(Un)masking femininity: desire and fantasy in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch

ABSTRACT

Anna Biller’s highly stylized Technicolor homage The Love Witch (2016) follows the titular witch Elaine in her relentless pursuit of romance. Renegotiating feminine sensibilities in relation to cinematic pleasure, the film challenges the established gendered visuality of gaze, fantasy and cinema through a politics of masquerading. By utilizing the mask (and the witch wearing it) as a challenge to gendered visuality, the film reworks the cinematic staging of femininity, suggesting that Elaine’s attempt at becoming a man’s ultimate fantasy is subsumed by the force of her own desire. Elaborating this logic of (un)masking with the help of excessive femininity and a lavish mise-en-scène, The Love Witch reanimates the icons and genres of the 1960s/70s screen, only to invest these aesthetics with the vantage point of a powerful female protagonist. Biller hence explores and pushes the frames of past cinema, contouring the ambitious (and sometimes murderous) women and witches that have always inhabited these spaces without exposing them to the generic punishment of symbolic erasure. Humorously producing a “glitch” in the staging of cinematic femininity, The Love Witch thereby creates a setting against which subversions of gendered positionality on screen can be probed.

KEYWORDS:

• Femininity
• mask
• witch
• gaze, fantasy and cinema;

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Jenny Stümer

Jenny Stümer teaches media and film at the University of Auckland. Her research explores the mediation of gender and politics through cinema and art with a particular interest in affect. E-mail: [email protected]