This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. Maybe you have seen this image: five outlines of a head (turned sideways in profile), each holding (in its mind’s eye) one of four images of apples stamped (from left to right) in decreasing order of detail, except for the last head, which is empty. This is an image of images, an image about how imagination works. At its most basic level, imagination is image visualization. When you think of an apple, what do you see? In The Love Witch (2016), witchcraft looks a lot like imagination—energy concentrated […]
by Matilda Lin Berke on Dec 11, 2023Over the last decade, Los Angeles-based film artist Anna Biller has eked out a small but fervid following; watching her films is like undergoing hypnosis by means of feng shui, wherein the viewer is lulled into a stilted, cheeky and brilliantly manicured simulacra of golden-era Hollywood staging, blocking and delivery. However indebted these forms are to their masculinist forebears, Biller is not content to be considered a pastiche artist: in the below discussion she concedes that her choices are guided by what gives her cinephilic pleasure, although — because? — the feminist interrogations of her work are impossible to ignore. She […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Jun 23, 2016