Anna Biller

[DarkImbecile]

Anna Biller



"I just don't really have a connection to exploitation, because I see it just as a precursor to pornography. I am in conversation with the pornography that's all around us."

Filmography

Features
Viva (2007)
The Love Witch (2016)

Shorts
"Three Examples of Myself as a Queen" (1994)
"Fairy Ballet" (1998)
"The Hypnotist" (2001)
"A Visit from the Incubus" (2001)

Web Resources
2016 interview with Steve Macfarlane, Filmmaker
2016 interview with David Chaudoir, Cinema Jam
2016 interview with Colleen Kelsey, Interview Magazine
2017 interview with John Patterson, The Guardian
2017 interview with Katie Rife, The AV Club
2017 interview with Brittany Stigler, Screen Slate
2017 interview with Rachel Bowles, Vodzilla

[colinr0380]

Anne Biller's 'The Love Witch' is a fun and interesting watch if you like your feminist movies a bit retro and kitsch (it's filmed to look like the 60s though uses a few anachronisms).

On hearing Mark Kermode's recent (positive) review of it where he said The Love Witch was like a Jess Franco film with Beyond The Valley of the Dolls mixed in, though without a camp element, all I could think was that domino isn't going to like it at all!

EDIT: This might just rather off the mark too, but I like that The Love Witch looks to have that brightly lit, slowly edited (by modern standards), psychedelic aesthetic on display in 1960s and 70s TV movies!

[Foam]

Anne Biller's 'The Love Witch' is a fun and interesting watch if you like your feminist movies a bit retro and kitsch (it's filmed to look like the 60s though uses a few anachronisms).

This was one of the most fascinating films released last year. I'll be scooping up the Blu.

Anna Biller has said in multiple interviews that she is sincere and wasn't intending for the film to be received ironically. She just loves 1950s-1960s widescreen technicolor movies and wanted to make a contemporary film shot in that style. I'm not sure she succeeded, because in some ways it does just feel like a 1960s film that weirdly has a few cell phones and computer monitors in it. The lighting and makeup is very 60s, but she says that the fashion was incidentally retro-now, with the cast often wearing their own casual clothes. It may be an interesting case of a type of stylistic experiment that is doomed to fail since our associations with those kinds of visuals are so historically determined.

Whatever the case, Biller and her cinematographer deserve a lot of credit for going all-in on fully capturing a cinematic style of a particular vintage. It makes films with similar strategies like The Artist and Death Proof seem half-assed in comparison.


edit:

[kidc85]

Anne Biller's 'The Love Witch' is a fun and interesting watch if you like your feminist movies a bit retro and kitsch (it's filmed to look like the 60s though uses a few anachronisms).

but I like that The Love Witch looks to have that brightly lit, slowly edited (by modern standards), psychedelic aesthetic on display in 1960s and 70s TV movies!

I watched her debut Viva last night and was completely entranced. It's her take on late 60s/early 70s sexploitation comedies and is superbly well judged about how much she needs to change to make her point without being overly didactic. Her men are at risk of being hypocrites, there are those who have co-opted sexual liberation into a tool for further oppression; her women are at risk of not being freed by sexual liberation but further imprisoned by a new social norm where casual sex is now an expectation. Biller carefully keeps herself being removed from lecturing by making a film that is genuinely sexually liberated itself. Biller, who stars, is occasionally casually nude herself and there are multiple instances of free sexuality which are portrayed without a hint of negativity. In period sex comedies, liberation is the freedom to say "Yes", for Biller it is the freedom to also say "No". It's an opinion that unfortunately continues to be necessary to make with sexuality continuing to be considered an either/or definition - and Biller makes it in a highly unique manner.

As a genre exercise too, it's pretty thrilling. It's not a 1:1 copy of period sex comedies but it is gorgeous, being influenced by all of the best visual elements of the style. Its sincere faithfulness to the awkward dialogue, stilted acting, and slow editing and plot development of the genre means it's not for the faint of heart - especially considering it's 2 hours long. But Biller uses the film's length and pace well and gives an authentic sense of a journey, being far more emotionally involving as the film moves towards its climax than any sexploitation has any right to be.

