"Tonight is going to be antithetical to traditional methods of moving image distribution." At around 00:00 GMT on March 27th, artist Zia Anger begins her staggering, shrewd, and somehow still surprising performance My First Film with this ambitious agenda. By the performance’s end, about two hours later, Anger has more than achieved her aim—imagining and realizing a creative, conceptual work that is not contrarian but utopian, a statement that is forceful and immutable, yet intimate, something exceptionally clear-eyed, and as ever with Anger, characteristically noncompliant.
Though there is always an evident, and ontologically inherent variability and singularity to live performance, My First Film has, since 2018, more or less existed established in its one original form. Described by the artist as an “expanded cinema performance,” My First Film meshes Anger’s unseen, undistributed first feature Always All Ways, Anne Marie (formerly known as Gray) with live on-screen commentary, giving the spectator the filmmaker’s presence in lieu of the film’s absence—exploding, reconstructing, piecing, and putting in parallel the narrative of this 82-minute film with the much wider, much more interesting contextual one: its production, completed in 2012, and the destruction that has taken place ever since.
To everybody but Anger, the disregarded Always All Ways, Anne Marie did not exactly exist. To this day, Amazon’s Internet Movie Database assigns it the status “abandoned.” Reflecting on her own ambiguous status as filmmaker in program notes written for a performance held at New York City’s Metrograph, Anger shares: “fellow artist Jillian Mayer once told me the act making a film which nobody sees is actually just theater.”
Following the cancellation of a handful dates scheduled across the UK, in the 2020 months of March and April—a time of prolonged physical separation and isolation, during which exhibitors try to replace or reconstruct the experience of collectively watching a film—Anger’s My First Film moved from its initial exhibition context into another, streaming live and digitally to each of its audience member’s domestic device of choice. The expanded cinema performance is taken out of the cinema, but its gesture of resistance and reclamation remain.
Some elements are lost in the transition (the rider requirement for Anger’s rejected film to occupy the same cinema screen it was once kept from, is an especially brilliant and bold one), but My First Film can capably adapt to its new surroundings.
A work of non-fiction this personal may benefit from at least some brief contextual information about the woman both behind its curtain and at its center. Zia Anger works in moving images. By 2018, the year the artist performed My First Film’s predecessor (abandoned) at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater, Anger had already written and directed several short films and had crafted many uniquely accomplished and adventurous music videos. Though in relation to that body of work, My First Film is just as subversive and insightful in its iconoclasm, this performance differs in the ways in which it disarms. Explicitly introspective, My First Film is an entirely solo work—it’s not conceived and shared, as before, with actors, performers and choreographers, or Anger’s regular cinematographer Ashley Connor—and though the time is elastic, My First Film approximately runs to a fully feature-length 120-ish minutes.
At the outset, Anger shares her screen, and what follows is mostly the artist’s subtly structured stream-of-consciousness movement from application to application and window to window, a show-and-tell exhibition of items that alternates between her iMessage, Safari, QuickTime, and TextEdit. Though these everyday applications are incredibly familiar (it is worth noting that, unlike a film that may require any expensive cameras or proprietary software to edit sound and image, the tools at Anger’s disposal here are all free and pre-installed), My First Film is not quite a desktop documentary or a diary film, but a work that combines and sequences these simple elements into something very new.
Space is appropriately left available for both audience interaction and Anger’s own improvisation. With playback of Always All Ways, Anne Marie taking place in its middle, My First Film is framed beginning and end with 1:1 iMessage exchanges with its audience: a “before” that acts as an initial icebreaker, and an “after” that reveals and reflects back what has been achieved by and between both artist and audience by the end of the work. From start to finish, the effective and impeccably structured My First Film progresses beat to beat and moment to moment with an easy and perfect imperceptibility.
Its first stab at disrupting traditional methods of moving image distribution comes with the sharing of short expired Instagram stories. That this process of sharing is quite fun—and the content shared is frequently funny—must not imply that what this is is in any way anything frivolous. Though brief, the archeological, excavating act might represent in miniature what the remainder of My First Film does more apparently: a rule-breaking retrieval of once-ephemeral work to be redistributed again and more directly to its audience.
