Todd Haynes: 20 Years of Killer Films

The Walker honors boundary-breaking director Todd Haynes for the 60th Walker Dialogue and Retrospective. Explosive, original, thoughtful, and intelligent are only a few of the words that describe Haynes’s films. Pulling from histories public and private, literary and filmic to tell stories, his approach is consistently revelatory. His subjects are often elusive, so he has developed innovative ways to treat them.

A filmmaker noted for creating his own genre, Haynes proposes imaginative analogies, extrapolated lineages, and alternative histories—casting the pathos of AIDS onto an affluent housewife, locating Oscar Wilde as the forebear of glam rock, and portraying Bob Dylan through performances by six actors. His most recent feature, Carol, looks at forbidden love in the 1950s and is heralded as “the biggest critical hit of the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition this year” (The Wrap).

For the past 20 years, Christine Vachon’s company Killer Films has produced Haynes’s Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven, I’m Not There, and Carol, all shown in this retrospective.