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Far From Heaven (Paperback)
Loot Price: R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
You Save: R68
(17%)
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Far From Heaven (Paperback)
Series: BFI Film Classics
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List price R398
Loot Price R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
You Save R68 (17%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been hailed as a homage
to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, although anyone tempted to take the
film at face value should be warned that it aims to subvert as much
as celebrate that genre. Impeccably constructed, with a care for
detail unknown in films from the era, it sets out to make key
themes from the genre - romance across racial barriers and class
lines, and perhaps the period's greatest taboo, romance between
members of the same sex - utterly explicit, when half a century ago
those themes had to be encoded in allusion and metaphor. Haynes
took as his main source Douglas Sirk's 1955 classic, All That
Heaven Allows, although Far From Heaven also references Rainer
Werner Fassbinder's bleak portrayal of inter-racial love, Fear Eats
the Soul (1974). In the context of Haynes's background in the New
Queer Cinema movement, with films such as Superstar, Poison and
[safe], this admixture makes Far From Heaven a rather more complex
film than just another well-dressed period pastiche. John Gill
provides a revealing insight into how Haynes confronts issues of
race, sexuality and class in a suburban 1950s American
neighbourhood. Haynes has been evasive when pressed for a
definitive explanation of his film, although as Gill contends, he
has left enough evidence lying around on screen for the keen viewer
to pick up on numerous disturbing strands at work beneath the
glossy surface of this sumptuously presented weepie. While it may
affect to pass as a classic of the genre, Haynes's ultimate aim,
Gill contends, is to undermine the nature and notion of cinema and
storytelling.
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