1. Rhodes says that allegory is trying to correct old works, and intertextuality is referencing something to "wink at the audience".  It is important to understand Haynes's work because for him, "film history is not just an archive of images, but rather an arsenal of aesthetic and epistemological strategies".  He uses film history as a vehicle to take well-known film and rework them to mean what he wants them to mean.

2.He uses a deep depth of field and long shots which create a double vision within the shot, and takes away the attention from Carol because of the overabundance of stuff cluttering the frame. This relates back to Sirk because he was known to be really detailed with his set designs.

3. The AIDS crisis  was characterized by not being talked about.  Ronald Reagan avoided the subject for years while people died, and the group ACT UP's slogan was "Silence = Death", because nobody talked about AIDS.  And so by not being explicit about Carol's disease in Safe, it was explicitly representing AIDS.

Nick Davis, “The Invention of a People”

There’s some heavy Deleuzian theorizing in here. Do your best and focus on how the relationships between the characters are structured, and answer the following questions.

4. Arthur Stewart serves as a free-indirect surrogate for both Haynes as storytelling agent and the audience as fact-finding spectators, a participant in the film's specularisation of camp identity, and the subject of the film's premier case history of sexual coming-into-being.  He is similar because of his inquiries about Brian, who remains an object of fascination throughout the movie. 

5. The differences between Brian and Arthur become constitutive of the film's overall character.  "Brian seems to be pivotal in how Arthur becomes constituted as Arthur both in how the film regards Arthur and how Arthur regards himself."  Also when he masturbates to the newspaper image of Brian and Curt kissing, he almost produces the 'real' coupling of Brian and Curt.  He uses fantasy in the forms of performativity and impossible fabrication.  He is "both the consummate of the self that never coheres and the very definition of Deleuze and Guattari's schizo: transsexual, both alive and dead. He doesn't confine himself inside contradiction, he opens out."

6. He returns to the scene of the 1960s and early 70s counterculture, played out from the standpoint of the reactionary conservtism of the mid-1980s, viewing his homosexuality with the knowledge of AIDS.

Assignment 8:

1.He went to Bard for a summer, which is a school known for experimental filmmaking, and he had a very influential teacher in high school that introduced him to Stan Brakhage and other avant-garde filmmakers. Superstar fit into the trends in the way that it was screened, a "hybrid position between the more traditional experimental film venues, which had rejected it, and other broader arts and semi-theatrical venues.  

2.  It reminds me of our discussions on Van Sant, who constantly alludes to other works in his films.  Psycho is a prime example, taking it out of context and giving it new meaning.  We distinguished both Van Sant and Soderbergh as directors who cast against type, and so it seems that maybe a way of showing authorship is in the way that they manipulate common images to society and make us see them in a different light.  (However, if this is a quality of all three directors, maybe they're not so unique after all, huh? )

3. MacDonald thought that Sirk's Imitation of Life was ridiculously over the top, but Haynes said that he took them seriously because he wasn't introduced to them until college.  Haynes saw a Lucille Ball show live and was amazed that she could be so governing as director and then play a childish woman.  He also noted that he tried to make Far From Heaven as close to the way that a film would have been made in the fifties, making it a cinematic representation of those times.

4. Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith are all discussed as influences or having similarities to Poison.  Poison stirred controversies because it was reviewed as just being about anal sex in prison, and politicians were angry and wanted to charge him with "inappropriate use of taxpayer money" because he made material that might offend American sensibilities.  

5. His idea of "death of the subject" means that the individual can no longer feel, and goes into the waning of affect.  But "if subjects continue to feel, then they may not be dead".  

6. Post-modern melodrama "considers the workings of emotion in the framework of modern identity and the dynamics of pathos in cultural production", and are centered around the "feeling subject".  Some filmmakers associated with melodrama are Fassbinder and Almodovar for their self-consciousness.

7.  It illustrates the play between postmodern theory and melodramatic pathos and treats them as products of social circumstances.

8. Un Chant d'Amour was an important turning point in his career because it was one of the last things he ever made, it was the only film that he made, and it was the beginning of his "disappearance from the text".  His view of the homosexual life was incompatible with the Gay Liberation movement because he could not "comprehend its affirmation of a gay identity or the demand for gay positive images". 

9. She notes that the structure is made up of three stories: Horror, Homo, and Hero.  She notes that he changes between them, and she creates parallels between them such as the spit motif, and their similarities with their treatment of death.  By paralleling the stories, it becomes like a cinematic montage, which is how Genet's writing style has been characterized, and this parallel story relates back to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.  Also, it goes back to the theory of montage by Soviet theorists in the 1920s: cinematic meaning is not contained in a single shot, but in relation between shots.

10. Michael Laskawy says that abuse as a child leads to criminal activity and homosexuality, which leads to AIDS.