Carol director Todd Haynes to be honored with retrospective

October 5, 2023 Queer Forty Staff 3 min read

Carol and Poison director Todd Haynes will be honored with a Moving Image Award for Career Achievement, accompanied by a complete retrospective, a gallery exhibit, and the publication of a new book.

Todd Haynes will be honored with the Moving Image Award for Career Achievement on December 4, to be accompanied by a complete film retrospective, gallery exhibit, and publication of a new book about his process. In addition, the Museum of the Moving Image has acquired Haynes’s film production archive into its collection. These materials include notes, scripts, and sketches from every feature film made by Haynes, as well as his short films and work for television.

The exhibit will be on view starting November 18 and will center on Haynes’s elaborate “image books,” albums that gather visual inspirations for each of his productions, with a focus on his new film May December, which stars Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. The exhibit will also feature video interviews with Haynes and additional production material drawn from the archive recently donated to the Museum.

Barbara Miller, MoMI’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs said, “We are thrilled to honor Todd Haynes’s extraordinary career with this expansive initiative. From his electrifying emergence in the 1980s to the brilliant May December, Haynes has remained a singular filmmaker, crafting artistically fearless films that subvert genre expectations and explore transgressive identities. We’re excited to present a retrospective of his works, and to be able to offer, through the exhibit and the publication of Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process, a glimpse into his compelling creative process.”

From December 1–30, the Museum will present a complete retrospective including all of Todd Haynes’s feature films from Poison (1991) through May December (2023) as well as early short films, and television work.

The book, Todd Haynes: Rapturous Process, published by the Museum, includes an in-depth 2023 career interview with Haynes by the Pompidou Centre’s Judith Revault d’Allonnes, a new essay by Michael Koresky, a conversation about May December between Haynes and filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, and a foreword by Julianne Moore. The book features more than 200 pages of materials from Haynes’s archives, including drawings, paintings, storyboards, notes, on-set photographs, costume and set designs, and more—much of which is drawn from Haynes’s production archive, which is part of the Museum’s permanent collection. Copies will be available for purchase in the MoMI Shop onsite and online starting in late November.

Haynes studied art and semiotics at Brown University. In 1987, he created the short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story with Barbie dolls. Since then, he has tirelessly continued to address questions of gender and identity. His first feature film Poison, inspired by Jean Genet, was released in 1991 and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Safe (1995), starred Julianne Moore, Velvet Goldmine (1998), starred Ewan McGregor, and was followed by a homage to Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven (2002), again with Julianne Moore. In 2006, he had six actors including Cate Blanchett play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. He then directed the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011) with Kate Winslet, before returning to feature films with Carol (2015), with Blanchett and Rooney Mara, Wonderstruck (2017), Dark Waters (2019), and the documentary The Velvet Underground (2021).