2021/02/03 by Jenny Stümer · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Psychology · #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Cinema and Media Studies #Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology
paper · doi:10.1080/14680777.2021.1879195
openalex publication_date 2021/02/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/23
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.