Camera Obscura articles

Recent articles from Camera Obscura

Pathos and pathology: the cinema of Todd Haynes.
September 1, 2004... Because infinity--for the eye--begins just a few meters away from the retina.... --Roger Caillois, "The Image" There are at least two shots in Todd Haynes's work that recur so frequently one might almost call them signature shots. The first appears in Superstar (US, 1987) and Poison...

The incredible shrinking star: Todd Haynes and the case history of Karen Carpenter.
September 1, 2004... Critics have consistently characterized the films of Todd Haynes within the terms of what B. Ruby Rich described in 1992 as the "new queer cinema"--films whose style displayed traces of "appropriation and pastiche, irony" and a social constructionist understanding of history. Not...

Grainy days and Mondays: Superstar and bootleg aesthetics.
September 1, 2004... The year is 1970, and suddenly the nation finds itself asking the question, "What if, instead of the riots and assassinations, the protests and the drugs, instead of the angry words and hard-rock sounds, we were to hear something soft and smooth, and see something of wholesomeness and...

Of housewives and saints: abjection, transgression, and impossible mourning in Poison and safe.
September 1, 2004... In the opening sequence of Velvet Goldmine (dir. Todd Haynes, UK/US, 1998), future glam-rock trendsetter Jack Fairy stands in front of a mirror and, having been brutalized earlier by a pack of schoolyard bullies, smears the blood from his split lip into a glistening, cherry-red smile,...

Dangerous spaces: Safe.
September 1, 2004... For me, the problem is always in content; we want to define the perspective of a film solely through its content, and not through its form. --Todd Haynes No matter how much we desire, with Susan Sontag, to resist treating illness as metaphor, illness is metaphor. --Paula A....