I watched this on Mubi UK, but I love that its home video release over here is by Shameless so it can nestle right up against the very films it's discussing.

[domino harvey]

No doubt Ed Wood preferred people looked at his themes and not his style too, but that's not how it works. I am sure Colin is correct and these are custom-made to never be seen by me, but the above quoted comment would be insecure coming from any director-- you don't get to choose how people read your film, and if so many people are focusing on aspects that you claim aren't there, guess what?

[Foam]

I agree that the director isn't the final authority over the film's meaning. But as someone who did view it as a campy, ironic, jokily intellectualized pastiche-like film when I first saw it, I have to say I did get a lot more out of it during a rewatch with Biller's own comments in mind (although it was enjoyable in both cases).

Anti-authorship discourse has, in some quarters, calcified into as intellectually rigid a doctrine as the sorts of thinking the New Critics and Barthes et al were seeking to challenge. I met theory nuts in grad school who thought that literally anyone's opinion of a given film--including the studios or opportunistic DVD distributors--should be given more weight than the director's (or screenwriter's, or whoever's) stated intentions, as a kind of ideological rule. That reconsidering a film in light of a director's statements is always a "conservative" move. I think that's ridiculous.

Sometimes an artist is doing something sufficiently radical or difficult that readers/viewers/critics don't have the language or imagination to account for it sufficiently. There are certain mediums where it's routine for program notes or some other kind of accompanying paratext to try and frame the work's reception (performance art, classical music, poetry collections, etc). It seems to me The Love Witch could have benefited from something like that, but it's not very common practice in cinema, unfortunately.

[Andrew_VB]

No doubt Ed Wood preferred people looked at his themes and not his style too, but that's not how it works. I am sure Colin is correct and these are custom-made to never be seen by me, but the above quoted comment would be insecure coming from any director-- you don't get to choose how people read your film, and if so many people are focusing on aspects that you claim aren't there, guess what?

she's entitled to her opinion, though. her comment seems to be more in response to the lazy way her films have been reviewed, defaulting to calling them pastiche without taking the time to more seriously engage with the ideas behind them.

odd that you choose to respond so dismissively when you say you apparently wont consider watching.

[TMDaines]

I don't see what's wrong with her comment either. Fair play on any director to comment on what their intentions were instead of people supposing them after either having watched or not watched their work.

[colinr0380]

I think everyone has a point here. It is always great to hear someone with an actual point of view that they have about their work and how they want it to be seen (it contrasts interestingly with the more predominant filmmaker interview where a director or actor is reluctant or unable to describe their film! Which is perfectly valid too, I hasten to add!). I’m also curious about how much the reception of Biller’s previous film Viva plays into this reaction, as that felt aesthetically very much in the same vein but did not make too much of an impression on a horror fandom audience who might have been expected to embrace it. It might therefore make sense to not wholeheartedly embrace comparisons in a later film? Perhaps like Ben Wheatley’s recent High-Rise there feels like a fine line between 70s homage and 70s pastiche, and then there is the question of even how much a film is allowed to use a particular aesthetic but still exist on its own terms, and an audience’s reaction to which side a film falls on can be a very personal one.

But I also strongly believe that upon release the filmmaker kind of relinquishes control of their film to the audience to do with, or interpret, however they wish (albeit not legally of course, I hasten to add!). The best films speak to all sorts of different audiences at once, or allow different viewers to take different things away from the same piece of work by perhaps identifying with different characters, or focusing on certain details compared to others.

I like to think of film making and appreciation to be two sides, with the fixed unchanging film the fulcrum around which they turn. Fully a filmmakers at the start to mould into a form; (almost) fully the audience’s afterwards to take what they need from it. Though of course the best filmmakers consider their audience during the ‘manufacturing process’, and a good viewer always considers what the filmmaker is trying to achieve when they assess a film.

