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Jul 23 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
When I wanted to get a passport at age 20, I realized that my parents had lost my birth certificate. I sent away for it, and there was no first name on it (just "2" as the second of a set of twins), so I had to apply to get a name. The whole process took months. #hippieparents
I kept the names they had given me but added an extra middle name, which was Charles-Armand de Polignac
My plan was to travel around Europe aimlessly for a few months, and take a semester off school. My parents really didn't believe I was going, although I kept telling them. Finally I said good-bye and they just laughed. "So, you're actually going to Europe!"
They thought it was so surreal: "Have fun in EUROPE! Hahaha!" The reason I just thought of this whole scenario is that I watched the movie KAJILLIONAIRE recently, and it gave me flashbacks.

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More from @missannabiller

Anna Biller Profile picture
Jul 25
Once I went down a deep Satanic Panic rabbit hole and I learned that the children/toddlers in the McMartin Daycare Center had STDs and genital scarring, there were really tunnels, etc. The perpetrators weren't charged because they couldn't prove which adults abused them.
Eventually I found a message board where one of the mothers of the abused children spoke in detail about it. The parents hired an independent team to dig up the school, and they found the tunnels exactly as the children had described them.
The case had been debunked on every news outlet because they never found tunnels during the trial, but it seems they didn't try very hard. And then when they did find the tunnels, no news outlet would cover the story.
Read 10 tweets
Anna Biller Profile picture
Apr 2, 2021
After watching PIECES OF A WOMAN I was staggered by the thought that the most dramatic moment of many women's lives (childbirth) is so rarely the subject of movies. And reviews by men are using words like melodramatic, Lifetime movie, etc.
It's a difficult watch. Shia LaBeouf is traumatizing because he's doing his aggressive man thing in a woman's picture. But like it or not, drama isn't melodrama simply because it's about a woman's life. The most maudlin, clichéd films about men are rarely called melodrama.
So even if you don't think it's good, or have problems with the script or acting, it's still really striking that this thing that women go through is so absent from culture, in a world that's so obsessed with capturing realism.
Read 6 tweets
Anna Biller Profile picture
Apr 1, 2021
The full list of ten is:

RAN
KAGEMUSHA
VAGABOND
MISHIMA: A LIFE IN 4 CHAPTERS
THE KING OF COMEDY
VARIETY
HOUSE OF GAMES
MEPHISTO
FITZCARRALDO
L'ARGENT
Runners up:

WORKING GIRLS
CRACKING UP
BORDER RADIO
THE MAKIOKA SISTERS
FANNY AND ALEXANDER
I'm an obsessive Bergman fan, but FANNY AND ALEXANDER is one of the the only films of his I didn't love. Something about the relationship between the patriarch and the maid really put me off. So that's why it's not on the main list.
Read 6 tweets
Anna Biller Profile picture
Dec 28, 2020
I was just thinking about how when I traveled abroad to film festivals, I had various male intellectuals lecture me about why you "can't" make movies like I make today. Very nice men...very smart. They were just trying to educate me.
A Spanish filmmaker told me that you can't make movies like this after Word War II. He then went on to explain the history of cinema to me, mentioning Bazin, etc. A French philosopher talked about Simone de Beauvoir being such old news in France, or something like that.
The filmmaker who talked about WWII - well, in a sense he was right. Because it was after WWII that cinema really cracked down on women being able to write films in Hollywood or even to write for women's magazines. All the female writers were fired and men were hired.
Read 12 tweets
Anna Biller Profile picture
Dec 26, 2020
I rewatched I'M NO ANGEL last night, and it seems to me that the word Mae West created is slipping further and further away...radically so even in the last two or three years. Female desire, pleasure, glamour, and sexuality have become such wrought subjects, more than ever. Image
Watching it, I couldn't help thinking about how masculinity and femininity were equally fetishized in old Hollywood, and now masculinity is fetishized as much as ever, but femininity is an embarrassment.
The way Mae West does femininity - as a parody but also as a form of pleasure and power - it what I grew up with, watching 1930s movies as a child. Now more and more people will see at as freakish and problematic.
Read 6 tweets
Anna Biller Profile picture
Jun 25, 2020
“Just the sight of this book made me wonder how it happened that so many different men have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behavior.” -Christine de Pizan, 1405
"It seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. They all concur in one conclusion: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice."
"Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept...hoping that I could judge impartially whether the the testimony or so many notable men could be true."
Read 12 tweets

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