Narrating Reflection in Zia Anger’s My First Film

By: Aidan Cseh

My First Film – Zia Anger’s newest experiment with film language – begins with the words “Note: this probably shouldn’t be a film” typed out onto a digital note document. From there, candid phone-recorded videos of Anger are weaved between images of the document, revealing further text:: “My videos are not the film lol. Still I thought the first thing you see should be ‘joy’”. By placing the word joy within quotation marks, the authenticity of the videos is questioned and their presence in the film is both real and unreal. They appear “real” because of the visually authentic lens of a cell phone, and “unreal” within the structure of film; yet Anger’s voice, communicating through the abstraction of a note document, attributes them with truthfulness. The film cuts from the text to Vita, played by Odessa Young- the film’s part fictitious, part autobiographical stand-in for Anger herself – sitting at her computer screen beneath cinematic lighting and framing. At this moment, she is contemplating a rejection email concerning the funding of a film centred on her mother’s “period piece” — a performance of mimic menstruation — for the fact that it lacks narrative and is too “asoteric” (a mispronunciation of ‘esoteric’ that is embraced by Vita after it is criticised by an ex-boyfriend). Seamlessly the film flows into a fictional narrative, consistently layering Vita’s filmic presence over top of Anger’s, kaleidoscoping cinematic and digital forms — the character and the artist — in a meta structure that reveals the complex emotions that mobilised the film’s creation.

In the film’s narration, Vita says and repeats throughout: “this is a true story”. The “true” narrative of the film follows Vita as she reflects on the creation of her first feature film Always All Ways, Anne Marie, one that Anger had filmed and attempted to release in 2012. Vita grapples with the passion of its production and the “abandoned” status it has today. She attempts to direct the crew, yet for the most part, no one, not even Vita herself, seems to understand how to collaborate on the completion of a scene. There’s a privilege that is exercised in the collective absent-mindedness of the crew, one that materialises when their lack of physical and mental coordination impedes on the safety of the set: a plane flies dangerously closer and closer to them in order to land the perfect shot, and Vita frustratingly yells at a boom operator for accidentally bumping her head, much to the crew’s dismay. The narrative plays out linearly through these cinematic vignettes of the film’s production and also poetically through the present day reflection that materialises in narration and the edit.

The plot of the film is Anger’s honest reflection of her experience directing Always All Ways, Anne Marie, and the emotional toll its production and rejection from more than fifty film festivals had taken on her. Her 2019 performance— also titled My First Film— reexamined her present day relationship with the film, playing out as a multimedia piece that embraced audience interaction through airdrops, and texts. On stage, and also over Zoom during the pandemic, Anger scanned through her “abandoned” film while illuminating its scenes with details about its production and aftermath. While she emotionally wrestled with the failure of the film, audience members could airdrop and text the filmmaker, interweaving a radically intimate element into the singular honesty of the performance. My First Film (2024) develops on this radical extrapolation of truth through the use of film language, creating a cinematic form of interwoven stock footage, clips from Always All Ways, Anne Marie, and grainy analog film that demonstrate various points of the film’s production with the implication that an artist, or more personally Anger, is behind the images. While Anne’s actress Dina, played by Devon Ross, describes the scene in At Land when Maya Deren disappears behind the dune of a beach, the film cuts to the scene itself, reminding us again of Anger’s presence behind the film’s construction. Its representation of truth is not in terms of some kind of collective understanding – a unification of perspectives to understand the happenings of the event – but as something with a subjective, personal, and emotional form. 

The narrated reflection of Vita throughout the film re-interprets the events of the production, and recounts their outcome in subjective and intimate detail. While reflecting on the casting of Dina as Anne Marie, Vita says that she chose her because she felt she was a prettier, less messy version of herself. It is in this voiceover, when Vita introduces another layer of character relation, that the overlap between the voice of Vita and Anger becomes further abstracted. The events of Vita’s personal life also begin to disrupt the flow of the set, perpetually unravelling the already unorganised crew and further muddying our conceptions of truth and fiction. After Vita’s production assistant boyfriend pompously and “accidentally” gets her pregnant, her frustration mounts in an argument that pauses the filming of an emotionally cathartic scene – the moment when Anne also realises that they’re pregnant, represented by a primal scream. After the argument, Vita’s boyfriend abandons the set due to a lack of support of his ideas, and the crew members practise the cathartic scream that Dina can’t seem to get right. One by one, the group screams with varying amounts of authenticity, none of them quite honest or fully invested in the idea, yet Vita screams with genuine emotional release. The catharsis meant for Anne Marie arrives for Vita instead, and the “true story” of Vita takes precedence over the production. She mirrors the character she’s developed in more ways than one: they share a pregnancy, a strained connection with their father, and Vita’s scream instates Anne as a projection of herself in parallel and conversation with her own life. The complexity of Vita’s pregnancy, relationships, and emotional weight of creating also belongs to Anger. The meta framework of the film that acts to make us aware of its own production is what draws out its creator’s sense of emotional truth. 

Near the end of the film, Vita decides to have an abortion, which is acted out by a doctor in pantomime. At this moment Vita has become physically and mentally exhausted by the process of creating the film and the crew has left the production, leaving her to shoot the rest with only her Dad, Dina, and a camera. The miming of the abortion is reminiscent of her mother’s “period piece”, making it and her pregnancy poignant metaphors of self-embrace, which in parallel with the act of creating, represent a physical, mental, and artistic freeing embrace of the body. The “period piece” and the abortion function not as metaphors in themselves, but only in the meta construction of the film are Vita and Zia able to reconcile the act of creation, both artistically and physically, with its own messiness. Creation is depicted as chaotic and fulfilling in the moment, in hindsight, melancholic and overwhelming—and altogether physically out of control. The film breaks the body open formally and narratively to exorcise raw emotion from past failures and mute points; her ego is reconciled with the body through the eyes of the viewer.