Anna Biller |
Tonight’s film The Love Witch was directed by US film maker
Anna Biller and I can quite honestly guarantee that you’ll have never have seen
anything quite like it. Unless you’ve seen any of Biller’s other films, that
is.
Biller was born to a Hawaiian mother, Sumiko, who grew up on
a coffee plantation and maintained an air of glamour from an early age,
strongly influenced by the films she saw at the local movie house. Sumiko met
Anna’s father, Lee Biller, at the University of Hawaii where he was studying
art. I wish I could show you photos of the couple – they were an incredible
looking pair.
As newly marrieds they lived a life of dreams but the
reality was poverty. They moved to Los Angeles where Lee taught art classes and
Sumiko worked in a restaurant. She later became earned a living as a ‘hostess’,
with clients including Marlon Brando, Errol Flynn and Frank Sinatra. Sumiko was a self-taught fashion designer
with an air for the beautiful and strange. Her designs became the toast of Los
Angeles and she eventually opened a fashion store in West Hollywood called
‘Inside Sumiko & Ephemera’ – this was 1967, so you can probably imagine the
types of clothes on offer. Frequent clients to the Sumiko store included Diana
Ross and Raquel Welch.
A lot of what powers Biller’s cinema is informed by this
rather bohemian upbringing. As a child she was clearly surrounded by glamour,
witnessing a parade of beautiful women using sex appeal to derive
power, but in turn they were being ruled by more powerful men who presumably held on to
the finances. These experiences arguably shaped the theories of feminism and high style
which have dominated her work since her first steps into making movies.
And those steps were over 22 years ago now, lest people
think that Biller is new to the game. Her first film was Three Examples of
Myself as Queen in 1994, a half hour anthology film described as ‘a colourful
musical fantasy inspired by old Hollywood musicals.’ 1998’s The Fairy Ballet
was a short film extract from a planned feature length musical film which in
the end didn’t get made.
Biller switched to 35mm for her first feature length movie
Viva in 2007. This film, which incidentally features her mother Sumiko
(credited as ‘Japanese Mae West’) and includes paintings by her father, is
described by Biller on her own website as “a cult freak-out retro 1970's
spectacle, about Barbi, a bored housewife who gets sucked into the sexual
revolution. She quickly learns a lot more than she wanted to about the
different kinds of scenes going on in the wild '70's, including nudist camps,
the hippie scene, orgies, bisexuality, sadism, drugs, and bohemia. Viva looks
like a lost film from the late '60s, even down to the campy and self-assured
performances, the big lighting, the plethora of negligées, and the delirious
assortment of Salvation Army ashtrays, lamps, fabrics, and bric-a-brac. Whether
you're looking for naked people dancing, alcoholic swingers, stylish sex
scenes, a sea of polyester, Hammond organ jams, glitzy show numbers, white
horses, blondes in the bathtub, gay hairdressers, or psychedelic animation,
Viva has it all!”
Now that’s self –publicity! Although it's interesting that
Biller uses the word ‘camp’ in her description, as it’s a word that she now
hates (and I should know, I used it in a piece on her and she took great
exception to it on Twitter – but that’s another story).
Viva is best described as the bridge between Paul Thomas
Anderson’s 1997 movie about the porn industry, Boogie Nights, and the
outrageous Hollywood-for-10-cents short films of George Kuchar like Hold Me
While I’m Naked (1966) and 1963's Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof. It’s extremely detailed, decidedly
overlong, but the attention to detail, for which Biller clearly prides herself,
is jaw dropping.
So on to The Love Witch, which screens tonight. It’s the story of Elaine, who has moved to
California away from her ex-husband. She’s in town to make a new start and to
find a new man. But the way she plans to snare a guy is via witchcraft. I’ll
say no more except that things don’t exactly go to plan.
The witchcraft popularity explosion in the 1970s, from which
Biller takes her thematic cue in this film, was cinematically handled very
differently in the US to here in the UK. The UK has always been determined to
see the seedy side of the dark arts in features like Malcolm Leigh’s semi
documentary Legend of the Witches, a 1970 film which on release found itself
booked in for an extensive run in the private cinemas of Soho, and Derek Ford’s
1971 secretaries–as–witches–on their-lunch-hour expose Secret Rites. I can
also remember in the 1970s a magazine called ‘Witchcraft’ monthly that used to
languish in the top shelf of my local newsagents.
In the US the concept was handled in a more adult, and
certainly more stylish and confident way, and Biller has acknowledged the
influence of some of these films on The Love Witch – films like Hollingsworth
Morse’s 1972 movie Daughters of Satan and George Romero’s flick Season of the
Witch from the same year – not forgetting the long running TV supernatural soap
opera Dark Shadows which held America in its rather bonkers thrall between 1966
and 1971, all of which mixed the dark arts with suburban settings; perfect
source material for the director’s west coast Wiccan communities, although in
interviews she has also acknowledged the influence of European directors like
Carl Dreyer, Joseph Losey and Luis Bunuel.
All of Biller’s directorial and style quirks are present and
correct in The Love Witch. Again sumptuously shot on 35mm by David Mullen (who
had worked with Biller before on The Hypnotist sixteen years earlier), it
utilises the Californian locations of Eureka and Pasadena to create a timeless
vibe that’s initially comforting but with a level of unease that gradually
begins to permeate the movie. A film that Biller also referenced for this
creeping of unease was Bryan Forbes’ 1975 film The Stepford Wives.
But welcome back from Mars if you haven’t heard just how
good this film looks. Though the timescale is not specific, there’s a definite
1970s vibe to the movie, recalling the golden age of US TV movies of the week
(although in style it reaches back further to the films of Douglas Sirk and
Alfred Hitchock’s ‘golden age’ movies like Marnie, Vertigo and The Birds).
But as someone who’s seen the film a couple of times
already, I’d make a plea on behalf of the director to look beyond the giddy
colour schemes, the amazing soft furnishings (most of which Biller made
herself, along with the costumes and some of the music) and the overall look of
the thing. Because that’s what the director wants you to do, and it’s hard, but
there’s some serious stuff going on under the surface here – serious questions
about male and female power and sexuality, and the male – and female – gaze.
I’ll let Anna Biller have the last word her art. She writes:
“In my work I try to combine pure cinema with authentic
experience… I am trying to do something most unusual: to create “proper” art
films masquerading as popular films. So while I am quoting genres, I am using
them not as pastiche, but to create a sense of aesthetic arrest and to insert a
female point of view.”
Enjoy the film.
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