We could cite his almost word-for-word 2011 television adaptation of James M. The reality that has always preoccupied him is one that isn’t evidentiary, isn’t verifiable. But outside of these teasing invocations of documentary form, Haynes’s films are not interested in the notions of accuracy and authenticity against which such films are judged. Pennebaker’s Dylan documentaries Don’t Look Back and Eat the Document in I’m Not There. Even as it seemed so outside his ordinary aesthetic bailiwick, his recent legal thriller Dark Waters felt so square in part because of its adherence to the conventions of the docudrama. Recall the tabloid doc voice-over and the deadpan “Dramatization” chyrons in his early biopic about Karen Carpenter titled Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was shot mostly with Barbie dolls or the cover versions of D.A. Haynes has demonstrated his interest in the visual and material cultures that swirl around popular art, but he’s also made it clear that his interest in maintaining fidelity to sources is capricious at best. Haynes’s title card was funny to me because it felt almost like a dare. But he’s been playing with documentary the whole time, calling upon its beats and conventions, flirting with biography and ethnography while always ultimately disavowing the idea of a “true story.” Ruby Rich called the “New Queer Cinema,” Haynes has hopped from genre to genre, pastiche to pastiche, hard art house to Oscar-bait, though never quite to nonfiction film. Since his emergence in the late 1980s with the generation of filmmakers B. Or, more accurately, I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make something that he’d finally call a documentary.
I had been waiting for Todd Haynes to make a documentary for a while.
At the beginning of The Velvet Underground, the first documentary film by Todd Haynes, a title card appears: “A documentary film by Todd Haynes.” I laughed out loud when I saw it, though not out of derision.
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