The artist film maker talks about canons, gatekeepers, Brecht, and the theatrical experience
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2019)
Zia Anger’s My First Film is quite unlike most things you’ll ever see in a cinema. By sitting in the front row and projecting her laptop screen onto the bigger one in front of her, she performs a live desktop documentary that challenges our assumptions of what constitutes a film and who decides what constitutes a film. By interacting with the audience, and communicating directly by what she types on screen, Anger provides a commentary to her own personal history and the history of her first - and, crucially, never released - feature film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. The performance morphs and changes each time she performs it, partly due to the nature of live performance but also in her constantly revolving reflection on her story and the repeated retelling of her story.
When ALT/KINO was at the 2019 edition of Sheffield Doc/Fest, we caught up the Zia to discuss the performance.
ALT/KINO: It's always interesting when artists and filmmakers choose to revisit past pieces in some form. How did you decide - and when did you decide - that you wanted to kind of re-engage with Always All Ways, Anne Marie [2012]?
Zia Anger: Well, it always felt, obviously, unfinished and through the years - I think I "finished it" in 2012 - it haunted me. It haunted my practice, specifically, because I had this thing that I couldn't prove to anybody that I had done. I mean, of course, I could send a private link or something like that but my record as a filmmaker did not have this film on it. So it haunted me for many years in many different ways. I didn't make films for a long time after; I didn't have confidence in the way that I made films.
Yeah, it was just a really sad thing to kind of be dragging around and on IMDb, back in 2012, when you would upload something to Withoutabox to apply to festivals, it would automatically be uploaded to IMDb. Then, until it would premiere, there would be a red stamp next to the title that said 'post-production' or 'production' or whatever. Withoutabox and IMDb were linked because they were both [Withoutabox folded in 2019] owned by Amazon. So, as I continued on with my career and started making films again, and started realizing I need financing for films, I go to these meetings with financers and producers, and for whatever reason they always check IMDb, right? They'll you'll sit in a meeting with them and mentioned something, and they'll be like 'oh, let me look that up.' So I always knew that there was this thing, this mark on my record that said 'post-production.' And as the years went by I thought, 'even though I can obviously finish a film, is anybody reading into the fact that, you know, three years... six years have passed with something that still says it's in post-production? Am I somebody that a financier could trust to finish a film?' So I wrote to IMDb, an email, and I said, 'can you please take this off my director's listing because it doesn't exist.' Even though it does exist, it didn't exist in that way.
And I never heard back and a month later I checked and they had changed the listing from 'post-production' to 'abandoned' in big red letters. I was like, 'whoa, this is even worse,' that now I'm a filmmaker that abandons work, right? Like, how can you be trusted with a million dollars if you're somebody that abandoned something? So I wrote a nasty tweet about it, basically saying that it wasn't me that abandoned it; it was programmers, it was IMDb. It was the whole system that kind of abandoned this work, even though this work in my mind is - and I'm not really competitive with other filmmakers, but you know - is more inventive, or more singular, than any of those films that you'd see at a top 10 festival, any of those films that are about a young boy coming of age. And I knew that the film had problems. I knew that it was not a great film, but it's bad like everybody else's first film - that's what I say in the performance.
And a friend of mine, Mark Lukenbill, who programs for Spectacle (a microcinema in Brooklyn) had seen my performance work with Jenny Hval and invited me to - because of this tweet - show my abandoned work at Spectacle and I said 'I can't, I can't. Unless you give me, like, a format to do it in, I don't think I could do that because it's really embarrassing to pull these things out.' And they said 'what if you did it in this format?' like this Jenny Hval performance that they saw, which had a lot of text on screen and was communicating with the audience in that way while music was happening. And I got really drunk. And then I was really hungover and I went and did the first performance. I prepared a little bit but for the most part, I really just, you know, wrote from the gut. And in that way, it was an accident that this performance happened. There were maybe only 15 people in the theatre but as it was happening, I started to have this experience where people were laughing and crying and gasping and cheering. It felt like the way that I had always hoped a theatre - an experience in a theatre - would feel, even though I knew that my film in its original form would never have been received in that way. So after that, I called up some friends who run Memory, which is like an independent production studio, and I was like 'I think I've got something here. I think I've got a performance.' So yeah, it was an accident that kind of unfurled into this thing that felt like something and felt like something that I wanted to explore. And over almost the last year, I've just been developing it as this new piece that I'm really proud of. I mean, this is a very normal, narrative way of explaining how I got into it but it did not start as a conceptual thing. It started just as a new way of practicing; I didn't know if it was performance, I didn't know if it was filmmaking, it was just a new tool in my practice.
A/K: So the desktop tool and aesthetic you'd been using previously?
ZA: Yeah, with Jenny Hval. Not with the split-screen or anything like that, but with the text edit - actually, the Notes app - on an iPhone had become a part of our collaboration.
A/K: It's interesting because the visuals are quite reminiscent of online video essays and desktop documentaries - had you seen other people using this style?
ZA: I hadn't but I knew that it had been done. I mean, it's not like there's anything really inventive about the way that I'm showing this, right? People had done live desktop performances way before I did, so for me it was more about being 'okay, there's this tool that exists, and maybe I should just get good at it.' And it became this really interesting way of practicing my art that was just me. It didn't include, or indict, anybody else in the process, which was interesting because I have a number of really, really great collaborators, but also at times have found that relying on your collaborators too much is not a safe way to practice.