The next disruption occupies the most considerable and significant stretch of My First Film, first the audience is given a glimpse at Anger’s mother’s “Period Piece” performance and then Anger’s own Always All Ways, Anne Marie. This is not a blur of fiction and non-fiction, but of text and context. Anger’s juxtaposition of the two—and subsequently, the viewer’s gradual increasing consciousness of the interdependent exchange between taking place between one and the other—is clean and clear. From here, My First Film continues in this split-screen format. On one side of the canvas, Anger engraves ellipses and skims through her 2012 film in QuickTime, and on the other—sitting in close proximity but at a great ironic distance—Anger narrates from a neutral position in our shared first-person present moment. Stoic, her tone is sincere—and ruthless when appropriate.
“This is a true story,” Anger begins to repeat in her commentary, remembering the work and weight that went into her film’s production, all of the ethical problems contained therein, and what did, and did not, happen after the film was finished. After shooting in her home town with family and friends across 2010 to 2012, Anger entered Always All Ways, Anne Marie into fifty or so film festivals, and was rejected by all.
My First Film’s fascinating juxtaposition of first- and third-person comes into greatest focus when Anger plays back an Adderall-fueled to-camera crowdfunding video, shot to raise the money to continue production on the feature. Thinking back in time, and looking ahead at the footage in front of her, Anger writes: “She was a mess… I have to stop her… I hate her.” The short clip is paused, but there is no stopping her. Anger’s commentary may vary performance to performance, but what is replayed night after night—what Anger is in extended dialogue with—can only remain the same. What she can do, and does, is take back some control over these images, refashioning and reproducing them into something we see by My First Film’s end as significantly greater. Always All Ways, Anne Marie is never shared in full—My First Film does not follow the traditional linear format of projection and post-screening Q&A—and instead this text is contained and incubated within its context, all kept under Anger’s close authorial control. Though the film might hold less of our attention than Anger’s live commentary, this thing, the appearing and disappearing object at the performance’s center, is no empty prop. It becomes unmistakable through Anger’s close reading that the film’s subject matter has sculpted the eventual shape of this very performance, and so closely are themes and motifs shared and related to one other that any hypothetical attempt to replicate My First Film’s essential structure with another film, or any other source material, would certainly not be in the same way successful. This is not totally by accident: as Anger admits, Always All Ways, Anne Marie is to some extent the product of advice given often to first-time filmmakers, a reconfiguration of Anger’s own life and upbringing, with some key differences.Filmed in four parts, Always All Ways, Anne Marie follows its protagonist’s pregnancy as she cares for her ailing father and strives to find her mother, who abandoned her at birth. It’s this chronological skeleton that provides a more invisible structure to My First Film. Motifs from the former appear again in the latter—hermaphroditic worms, pregnancies and abortions, the life cycle of births and deaths—and ideas from then take on new meanings in the here and now. Though appropriately, gracefully imperfect, there is some symmetry between abortion and abandonment, challenging the cultural conditioning of shame, silence, and pluralistic ignorance.
As in Anger’s short films and many of her intriguingly-choreographed music videos, Always All Ways, Anne Marie pays close and considered attention to the body, to what is expressed in the physical movements of its performers. My First Film—though its direct address to the audience takes place within the confines and through the language of a word processor—does so too. A September 2019 music video made by Anger for Jenny Hval’s “Accident” (their fifth collaborative work, and the third single from Hval’s album The Practice of Love—title borrowed from Valie Export’s 1985 film Die Praxis der Liebe) is an especially enlightening intertext, and somewhat of a distant relative to My First Film.
As everywhere elsewhere in Anger’s music video body of work, “Accident” glimpses the hand habits of one of its figures—Anger’s fingers pressing and depressing on the keys of a Macbook, finding the language of pleasure and pain, typing a short email to her friend Jenny. And as well as incorporating Anger and her mother’s “Period Piece”—miming the movement of the eggs from ovary to uterus via fallopian tube—there is much to “Accident” that, though brief, entrancingly expands My First Film’s ideas on the labor of work and/or childbirth and the performative roles women, and particularly women artists, bear or are born into.
