Not too far into new cult sensation The Love Witch, the white witch heroine Elaine (Samantha Robinson) takes a break from preparing the elaborate spells and charms she uses to ensnare a parade of Mr Rights, to impart advice to a friend: "Give men what they want," Elaine insists, while simultaneously plotting to dispatch her latest (disappointing) gentleman caller.
"I wanted to create a character, not a cardboard female character that a man might create, but a character from the inside-out," says Anna Biller, the writer-director behind The Love Witch. "There are many sane women out there, but they have to deal with insane contradictions: wanting to be beautiful, wanting to be looked at, not wanting to be looked at, wanting to be loved, not wanting to be objectified. All of these things about being a woman that are difficult to negotiate and that nobody ever seems to want to talk about anymore."
If auteur theory floats your boat, get ready to bow down before Biller, a filmmaker who boasts no fewer than 10 credits – including producer, editor, director, production design, art direction, costume, set decoration – on her gorgeous sophomore feature, The Love Witch. Those job titles become all the more impressive once you witness the film's dazzling designs, matchy colour schemes, intricate tailoring, witchcraft rituals and spell preparations. Set your eyes to pop for the pink hats and roses in the tearoom and a renaissance fayre, replete with minstrels and cryptic Tarot symbols. Prepare to swoon over M David Mullen's gauzy retro 35mm lensing (as storyboarded by Biller).
“It’s pretty common for low-budget independent films to have people working in multiple roles,” says Biller, modestly. “Maybe not on this kind of scale, I guess. There were a few factors. We didn’t have very much money for pre-production in the budget. But I also found it very hard to explain to people what exactly I wanted. I ended up redoing some of the pieces I paid other people to do.”
Biller was already preparing The Love Witch just as her debut feature Viva – a cunning exploration of the sexual revolution and attendant female discontents – reached cinemas in 2007. That gap was partly down to budget and partly due to illness.
“It was almost impossible to make the movie on the budget we have,” she says. “So it did really take a lot of planning. I also became ill during that time. I got a virus that knocked me out. The doctor told me I’d need to take two weeks off. I thought: two weeks! But it was two years before I was well enough to work or start planning a production at all. So that left me at home crafting.”
Biller, whose long career as a visual artist goes back to the 1990s, was a little dismayed when Viva, her feminist reworking of Luis Buñuel's Belle Du Jour, was praised as an homage to the exploitation films of the late sixties. She was determined that The Love Witch would be appreciated for more than pastiche.
"People thought I had made a comedy," laughs Biller. "So I thought, I won't make a comedy this time. But ironically, it turned out to be a comedy for most people. I'm still surprised when people talk about Love Witch as being campy or pastiche."
She's not wrong. Many of The Love Witch's most ardent admirers see favourable parallels in Italian Giallo and Hammer horrors. Regular citations include such similarly-themed studio pictures as Rosemary's Baby and non-studio pictures as Ted V Mikels' Blood Orgy of the She Devils, Russ Meyers' Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Jesús Franco's Vampyros Lesbos.
Feminist B-movie
Biller understandably has mixed feelings when she reads rave notices for her “feminist B-movie”.
"What's odd is that even festival programmers and curators see B-movies, when my film influences are Technicolour dramas like Leave Her to Heaven, Powell and Pressburger, Brecht and Carl Theodor Dreyer," she says. "I'm interested in pageantry. And I guess people see pageantry and look back to most recent examples, which came out of the 1970s. I think this is a feminist movie. I don't think it's a B-movie. It takes a lot of work to create a film with this kind of texture. Older movies try to take life and filter it through a set of aesthetics. They don't take a documentary approach. I'm interested in creating an aesthetic cinema. Not because I want to copy what people did in the past. But because the things that interest me – fairy tales, literature – are more solemn, I guess. "
There are interesting academic inquiries into gender and film underpinning The Love Witch, but the curious reception afforded the film asks further questions of an unhealthy homogeneity in contemporary cinema; an era when even The Avengers have dull holidays in the middle of their movie and seldom do anything that might be mistaken for Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon.
Case in point: most of Biller’s cast have classical training: “I wanted actors with a lot of theatrical training who like to really prepare and create a role for themselves,” explains the director. It’s training which looks odd and stylised beside today’s mania for “um” natural performance.
“Since the 70s, people think naturalism is quote-unquote good,” says Biller. “It became a kind of moral virtue. When the old studio system was dismantled, their way of filmmaking went too. Suddenly that craft was dismissed. It’s too much make-up. The lighting is phoney. We don’t what to shoot in mansions anymore; we want to shot on location in the houses people live in. But most cinema, historically, is aestheticised cinema.” She laughs: “Ironically, I think that some of the reactions that I’m getting are the same as the reactions that people had to early naturalism.”
So The Love Witch is not a feminist B-picture. How about feminist revenge picture? We are made aware that much of Elaine's psychopathy is rooted in abusive male behaviour: a father who called her fat, an ex-husband who derided her cooking, and further sexual traumas visited upon her by her witch colleagues.
“I never thought of it that way,” says Biller. “But I suppose she is kind of passively aggressively killing people.”
- The Love Witch with Skype Q&A with director Anna Biller is at the Light House Cinema, Dublin 7, March 16th; the film opens at QFT, Belfast on March 17th
