This is gonna be one of those episodes where I just tell you to stop this video and go see the movie right now.
So, uh, just go watch it.
Rent it, stream it, whatever - just put it in your brain space, okay?
I'll wait.
♪ "It was so tra-la-la and so la-di-da" ♪
Well?
I know, right?
The Love Witch, brainchild of writer/director Anna Biller-
Uh, sorry. Writer, director, producer Anna Biller-
Oh wait. Um...
Writer, director, producer, art director, set designer,
Editor? Music?! Shiiii--
This is Anna Biller's movie.
Simple as that.
The film sprang forth, fully formed, from the brow of Anna Biller.
The Love Witch is one of the best cases ever made for the auteur theory.
Biller, a graduate of UCLA and Cal arts,
made her debut in 2007 with Viva,
Displaying her commitment to a unified vision of filmmaking
not only in concept, but also in look-
Oh my god, we're in a cake!
This scene was shot on location in a cake!
Everything is made of cake! It's cake! We all live in a cake!
This movie is gorgeous.
Just everything is so meticulously planned and pretty and it's, um...
♪ "Love is a magical thing love will make you-" ♪
[Kyle OS] Oh. My God.
Corny as Kansas in August.
The Love Witch is great, Anna Biller is awesome,
She's one of the most fascinating voices in modern moviemaking, PERIOD. Here's her blog.
Here's her Twitter. She has an engaging and insightful online presence, check her out.
Now, I want to try an experiment.
While you were watching The Love Witch,
What came to mind?
What movies popped into your head? What titles, what genre, what era of filmmaking?
Where did your mind go? Because it feels like you should be thinking of other films right?
The Love Witch seems to beg you to gaze into it and open your mind to its universe of...
itself.
But what's that universe?
I've been deliberately trying to avoid saying anything specific
that might guide your mind towards any... one thing.
Because that place where your head went? Those movies you thought of?
That era, that genre, that style?
That's what I want to talk about.
Maybe for the era, you thought late 60s, early 70s.
For genre, you might have thought exploitation,
Or more specifically, SEXploitation.
Maybe because of the subject matter in the period style you thought of THIS.
Or maybe even this character.
Morticia Addams meets The Love Witch, there's a crossover.
"You have enslaved him.
You have placed him under some strange, sexual spell. I respect that."
"But-" "What?"
"Pastels?"
Or maybe you saw the saturated colors and stagey blocking and corny delivery, and thought of this.
♪ "Let's do the Time Warp!" ♪
Or you watched it, and mentally added this silhouette at the bottom of the screen.
Or, if you're like me you, looked at this style and this set design, this acting, and your mind drift back to...
Classic Star Trek?
"I'd say someone was playing an elaborate trick-or-treat on us."
"Trick-or-treat captain?" "Yes, Mr. Spock."
You might have thought of words like feminist, which yeah, it's definitely feminist.
But a feminist what? A feminist parody?
Pastiche?
Deconstruction, spoof... of what?
What and then your brain went back to that portmanteau of sexploitation.
Or maybe, just maybe, you thought 'this is a bad movie, but it's bad on purpose.
It's a so-bad-it's-good movie. Those are things, right?'
♪ "Love is a magical thing" ♪
♪ "Frodo of the nine fingers!" ♪
Anyway, I was curious to see how other critics discussed it.
What connections THEY made, what films THEY cited.
So I went through Rotten Tomatoes and found...
interesting stuff.
Everyone seemed to use the phrase sexploitation,
mentioning films like Super Vixens, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and especially Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
All directed by this guy, Russ Meyer.
Russ Meyer came up a lot. In their review, TimeOut guessed that Biller was "an obvious fan of Meyer".
I saw critics call her "a feminist Tarantino".
Because Biller, like Tarantino, seems to enjoy old obscure movies.
They assumed Biller was doing the same kind of hyperlink-everything-as-a-remixed style of filmmaking.
When discussing the lead actress, the LA Times compared Samantha Robinson to Barbara Steele,
the star of this film by Italian horror director Mario Bava.
Writing for RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kinney compared her to Soledad Miranda,
the star of a few fleshy erotic horror films by Jess Franco.
And in his review, Mark Kermode joked about The Wicker Man.
Kermode: "And they suddenly have this really trange marriage ceremony that you keep imagining,
at any moment, somebody was gonna start building a wicker man in the background and set fire to it!"
Now here's the curious thing.
All of those connections.
None of them were intended.
In fact, Anna Biller was offended by some of those connections.
Like all those Russ Meyer comparisons. On her Twitter, she said this:
"Is this me, my camera and my attitude towards my actresses? Really?"
