Anna Biller
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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)
Directed by Russ Meyer
influenced The Love Witch (2016)
Visuals Themes
Biller has borrowed the movie's look from '60s melodramas like Valley of the Dolls (and its nudity from Russ Meyer's semi-sequel Beyond the Valley of the Dolls).
The violent parts hark back to Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
But that earlier film boasted more variety in an episodic treatment that spoofed a wider gamut of psychotronic cinema, from grindhouse “nudie cuties” to Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
A fiercely feminist vision of Powell and Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”) collaborating with Russ Meyer (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”)?
And its insider exploitation-nerd references will likely only resonate with cinema obscurists who can gas on about the difference between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens .
Think of Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), a film with the aesthetic sense, feel and mores of the 1950s, but with an added layer of modern sensibilities.
You wouldn’t be wrong, but what Biller is trying to create is a cinematic treatise very much akin to what Todd Haynes did with his Douglas Sirk inspired melodrama “Far From Heaven.”
Biller is a brilliant student of the genre, and she fills every scene with a nudge-and-wink reference to a host of forebears, including George Romero’s wicked B-movie Hungry Wives (also known as Season of the Witch), Ted V. Mikels’ creepy and garish Blood Orgy of the She Devils, and Paul Wendkos' utterly strange and beguiling shocker The Mephisto Waltz, which featured Alan Alda playing against type as a demonic classical pianist.
Their floodgates having opened for a while by the success of “Rosemary’s Baby,” such exercises were occasionally major-studio releases (“The Mephisto Waltz,” “The Pyx”), but more often grade B to Z (“Simon King of the Witches,” George Romero’s “Hungry Wives,” Ted V. Mikels’ “Blood Orgy of the She Devils”).
Kill! Kill! (1965) and Supervixens (1975)—it’s easy to pick up on a robust love of powerful women.
And its insider exploitation-nerd references will likely only resonate with cinema obscurists who can gas on about the difference between Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Supervixens .
It’s Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) that Biller cites, along with the Italian giallo thrillers of the ’70s and New Wave Euro art-house films, as her main inspiration for this lovingly crafted homage.
Writer/director/editor/composer/costume designer/art director Anna Biller (whose previous movie Viva has become a minor cult classic) saturates her films with a fiendish attention to vividly retro mise-en-scène that’s reminiscent of Queer Cinema directors like Todd Haynes ( Velvet Goldmine ) or James Bidgood ( Pink Narcissus ).
Writer/director/editor/composer/costume designer/art director Anna Biller (whose previous movie Viva has become a minor cult classic) saturates her films with a fiendish attention to vividly retro mise-en-scène that’s reminiscent of Queer Cinema directors like Todd Haynes ( Velvet Goldmine ) or James Bidgood ( Pink Narcissus ).
Along with the heightened psychedelia of the visual effects—the potion Elaine brews for her victims produces a colorful prism effect straight out of 1967’s The Trip—and musical nods to giallo, the overall effect is one of cheeky feminist camp, delighting in the artifice of both femininity and filmmaking.
Can we really help it if Biller's all-out celebration of/assault on gender roles and fertility rites reminds us of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal?
Biller is a brilliant student of the genre, and she fills every scene with a nudge-and-wink reference to a host of forebears, including George Romero’s wicked B-movie Hungry Wives (also known as Season of the Witch), Ted V. Mikels’ creepy and garish Blood Orgy of the She Devils, and Paul Wendkos' utterly strange and beguiling shocker The Mephisto Waltz, which featured Alan Alda playing against type as a demonic classical pianist.
Biller recently tweeted about preparing for an interview with the Criterion Collection, and listed a few films she might talk about: Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman”; Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud.”
A particular picture creeps to mind: Eye of the Devil (1967), a ghoulish black-and-white chiller featuring Sharon Tate as the distaff half of a deadly brother-sister pair of Satan-worshipping witches.
Working with cinematographer David M. Mullen to resurrect the diffuse and gauzy look of vaguely sinister fare like Jacques Demy’s “Donkey Skin,” Biller melds old techniques with a modern perspective, conjuring a world that feels lost in time and completely true to itself.
This not particularly lucrative minor vogue, which also encompassed a number of similarly themed TV movies, was soon buried by the more violently assertive horror strains introduced by “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” and slasher cinema.
While Viva turned the “bored housewife discovering the sexual revolution” subgenre on its head, her latest film The Love Witch burrows deep into the Satanism and witchcraft films of the early Seventies (before The Exorcist violently put an end to that).
Parise shines here, with his simple-mindedness and broad, expressive facial expressions, which remind me of the dimwitted frat boys from Whit Stillman’s charming Damsels in Distress.
A fiercely feminist vision of Powell and Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”) collaborating with Russ Meyer (“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”)?
It began in February with Robert Eggers’ The Witch, continued with the May premiere of Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness, went on into September with Blair Witch, and has now reached its conclusion with Anna Biller’s The Love Witch, a cult movie to be that’s best described as a timely throwback.
Biller is a little closer to Peter Strickland , the filmmaker behind “ The Duke of Burgundy ,” which shares some of the themes of this film, but I think Biller’s a more astute and provocative thinker.
Raven-haired witchy chick Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is driving down California highways and talking to herself in a voice-over monologue in the opening scenes of The Love Witch , just as Marion Crane did in the beginning of Psycho during her own white-knuckle drive into sexual obsession’s heart of darkness.
This milieu serves as the backdrop for an unhasty narrative that has some of the same sleepwalker sensuality as Daughters of Darkness or Picnic at Hanging Rock .