J Paul Johnson
Being John Malkovich. Get Out. À bout de souffle. Boyz N the Hood. Lady Bird. Night of the Hunter. Citizen Kane, first and foremost. At least a few filmmakers have made bona fide classics their first time out. But for most, the first film is at best a middling success, maybe at best something good enough to garner a little attention, a loss leader or a proof-of-concept leading to something bigger down the line. More frequent are the first films no one ever hears about: the ones that get abandoned due to any or all of dozens of reasons. The process can be so painful it’s been likened to giving birth. Zia Anger’s wryly self-reflexive My First Film recounts, with an esoteric metatextual flair, her own experience in that last category, her experience making a film fueled more by pharmaceuticals, ambition, and hubris than funds or acumen, and that ultimately, for those reasons and others, was aborted.
Even that brief description of My First Film seems woefully insufficient, for Anger’s film has, let’s say, a lot going on. Its plot is based on Anger’s own experience but is fictionalized, with surrogate characters renamed and cast for this specific telling of her story. Here, the filmmaker is named Vita and played by Odessa Young, and the film begins in flashback as she recounts, 15 years ago, with no small degree of hesitance and self-correction, the small steps that led to her making “her first film”: an independent, no-budget feature she’s named Always, All Ways, Anne Marie. That film’s protagonist, abandoned by her mother, a mime, cares for her aging, unwell father until an unplanned pregnancy has her considering an abortion in the midst of her shoot.
The set of Always, All Ways, Anne Marie is where most of the action of My First Film takes place and it’s as earnest and moving a telling of indie moviemaking as one can imagine. Here, for me anyway, is where My First Film is at its best, telling this well-acted Künstlerroman of a filmmaker in process, spurred on by ideas and feelings but unprepared for the shoot’s complexities. Vita is gregarious and open-minded, telling her small crew of friends—all of them working for free—that her film is “their film.” Without much of a shooting script, Vita relies on her own youthful exuberance, more than a little of it sparked by amphetamines, marijuana, and alcohol. She has next to nothing to offer those assisting her aside from free beer and the chance for a byline on IMDb.
Even early in the process, the first day of the shoot, Vita gets a little too enamored of the process, endangering her cast and crew for the sake of the shot, in a sequence that foretells a similar—and more tragic—event later on. Enthused by their modest successes, the crew forges on, with Vita’s non-actor friend Dina (Irma Vep‘s Devon Ross, as excellent here as she was there) playing the lead role. Improvising, crowdfunding, jerry-rigging, Vita, Dina, and the rest of the cast and crew party their way through the process until, on a night where everyone is method-acting drunk and high, one of the cast, so inebriated he could no longer perform, drives off the set in a pickup. It’s not clear if Vita has any insurance, or, for that matter, any ethics, in the wake of the all-too-predictable and preventable accident that follows. There seems like there’s no remorse, just a doubled-down determination to finish the film even if one of the cast is no longer available.
Parallel to the travails of Vita’s filmmaking is her unplanned pregnancy, the consequence of unprotected sex with a crew member. If the artistic process can be like giving birth, My First Film both both indulges and critiques the analogy before it is largely overwhelmed by it. Vita’s ambitions don’t include having children, at least not with at this moment or with this particular well-intentioned but dim lover. Vita weaves the pregnancy into the storyline of Always, All Ways, Anne Marie as Dina’s character wears an ungainly, unconvincing pregnancy pillow in the film’s final scenes and contemplates, as Vita does herself, an abortion.
That Anger’s “first film” (and not My First Film) was ultimately finished, but never released, runs parallel to Vita’s pregnancy and abortion, and My First Film leans even more fully into the analogy in its final moments when it employs one more level of meta-textuality in celebration of its completion. Anger had submitted Always, All Ways, Anne Marie to no fewer than 50 film festivals, earning rejections from each and every one, and the film is still listed today on IMDb as “abandoned.” (When Criterion someday releases its special edition of My First Film—it’s exactly the kind of contemporary content that company adores for its edgy, highly idiosyncratic metatextuality and self-reflexivity—maybe they’ll include Always, All Ways, Anne Marie, if it still exists, as a bonus feature.)
For more than a few years, Anger channeled her experience making Always, All Ways, Anne Marie into a feature-length multimedia piece of performance art, traveling with projected images, interacting herself with the media on screen and the audience both, using a mix of real-time text, spontaneous Internet searches, a participatory exercises, AirDropped files, and more. That, like My First Film, was an attempt to reclaim ownership of an experience in failure, one made manifest in no small part by the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) misogyny of an industry still deeply rooted in patriarchy.
Like those performances, with My First Film Anger is re-writing her past, deconstructing the relationship between artist and audience, and, especially in the film’s pregnancy/abortion storyline and its metatextual story-around-a-story, reclaiming a failed experience for her own artistic triumph. That’s an ambition one can’t critique. As a (hetero, cis, white, Boomer) male here because of his academic interest in film, I personally found My First Film‘s direct depiction of a rookie female filmmaker’s problematic first on-set experience, anchored by its excellent leads Young and Ross, in and of itself a perfectly fine and wholly self-sufficient narrative, one not in need of any of the elaborate metaphors or metatextual contraptions with which it seems to become, ultimately, raptly enamored. I respect I may be in the minority there, but whether you agree or not, Anger has made a film that, some 15 years later, makes a remarkable success out of a spectacular failure.