So, let's believe her?
If she wasn't influenced by Russ Meyer, then who?
In her directors commentary on the film, Billers cited this film as an influence.
Gertrud, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Like Elaine the love witch, Gertrud is a woman who longs for love, but can't accept the forms that love takes.
She also cited this film as a thematic influence.
Gene Tierney plays a woman named Ellen who, like Elaine,
is caught between her desires and her need to satisfy the desires of others.
Attention which decays into sociopathy.
Critics compared Samantha Robinson to Soledad Miranda and Barbara Steele,
but Biller once compared her star to Cathleen Byron,
who played sister Ruth in Powell and Pressburger 's Black Narcissus,
a nun who falls for a man she can't have.
Another woman caught between desire and duty, driving her mad.
In that respect, she's similar to this character: Petra von Kant. Another woman who wants what she can't have,
and so asserts herself through domesticity, cosmetics, through feminine acts.
Another influence, late Hitchcock. Elaine could be Tippi Hedren,
driving down a rear projected highway, tormented by her unmet needs.
But she's also Anthony Perkins, staring into the camera, mocking us in voiceover.
"What a pussy."
"What a baby."
"She wouldn't even harm a fly."
And that Renn Fayre scene,
♪ "Unicorns, rainbows, lucky-" ♪
Yeah, that.
Stylistically, it calls back to this film by Jacques Demy.
A musical fairytale starring Catherine Deneuve as a princess who wears beautiful dresses,
bakes cakes and woos a man to get her happy ending.
It's one of the few direct references she made.
And in The Love Witch, there are very, very few direct references.
Here's one.
You'll never get it.
It's a recreation of a similar shot in Jeanne Dillman.
Yet another woman trapped by domestic duties.
Using feminine sexuality as a means of escape and empowerment.
So I looked at this list of influences, and I realized two things:
one, Anna Biller has impeccable taste in movies;
and two, they're all about women.
They are ALL about women.
Let me clarify.
The average Russ Meyer movie is about women in the same way that the average ad for Arby's is about cows.
It's so disinterested in the inner lives of its characters,
and so overly interested in how they look while they're fighting, and dancing, and sexing.
Incurating feminine aesthetics for the sake of masculine consumption.
What Laura Mulvey famously called 'the male gaze'.
The film's Biller cites as influences are all deep, empathetic character studies,
exploring traditionally feminine aspects of life.
And The Love Witch follows suit, recalling older cinematic expressions of the feminine experience.
In Billers own words,
"A lot of the women's B-pictures in melodramas of classic Hollywood, for instance,
were great for women, and contain both a male gaze and a female narcissistic gaze.
I knew these films were positive for women, and what Laura Mulvey did for me
was to focus my goals on recreating this earlier type of cinema that could be cinematically pleasurable for women."
This idea can be found throughout feminist theory; the argument that it's not enough to elevate females, but also femininity.
And that empowering women in masculine roles -fighter, adventurer, that sort of macho stuff-
all only reinforces the masculine as the only legitimate sphere of power.
And If it looks like a cheaply made movie from the Nixon era,
Well, I'll let Biller explain.
"But I think that whoever made The Mephisto Waltz or, you know, Mario Bava or some of those directors,
they were looking at the same films I'm looking at, that were the Technicolor films of the 50s and 60s,
and they were studying those."
Make sense to me.
So what Biller's work's done is rather disturbing.
By showing that disconnect between the connections critics make and the connections she made,
she's proven there's something deeply, deeply wrong with the way we talk about film history.
Because it feels like so many of our cultural touchstones in film history
focus on the history of masculinity, and masculine interests and stories.
Exploring the strategies and values associated with masculine behavior.
Which would be fine, except it's done to the detriment of feminine interests and stories.
When Laura Mulvey wrote of 'the male gaze ', she focused on the camera.
Biller is also deconstructing the male gaze.
But not the gaze of the camera; the gaze of the historian.
How so often in the history of film we exalt examinations of masculine behavior.
And stories of feminine values and behaviors are warped for male consumption
and made for cheap and because that'd be aestheticized the grunginess and sleaziness, and laugh at it because it's baaad.
And in that process, we forget.
We forget an entire sphere of human behavior.
So the brilliance in the filmmaking of Anna Biller is in what she helps us to remember.
What Anna Biller has done isn't just tell a feminist story.
She's engaging in the feminization of film history itself.
And that's... awesome.
I'm sure the comments on this video are going to be absolutely delightful.
[Music: How Soon is Now, performed by Love Spit Love]