An Evening with Todd Haynes

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Archive Treasures screening series. Register at cinema.ucla.edu to attend this in-theater screening.

A pioneering voice of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, writer-director Todd Haynes has spent the past three-and-a-half decades crafting rich visual worlds for his introspective, complex characters. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in art and semiotics, where he also produced his first short, Haynes moved to New York City to be closer to a thriving independent filmmaking scene. From his foray into the dark mythos of Karen Carpenter’s life and legacy to his documentary celebration of The Velvet Underground, Haynes’s deep understanding of indelible Western cultural moments allows his psychological character studies to exist completely and fully within their highly crafted mise en scene. With features that explore the British glam rock scene of the 1980s, an American folk music hero of the 1960s and the small-town suburbs of the 1950s, Haynes’s oeuvre also consistently considers a queer perspective, reminding us that these folks have always been here—even if the mores of the day kept them painfully closeted.

This special evening presents some of Haynes’s rarer works recently preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker. Q&A moderated by Kim Yutani, Sundance Film Festival's  director of programming. 

Program runtime: approx. 100 minutes.