Capital Celluloid 2016 - Day 23: Sat Jan 23

Poison (Haynes, 1991): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.20pm


A rare 35mm screening of Todd Haynes' movie in the BFI Flare strand (full details here). The film is also being screened on January 21st. Details here.

Chicago Reader review:
This 1991 avant-garde shocker by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) freely cuts between three supposedly separate stories, each in a different style and set in a different period: a 40s tale of homoerotic passion in a prison that's loosely derived from Jean Genet, a black-and-white 50s SF-horror melodrama about a leprous sex criminal, and an 80s TV exposé about a victimized seven-year-old boy who murders his father. The film produces poetic jolts and visual-thematic rhymes that somehow unify the disparate strands into a single galvanizing experience. Haynes starts with a title—"The whole world is dying of panicky fright"—and then proceeds to show exactly what he means, illustrating the kind of fear that produces and promotes victimization both in society and in the minds of social outcasts. I could have done without the designer prison, but most of the other stylistic conceits work. With Edith Meeks, Larry Maxwell, Susan Norman, Scott Renderer, and James Lyons (who also served as coeditor).
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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