Anna Biller’s Pleasure Principles
In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building a cinematic world that centers female pleasure and eschews the conventions of a male-dominated industry. With images that are saturated with exquisite detail, she pays tribute to a vast repertoire of influences, including old Hollywood musicals, Hitchcockian thrillers, the art-house erotica of Radley Metzger, and the romances of Jacques Demy.
Biller, who was born and continues to live in Los Angeles, has been making films for almost twenty years now, but it wasn’t until the release of her 2016 cult sensation The Love Witch—a horror-fantasy about a spell-casting seductress undone by romantic obsession—that she emerged from the underground to enchant a wider indie audience. Beginning this week on the Criterion Channel, we’re hosting a retrospective that gives viewers a chance to catch up with that film as well as her first feature, Viva, a hyper-stylized evocation of classic exploitation cinema that chronicles the sexual evolution of a bored housewife. Biller’s artistry is also vividly on display in a trio of early short films that round out the series: Three Examples of Myself as Queen, a surreal “retro-fantastic feminist anthem” that casts the director-star as an Arabian ruler, a candy-colored queen bee, and a romantic princess; The Hypnotist, an ode to Hollywood melodramas; and A Visit from the Incubus, a psychosexual horror film draped in the look of a musical western.
In anticipation of the series launching on the Channel, I had a conversation with Biller over e-mail about the costume and production design in her films, and how her process has evolved over the course of her career.
