Lounge
‘My First Film’: Failure can be fertile
Summary
Zia Anger revisits her debut feature in this unique metafictional take on creativity and collapse
There are moments when something is said in passing in a film, and it’s only a second later that you realise the world has spun off its axis. My favourite instance of this is in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), a fiction film with the raw materials of documentary, set during the 1968 anti-Vietnam protests in Chicago. Someone lobs a Molotov cocktail at the National Guardsmen, which goes off near the camera. An offscreen voice warns: “Look out, Haskell, it’s real."
The missile was real, the voice added in post-production. It’s a jolt when you watch the film the first time, and a pointed rebuke of the puritan standards that documentaries are often held to. I felt a similar, if less dramatic, jolt during My First Film, another work erected on the border between fact and fiction. A young director, Vita, is recording a fund-raiser video for her debut production. She finishes, but the scene doesn’t end. An off-screen voice calls cut. Other voices are heard as Vita changes posture, flexes her hands. An assistant walks in with a slate as someone says, “You want me to cut this, Z?"
The opening scenes in My First Film are “Z"—director Zia Anger —goofing around on video. But it’s been 45 minutes since, during which we’ve been watching Vita’s story: her voiceover, her memories of making her first film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. It’s jarring, then, to be reminded that we’re watching Zia direct Odessa Young as Vita, who’s really Zia.
Always All Ways, Anne Marie was an actual film, made by Anger in 2010 with a skeleton crew. She completed it with difficulty and submitted it to the likely indie festivals. All of them rejected it. Anger moved on to make shorts and music videos for artists like Angel Olsen and Mitski. In 2018, she created a performance piece, also called My First Film, which looked at the genesis and failure of Always All Ways. This became a blueprint for her 2024 feature, which Anger co-wrote with Billy Feldman, and which premiered at the Danish film festival CPH:DOX in March.
Vita, played with electric nervous energy by Young, is anything but a flattering self-portrait. Her slippery grasp on the story she’s telling frustrates her cast and crew. She too is frustrated: by her clingy not-too-bright boyfriend, by the shoestring nature of the shoot, and by no one taking the project as seriously as she is. Though it’s not clear if we see any scenes from the original film, we get the sense from Vita’s film that it might have been pretentious and close to unwatchable (recalling the scene where Anne Marie gives birth, Vita says sardonically on voiceover: “The audience has come to understand that she is giving birth to herself"). There are dangers in staying fascinated by one’s past failures, but Anger doesn’t seem to suggest that she deserved recognition for her debut, even as she spins its collapse into ever more intricate webs.
Anger chooses a somewhat staid metaphor to run through the film: her/Vita’s abortion as the painful curtailment of a project. But she also leaves room for less quantifiable parallels, like the one suggested by Vita’s father (played by her father in the original film). “Reality is not art. Reality is this"—he pulls out cotton from a pillow and tosses it—“up in the clouds, floating to the future." In the context of Anger’s film, this moment could indicate the weight of documentary and the freedom of fiction. But it isn’t that simple. There are dozens of navel-gazing indies about anxious talent and unfulfilled art, none of which have the strange magnetism of My First Film. Fiction hasn’t freed up non-fiction here; it’s the other way around.
Unusual for this subgenre is the lack of cinephile (or even pop culture) referencing. The one nod is to Meshes of the Afternoon, a 1943 experimental short by Maya Deren. You can see the influence of this haunted work in Anger’s darkly beautiful music videos, and in My First Film’s elliptical, fragmentary style. It’s introduced to Vita by Dina (Devon Ross), the actor playing Anne Marie. Their relationship is the one lasting bond in the film. In a beautiful, fleeting insertion, Vita and Dina on set are cut with shots of Zia and her Anne Marie, actor Deana LeBlanc, in the same setting.
In his essay ‘Painting a Landscape’, John Berger wrote about the hold of work that’s completed but is unfinished in the artist’s eyes. “If I was absolutely convinced that the canvas was finished, I wouldn’t give it a glance. It is only its shortcomings that fascinate me. In these I can see the possibilities of a more accurate metaphor: I can feel all that has escaped me." There’s an emotional scene towards the end that suggests Anger might have finally found closure with her aborted first work. We should be grateful its shortcomings fascinated her so.
‘My First Film’ is streaming on MUBI.
