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.

摘要

Anna Biller 高度风格化的 Technicolor 致敬The Love Witch (2016) 追随名义上的女巫 Elaine 对浪漫的不懈追求。这部电影重新协商了与电影快感相关的女性情感，通过伪装的政治挑战了既定的凝视、幻想和电影的性别视觉。通过利用面具（和戴着面具的女巫）作为对性别视觉的挑战，这部电影重新塑造了女性气质的电影舞台，暗示伊莱恩试图成为男人的终极幻想的尝试被她自己的欲望力量所包含。借助过度的女性气质和奢华的场面调度来阐述这种（不）掩饰的逻辑，爱情女巫重现了 1960 年代/70 年代银幕的图标和流派，只是将这些美学与强大的女主角的有利位置相结合。因此，比勒探索并推动了过去电影的框架，勾勒出一直居住在这些空间中的雄心勃勃（有时是凶残的）女性和女巫，而没有将她们暴露在象征性擦除的一般惩罚之下。《爱情女巫》幽默地在电影女性气质的舞台上制造了一个“小故障”，从而创造了一个可以探索银幕上对性别定位的颠覆的背景。