Interview with Anna Biller
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.
What does the experience of visual pleasure on-screen mean for you?
The reason I became interested in visual pleasure as a concept is because of Laura Mulvey’s challenge (I took it as a challenge, anyway) to create a cinema of visual pleasure for women. That essay made me think of all of the things that are pleasurable for me, and really freed me from trying to copy things that are current or that other people are doing, especially all of the macho, violent, nihilistic, or even minimalist work that has been so popular in my lifetime.
By Hillary Weston
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6400-anna-biller-s-pleasure-principles
Still from Anna Biller's Viva (2007)
Review of John Waters' Pink Flamingos (1972)
Divine Dog Shit: John Waters and Disruptive Queer Humour in Film (Issue 80, September 2016)
by Stuart Richards
Pink Flamingos also features the most notorious scenes in Waters’s career. In the famous dog-shit sequence, the moment is filmed on a Baltimore street. With the sequence shot as a documentary long-take that confirms what we see is real as we hear: “You know somebody filthier? Watch as Divine proves that not only is she the filthiest person in the world but also the filthiest actress in the world. What you are about to see is the real thing.” The scene features close-up shots of Divine licking her lips and Crackers and Cotton smirking. It is in this lowly space that he finds his authority. He scoops, sniffs and consumes it. Taking this grotesquery further, he swallows, winks, smiles and licks his lips – and also gags. Played over this scene is Patti Page’s novelty pop song “The Doggie in the Window.” While standing out as the grossest scene in the film, the humour is at the same time consistent with what has preceded it – everyday cuteness juxtaposed with obscenity.
'Odorama' - John Waters, a scratch and sniff card accompanying the screening of Polyester (1981)
Sensory deprivation
I am interested in the idea of sensory deprivation - being completely restricted from experiencing all the senses ie. eyes are forced shut, ears and nose blocked, hands cuffed, mouth stuffed. A form of torture?
However, it can be argued that this type of 'sensory deprivation' provides an alternative form of sensory experience - one will still be able to see (darkness, beams of light), smell (the object that has been used to combat smell), hear (ringing in ears or earworms), taste (the inside of one's own mouth, the object that has been stuffed inside the mouth), touch (the cuffs, the person's own hands)
An idea I could expand on would be for a film to capture two extremes: the immersive experience of sensory deprivation and a sudden shift into complete sensory experience - overstimulation.
A baby's perspective
Babies cannot make sense of what they hear or see.
- Alludes to the state of newness and a heightened reality
- From a baby's perspective? Birth and first exposure to the human senses.
- First experiences seem more intense and alien to a baby, how can I capture this using filming/audio techniques?
Quotes from David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)
“I think we live in overstimulated times. We crave stimulation for its own sake. We gorge ourselves on it. We always want more, whether it's tactile, emotional or sexual.”
“The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.”
“Your reality is already half video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination. You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.”
"I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation."