Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

WHITE [MATER]IAL from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

Video Essay on Todd Haynes's [SAFE] (1995) by Amber Jacobs and Catherine Grant. You can read more about this work in 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular 'studies of a single film' entries. This one is dedicated to gathering direct links to freely accessible, high-quality studies of Todd Haynes's remarkable film [SAFE] (1995).

The resources are headed (above) by a new video by FSFF's author which was completely inspired by Amber Jacobs's magnificent commentary. This audiovisual essay foregrounds the film's treatment of mothering.

FSFF is also truly delighted and grateful to offer free access (below) to a wonderful, related excerpt from Rob White's recently published book on the cinema of Todd Haynes.

Below the embedded excerpt, readers can find FSFF's customary listing of open access resources on the featured film, and, below that, further offline, bibliographies related to this film.

Rob White on Todd Haynes' SAFE

Embedded excerpts from Rob White, ' The Misery the World Is Made Of: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', TODD HAYNES (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reproduced here at Film Studies For Free by kind permission of the author and University of Illinois Press. FSFF's thanks go to the author and publisher, and also to Steven Fast.

Notes on Contributors:

• Amber Jacobs works on feminist  theories and philosophies, film and visual culture, ancient Greek myth, tragedy and philosophy and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theories. Her Book On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother came out in 2008 with Columbia University Press. She currently works as a lecturer in the department of psychosocial studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
• Rob White spent ten years as commissioning editor of BFI Publishing (and series editor of the Classics volumes) before becoming, in 2006, editor of Film Quarterly (until 2013). He has been a columnist for Sight and Sound and is author of The Third Man (BFI Film Classics, 2003) and Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body (Palgrave, 2008). His book on Todd Haynes has been published in the University of Illinois Press series, Contemporary Film Directors.

Open Access Resources on [SAFE]

• Andrew Burke, '"Do You Smell Fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', ESC: English Studies in Canada, 32.4, December 2006
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007 
• Çakirlar, Cüneyt, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes’ Cinema of Queer Pastiche', Kult 1.1 (2011): 162–200
• Anthony Enns], '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• John Gill, excerpt from Far From Heaven (London: Palgrave/BFI Film Classics: 2011)
• Ruth Goldberg, 'Every Breath You Take: Re-Evaluating Time, Place and Cultural Metaphor in Safe', Screen Memories of the Mad Monstrous '80s: Trauma and Political Allegory in Horror Films that Look Back at the Reagan Years, PhD Thesis, Union Institute and University Cincinatti, Ohio, October 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013
• Julie Grossman, 'The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Amber Jacobs and Rob White, 'Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce: A Discussion', Film Quarterly, Feburary 2012
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007) 
• Jeremy Justus, "What you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you are feeling within" space, ideology and biopolitics in Safe', AmericanPopularCulture.com, October 2007
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006 
• Jed Mayer, 'Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE', PressPlay, Indiewire, April 16, 2013 
• Joan Faber McAlister, 'Unsafe Houses: The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film', Liminalities, 4.1, 2008
• Alison McLean, 'Todd Haynes', BOMB 52/Summer 1995
• Martha Elisabeth Polk, 'What is Wrong With Carol? Narrative, Genre, Feminism, and Language in Todd Haynes’ Safe', MA dissertation, Emory University, 2013
• Susan Potter, 'Dangerous Spaces: SAFE', Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 124-154
• Anat Pick, '"No Callous Shell": The Fate of Selfhood from Walt Whitman to Todd Haynes', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Jason Qualls, 'Genuine Artifice, Serious Camp: The Women's Films of Todd Haynes', The McNair Scholarly Review, 2008 (scroll to p. 119)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Stranded in the Jungle [on SAFE], Interzones, October 1995
• Chuck Stephens, 'Gentlemen Prefer Haynes', Film Comment, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 1995 
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Amy Taubin, 'Nowhere to Hide', Sight and Sound 6:5 (May 1996) p. 32-34
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002 
• Rob White, 'Todd Haynes’s Poison Reconsidered', Film Quarterly Fall 2011, Vol. 65, No. 1

Film Studies For Free entries on Todd Haynes

• On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day! July 4, 2010
• New Todd Haynes' Masterclass November 27, 2011
• Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture December 1, 2011
• All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies April 15, 2012

Other Resources Mentioned in the Video Essay Bibliography

• Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, '"There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel“: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(4), 2005: 359–370
• Laura Christian, 'Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 93-123
• Glyn Davis], 'Health and Safety in the Home: Todd Haynes's clinical white world', in David Alderson and Linda R. Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
• Mary Ann Doane, 'Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 1-21
• Roy Grundmann, 'How Clean Was My Valley? Todd Haynes' Safe', Cineaste 21:4, 1995: 22-5
• Lisa Lynch, 'The Epidemiology of "Regrettable Kinship": Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain', Journal of Medical Humanities vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Winter, 2002): 203-19
• José Esteban Muñoz, 'Notes on the Whiteness of New Queer Cinema: Safe', GLQ (1998) 4:1: 126-37
• Gaye Naismith, 'Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd Haynes's [Safe],' In P. Treichler, L. Cartwright, & C. Penley (eds), The Visible Woman: Imagine Technologies, Gender and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
• Roddey Reid, 'Un[Safe] at Any Distance: Todd Haynes's Visual Culture of Health and Risk', Film Quarterly (Spring, 1998): 32-44
• John David Rhodes, 'Allegory, mise-en-scène, AIDS: interpreting Safe', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Rob White, Todd Haynes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013) online excerpt

Further Offline Resources

• Andrew Burke, '"Do you smell fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', English Studies in Canada, Winter 2006, Vol. 32 Issue 4, pp. 147-168
• Matthew Gandy, 'Allergy and Allegory in Todd Haynes' [Safe]', In: Screening the city edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London and New York: Verso, 2003)
• Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore and Christine Vachon, '"...and all is well in our world" - making Safe', In: Film-makers on film-making edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
• Susan Kollin, 'Toxic Subjectivity: Gender and the Ecologies of Whiteness in Todd Haynes's Safe', Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 121-39, Winter 2002
• Christopher McQuain, 'Safe Man: Are Todd Haynes' Films Gay Enough?', Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, 2002
• Arij Ouweneel, 'Carol's Predicament" The Body in [Safe] (1995) and Jennifer's Body (2009)', Freudian Fadeout: The Failings of Psychoanalysis in Film Criticism (London: McFarland, 2012)
• Dorian Stuber, 'Patient Zero? Illness and Vulnerability in Todd Haynes's [Safe]." Parallax Volume 11, Number 2 / April-June 2005  

  

Front cover of Rob White, Todd Haynes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).