(Though of course I doubt people would agree with me in my contention that the recent Suffragette is really a less successfully veiled remake of the deep feminist themes of Carry on Cabby!)

[Foam]

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Biller

[Matt]

Biller’s getting herself in trouble on Twitter (again), this time for being a McMartin Preschool truther.

[domino harvey]

Wow. I touched the plate and looked and… it’s worse than it sounds. She has no clue what she’s talking about, holy fuck

[cdnchris]

I kinda liked The Love Witch but this tweet gave me a good laugh.

Well these bad (and frankly horrifying) takes explain why you haven’t made another bad movie in 7 years.

But yeah, she certainly fell down some rabbit hole there.

[domino harvey]

I liked it better upthread when she was just on a garden variety artistic ego trip. Now she’s posting despicable links to conspiracy sites about one of the most well-documented court cases of the last century because she wasn’t around or wasn’t paying attention (not sure of her age) when this all went down or during its immediate aftermath and so she doesn’t know any better (and is showing some real QAnon-level due diligence). Someone in the thread jokingly suggests she’s trying to get funding from the right wing, but looking at the hole she continued to dig, maybe not so jokingly?

[zedz]

Anna Biller, of all people, has a dedicated filmmaker thread?

[therewillbeblus]

Anna Biller, of all people, has a dedicated filmmaker thread?

That was the louder WTF take I had too

[domino harvey]

I mean, on the plus side, it seems likely that DarkImbecile will never need to update the first post

[colinr0380]

We all just worked with what we had in a pre-Julia Ducournau world.

[brundlefly]

Both the things I remember most about Biller's features came not from the work itself -- which I think landed amusing, but flat -- but from her DVD commentaries. She'd edited one she'd done with other crew/cast members to interject compliments on their work and to add details I guess she'd forgotten during the original recording. And of course there's nothing wrong with trying to make an experience better. (I sympathize. I will edit this comment fifteen times to no avail.) But the recording quality was different and the patches stood out so much they felt like ham-fisted displays of control.

Then there was a mention of how she'd been collecting production design elements for years. Which I guess sounded like an interesting process? A lookbook would be a lot more practical, but if you're drawing inspiration from specific objects and know you'll be working with small budgets and may not regain cheap access to those it may be great comfort to have them at hand. And I"m sure there's comfort in having physical evidence that you are making a movie when you aren't, yet. But I couldn't stop thinking about the state of her storage unit. What about all those projects for which funding fell through? Or objects that lose their luster? I don't know if I could watch a movie of hers again without thinking about it as a potential garage sale.

Not saying that these are control issues or hoarding tendencies or that they'd partner well with an inclination toward conspiracy theories.

[cdobbs]

Fans of Anna Biller might want to catch up with Nathan Fielder’s work if they haven’t, she seems like someone who might show up there eventually.

[swo17]

I think you meant to say Sacha Baron Cohen

[zedz]

Fans of Anna Biller might want to catch up with Nathan Fielder’s work if they haven’t, she seems like someone who might show up there eventually.

"Did you invite Anna Biller?"

"No, I thought you invited her."

[MichaelB]

Both the things I remember most about Biller's features came not from the work itself -- which I think landed amusing, but flat -- but from her DVD commentaries. She'd edited one she'd done with other crew/cast members to interject compliments on their work and to add details I guess she'd forgotten during the original recording. And of course there's nothing wrong with trying to make an experience better. (I sympathize. I will edit this comment fifteen times to no avail.) But the recording quality was different and the patches stood out so much they felt like ham-fisted displays of control.

Speaking as someone who goes to a great deal of trouble to ensure that interpolated parts of commentaries* sound identical to the rest (iZotope RX9’s Ambience Match and EQ Match modules are invaluable here), this was physically painful to read.

(*not so much due to second-thoughts revisionism as unexpected rightsholder objections to parts of the original and the desire not to have blank patches. I recently had to replace six minutes of a commentary, but I’d defy anyone to spot where it is. I’m not even sure I can remember myself.)