political and formal possibilities afforded by the genre of the woman’s film. The contributors contend that no consideration of Haynes’s work can afford to ignore the crucial place of feminism within it.

Theresa L. Geller is the author of (Wayne State UP, 2016) and editor of (Duke UP, 2022). She teaches film and television studies at San Francisco State University. Dr. Geller was recently a Scholar-in-Residence with the Beatrice Bain Research Group at UC Berkeley and a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.  Before relocating to the Bay Area, Dr. Geller served as Associate Professor of Film Theory and History at Grinnell College. Her scholarship has appeared in American Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Rhizomes, The Velvet Light Trap, Biography, and Senses of Cinema. She has also contributed essays to volumes such as The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory, East Asian Cinemas, Documenting the Visual Arts, Lady Gaga and Popular Music, Gender After Lyotard, and There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond.

Host or Publisher Womb House Books