Like any work of performance, theatrical or digital, My First Film too always requires and relies on the physical presence of its performer. “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard,” wrote Hélène Cixous in her 1976 article “The Laugh of the Medusa.” “Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that?” writes Maggie Nelson, a lot later, in her 2015 book “The Argonauts.”
In her authoritative 1993 text on the subject, “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction,” feminist scholar Peggy Phelan writes with precision on the ephemerality of performance and the mortality of the body, on the singularity and specificity of the former as a kind of public, psychic rehearsal for the loss of the latter. To borrow from Phelan’s theory of performance, Anger’s My First Film uses live commentary to “supplement (add to, defer, and displace)”1 the missing object, or corpse, at its center, reclaiming the rejection or appropriating the absence of Always All Ways, Anne Marie to generate this new work. In this way, the new work “does not reproduce the object, it rather helps us restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost.”2
It is My First Film’s primacy as performance that is surely Anger’s most substantial gesture at resisting traditional methods of moving image distribution. The work is not a total withdrawal from representation or the representational economy, but again, as per Phelan, “performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital… Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends.”3 What may be lost in the shift from film to performance is in reality, no real loss at all—Always All Ways, Anne Marie was never let enter this economy of reproduction in the first place—and in this new form, My First Film seems to somehow, in bereavement, do better justice to the themes of rebirth and resurrection in Always All Ways, Anne Marie than Always All Ways, Anne Marie ever did.
The corporeal metaphor with which Phelan conflates body and performance of course reflects My First Film’s own crucial refutation of reproducibility and reproduction. In either of its different-but-equal exhibition contexts (offline, theatrical and online, digital) there is no one original My First Film—no copy, no copy of a copy, no finished product to be sold. As performance, the work instead exists perpetually in-progress, in its ambivalent position between cinema and theatre, adapted uniquely live night after night from Anger’s private, personal life experience.
With this strategy of supplementation, insistence on a specific, controlled exhibition context, and in its irreproducibility, My First Film seems to synthesize several measures that resist traditional methods of moving image distribution. Using the examples of Paolo Cherchi Usai’s Passio, Gregory Markopolous’s cycle Eniaios, the online platform vdrome.org, and more, in the final three chapters of her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Dr. Erika Balsom writes on several decisive aspects and events in this movement of moving images that, in intriguing ways, Anger’s My First Film can be considered at the intersection of.
As “an evanescent performative event rather than a repeatable object,”4 My First Film necessarily admits any and all contingencies, resisting standardisation’s suppression of variability, and, in spite of its taking place via Apple’s Mac OSX, still favours the “frailty of the human over and above the mechanical sameness of the machine.”5 It is an important reversal that after the objective “failure” of Always All Ways, Anne Marie, My First Film can instead take place where the artist can assert their authority, allowing Anger’s performance to “succeed” where her film did not. Resisting dissemination and refusing “the imperative for media products to circulate… in order to generate value,”6 My First Film does not disband, disperse and drift beyond Anger’s interpretation and intention.
Though this withholding is central to its form, the no-guts no-glory My First Film is generous in other ways—closing with what Anger refers to as denouement, the performance concludes with spectacular and bittersweet catharsis. The performance’s prevailing emotion—a painful sorrow, a palpable ache that gnaws like grief—proves to be one of the work’s most special and surprising elements. Equally unexpected and extraordinary is a point Anger reiterates and repeats beginning and end: with Always All Ways, Anne Marie, she did what young filmmakers are told to do—she wrote what she knew, she secured the help of friends and family, she crowdfunded, she footed the substantial bill to submit her first film to fifty film festivals. My First Film is not the same repeated advice. Thankfully, what’s contained in the work is not presented didactically like advice at all. With this self-effacing, self-empowering performance, Zia Anger challenges a profit-making model not conducive to interesting and worthwhile work, fetches the bolt cutters, and enacts personal revolution.
Additional livestream performances of My First Film will take place in May 2020. Follow Zia Anger on Twitter for more information.
NOTES
1. Peggy Phelan, “The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, p.147
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p.148
4. Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, Columbia University Press, 2017, p. 170
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p.190