My First Film (Zia Anger, 2018) (Patreon)

As a special presentation during these days of international lockdown, filmmaker / artist Zia Anger has been recently conducting live streams of her film-performance My First Film, which has played to great acclaim over the past year at various venues around the world. It's difficult, of course, to know exactly how closely the streaming feed approximates Anger's live presentation, although one gets the sense that they are fairly similar. Anger "narrates" the work by typing into a text window on her laptop, while screening video on other desktop windows. So in a certain way, My First Film strikes me as uniquely suited to this online format.

I can see why the piece has attracted so much attention. While I am deeply ambivalent about My First Film, I certainly haven't stopped thinking about it since I saw it several days ago. To say that it is a personal work is both an understatement, and to sell it short. In its broadest terms, Anger's project is an inquiry into unrealized dreams and failed endeavors, using the capricious economy of American independent cinema as an armature for these broader philosophical concerns. Anger does, in fact, walk us through the process of making her first feature film, a semi-autobiographical work entitled Gray. Despite funneling copious time and resources into the project, it was summarily rejected by every film festival to which it was submitted. But this failure to connect is only one aspect of Anger's casual, almost pedagogical presentation.

In discussing the struggles of getting the film made, Anger reflects on her own role as an artist and a director, reconsidering some of the ethical choices she made along the way. These vary from the small and commonplace -- posting a GoFundMe and then failing to get everyone their promised donation premiums -- to more grievous transgressions. In particular, Anger analyzes a party scene during which, for Method authenticity, she had her actors get drunk. After the day's shoot, one performer drove home drunk and got into a near-fatal accident. This is one of the key points of My First Film, and it's less of a reckoning than the introduction of a new moral conundrum. Is this transgression somehow worse because it didn't even result in a good, successful film? Anger concludes this segment by remarking that she will never work with non-professional actors again, which struck me as an odd takeaway from the situation.

At the same time, the live element of Anger's commentary means that her "conclusions" are, textually speaking, at least partly provisional, and certainly subject to evolution. Anger works from a script, but the real-time presentation of My First Film allows her to engage with the experiential now of the moment that she, the audience, and the text all share. (In her April 1 performance, she drew attention to a scene from Gray in which the main character is in a supermarket stockpiling canned goods and toilet paper which, as they say, "hits different" now.) 

But there can be a discomfiting lack of space between Anger and My First Film as an artwork, and this is not only the result of the live presentation or instant commentary. At one point, Anger refers to festivals "rejecting me" and then back-spaces to correct the phrase to "rejecting my film," and this conflation between artist and object seems like a scripted "error." In backtracking, Anger would seem to imply that she has come to realize that the rejection of  Gray is not a rejection of her person, that she and her work are separate entities. But then again, My First Film uses specific language and rhetorical callbacks to explicitly compare the failure of Gray to debut in the world as expected to the filmmaker's own abortion. The implied metaphor is about taking control over choices and refusing shame, but the conflation of these two material scenarios -- the failure of an independent feature film and the termination of a pregnancy -- seems politically tin-eared at best. It ignores questions of access, of privilege, and conflates aesthetic judgment with the moralistic legislation of women's bodies.

With this in mind, I came away from My First Film feeling that Anger has instigated a potentially productive flux of concerns, grappling with the various pressures that young women can feel to achieve certain cultural benchmarks of maturity or success, regardless of whether those "achievements" correspond to their own experiential needs. But the flux is messy, and a lot of My First Film needs to be picked through rather than simply accepted because of the validity we tend to grant to personal experience. With distance, we all become more capable of self-criticism, seeing our own experiences more objectively. And as a "living text," My First Film is uniquely suited to this type of evolution.