My First Film – first-look review

“This prob­a­bly shouldn’t be a film,” notes the open­ing of Zia Anger’s debut fea­ture, deci­sive­ly titled My First Film. The courage to begin with such abne­ga­tion speaks vol­umes about the ambiva­lent rela­tion­ship between cre­ator and cre­ation, where vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is at stake. At the same time, the assur­ance which caus­es those words to appear on a desk­top screen teas­es a con­tra­dic­tion: My First Film is a meta-his­to­ry of first times, but it is not real­ly a debut.

It has been 15 years since the direc­tor shot a fea­ture about a young woman search­ing for her moth­er – Always All Ways, Anne Marie – which IMDb clas­si­fies as ​“aban­doned”. Anger can be con­sid­ered a vet­er­an in debut film­mak­ing after years of tour­ing with a desk­top-based live per­for­mance called ​‘My First Film’, the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of which now exists as a 100-minute aut­ofic­tion fea­ture with the same name.

More than a sim­ple repack­ag­ing of the nar­ra­tive, ideas, and raw reflec­tions which fuelled her desk­top-based live per­for­mance of the same name, My First Film occu­pies sev­er­al planes of exis­tence. First, as a lega­cy piece, then, as a ven­ture in fic­tion­al meta-fic­tion, and third­ly, as a joy­ous recla­ma­tion of all the lost ​‘firsts’: films; abor­tions; rejections.

The act of turn­ing a (very per­son­al) per­for­mance piece into a fea­ture inevitably ques­tions the trans­lata­bil­i­ty of art across media, but the film is clear­ly the project’s final incar­na­tion: the fullest and the most acces­si­ble of all.

In 2018, Anger start­ed her desk­top per­for­mance in front of audi­ences and dur­ing the ear­ly days of lock­down, she put up a lim­it­ed num­ber of live-stream events that utilised the for­mat even more: con­nect­ing the iso­lat­ed. My First Film, how­ev­er, trades desk­top for the cin­e­mat­ic con­ven­tions of plot, per­for­mance and cam­er­a­work, to present a non-lin­ear emo­tion­al journey.

Trans­for­ma­tion may be the defin­ing fea­ture of Anger’s approach to sto­ry­telling in the way she invites it, both as a per­former and as direc­tor. She is gen­er­ous and wise to hand over the role of Vita (Anger’s alter-ego of fif­teen years pri­or) to an actress as vivid as Odessa Young (Shirley) who shines even in her melancholy.

Vita is a first-time film­mak­er with a crew of friends and a crowd­fund­ing cam­paign; behind the scenes, she also has an Adder­all addic­tion and an unwant­ed preg­nan­cy to deal with. Laugh­ter, tears, or suf­fo­cat­ed dreams weigh on Vita, but it is no coin­ci­dence that her name is Latin for ​‘life’, as My First Film, only in its present shape and form, can realise the promise of cathar­tic new begin­nings that haunt­ed its past versions.

Con­text and lega­cy aside, My First Film is a fas­ci­nat­ing explo­ration of cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage and the myr­i­ad of ways the cam­era can lit­er­al­ly inhab­it a nar­ra­tive. Ash­ley Con­nor (who lensed Always All Ways, Anne Marie and recent­ly, Polite Soci­ety) gets cre­ative with cam­era posi­tions, move­ments, and over­all dynamism to slip in between Vita’s voiceover nar­ra­tion and the plot itself, effec­tive­ly carv­ing a space for the unshare­able to dwell in. Loss may fit images bet­ter than it yields itself to words, yet Connor’s visu­als ampli­fied by Per­fume Genius’ ethe­re­al score nev­er try to fill in the gaps left by Anger’s pre­vi­ous projects.

Images acquire a life of their own: chaot­ic hand­held scenes, stock clips, old and recre­at­ed footage, the director’s own Insta­gram sto­ries, Maya Deren’s Mesh­es of the After­noon coex­ist in a hybrid med­i­ta­tion of loss and sev­ered begin­nings. It’s also true that film­mak­ing itself is a process of heal­ing – and the glo­ri­ous doc­u­men­tary-style end­ing tes­ti­fies to that – it is at once messy, trou­bled and some­what sacred.