NEWS
MoMI to honor Todd Haynes with Moving Image Award, retrospective, and exhibit in December
OCTOBER 2, 2023
We're pleased to announce that 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.
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In addition, the Museum 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.
Presented as a temporary addition to the Museum’s core exhibition Behind the Screen, 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, our Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs notes, “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, is an adaptation of Centre Pompidou's book published on the occasion of its own Haynes retrospective earlier in 2023, but with new material for English-language readers. It includes an in-depth 2023 career interview with Haynes by the Pompidou'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.
May December opened the 61st New York Film Festival and will be released by Netflix in theaters November 17 and on Netflix December 1. View the trailer here.
Passionate about the visual arts since childhood, Todd 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. After Safe (1995), which starred Julianne Moore, he evoked David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust period in Velvet Goldmine (1998), then paid homage to Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven (2002). In 2006, he had six actors play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. He then directed the miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011), before returning to feature films with Carol (2015), Wonderstruck (2017), Dark Waters (2019), and the documentary The Velvet Underground (2021).
Funds raised from the Moving Image Awards will support the Museum’s mission to explore all facets of film, television, and digital media, including support for education and community engagement programs which serve youth, adults, and their families across all of New York and beyond.