As much as I want to collaborate with other people, and always be around other people, other people don't always want to collaborate or be around me. Not because of who I am as a filmmaker, but just because it's very hard to make independent film. It's very hard to make independent music. There's a lot of concerns and frustrations within that make it hard to work with other people who are at the same level as you because, you know, there's money involved, and there's more powerful people involved. So yeah, so it is the first thing that I've ever done totally alone. I mean, you could say that when you're directing a film, and you're the writer and the director, you're the captain of the ship. I never liked to think that way, I always really was trying to get rid of the hierarchy, but it's really hard to convince other people of that. So in a sense, I've always kind of been the captain of the ship, in other people's eyes, but in this case it was more like me on my own little sailboat trying to, you know, make everything work.
My First Film (Zia Anger, 2019)
A/K: You mentioned your tweet calling out programmers earlier and I think it's always interesting to think about the artistic and political sides of curation in a festival environment, such as Doc/Fest, and the role that these events play in the forming of canons. Your performance opens with you AirDropping videos to audience members' phones and raises immediate questions about gate-keeping and the nature of distribution. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the process of getting your work out there - either with regards to Always All Ways, Anne Marie or more generally?
ZA: Yeah, so in the beginning of the piece, I AirDrop my Instagram videos, which have expired, right? They're not meant to be seen anymore. But, as the maker, I always have access to them and I can always do what I want with them: I can repost them, I can save them to my phone. It took me a few performances to realise that that action that I do at the beginning, which is sending out my old expired Instagram stories, is essentially what I'm doing with the performance. You know, the whole performance falls under that huge umbrella of finding ways around, or hacking, the canon system in which you need a premiere to then have your release date posted next to your film on IMDb. So it took me a while to figure that out and then in a larger sense, the story that I end with - which I won’t say and spoil for anybody - but this story I end with is personal, and it's about my family, but ultimately it's about coming from a place that has always been antithetical to traditional methods of distribution, conception. It was this kind of release for me to realise that I was literally made from this antithetical practice and kind of embracing that. That's maybe not a strong way of saying it, but I'm embracing this thing that maybe for a really long time I had pushed against. I wanted to be accepted, I wanted to be folded into the way that filmmakers are accepted. I wanted that to happen for me and this performance is a release from that, right? It's me releasing that goal. Then, to take the individual out of it, it's kind of just a demonstration that like you too, who are in the audience, who may be filmmakers, but may just be audience members, can also release the expectations that you have for your career or your idea of what a screening should be.
A/K: And this is structurally quite a complicated piece which, as you've mentioned, you developed over a couple of years but is full of riffs and loops back around to ideas of the female body, conception, creation and procreation. I just wondered about that process of drawing out these connections between your own history, and your filmmaking, and other repurposed elements.
ZA: Yeah, finding those comparisons has been through writing and rewriting. So in this performance [at Sheffield Doc/Fest], I don't think I said it but in some performances, I explain that when I went and shot this first film, I wrote 40 pages, and I didn't edit the 40 pages, and they didn't look like a traditional script but I was like, 'yeah, I can do this, right?' because I was, like, a jacked-up 24-year-old white woman who had been told I can do anything. What I've learned in the past 8-10 years of continuing to make stuff, and from watching other people work and make things, is that I really respect people that rehearse and I respect the rehearsal process. So, the first couple of times I didn't rehearse, I didn't do anything. Then at a certain point, I realised that if I'm going to respect this piece, I'm going to have to rehearse it. Through the rehearsal process, I began to see these crazy parallels - which might just be the way that my mind works, I'm kind of always looping, that's like my problem, maybe? - but I realised that all of these things are just mirrors, like this endless hall of mirrors where everything looks the same.
A/K: And then you have slightly more interactive elements which I assume weren't there right from the beginning? I'm thinking primarily of the final action in which the audience is allowed to participate with you.
ZA: Well, I used to study theatre and I was really struck, for a long time, by Brecht's alienation effect where you're supposed to alienate the audience to make them reject catharsis and actually, like, stand up and want to do something about what they were experiencing, rather than just being super cathartic and letting the world happen.
A/K: Get rid of the verisimilitude to engage more deeply with the material.
ZA: Yeah. Yeah. So I knew that in a [movie] theatre you can't use your phones. Besides, in a horror film, you can't laugh and scream. You certainly can't make a mess - of course, everybody does with their popcorn, but, there's an implicit agreement with the theatre. So that's one thought that I had. Then another thought I had went back to being a very young person and really being in love with The Rocky Horror Picture Show from a very early age. My dad would bring me to the live shows and that was, to me, the most exciting experience I've ever had watching a movie. So I thought, you know, one is to demonstrate that you can be whoever you want to be in a literal cinema, through alienating the audience and goading them into doing things that are taboo, or not supposed to be done in a theatre. The other thing was thinking, 'well, I've had such a good time doing these things: yelling and screaming, ripping things up and having things thrown at me' that maybe, in the smallest way, once I goad them to do these things, they're going to really, really like it. They're going to really like being able to use their phone. They're going to really like being able to rip things up. Sometimes I prompt people to scream or yell - they're going to really like these things.
So that's how that came to be, and there is a part of me that, in the performance, has to really check and make sure that I'm not actually alienating people. I don't want to alienate the individual. It's not about the individual experience, it's about the experience as a group of people. So how best to make everybody feel a part of it and valuable while they're doing these things, because that was the experience that I had in Rocky Horror, which is, you know, the most ridiculous thing to say that that's an inspiration, but it is.
A/K: It's particularly interesting seeing this with a British audience as well, where even making unintentional noises in a horror film will often get you shushed. Jodie Mack did a screening in London last year which involved vocal audience participation and even very committed fans took a while to warm up to it. But once they started...
ZA: Yeah, I think we're so concerned with having this really pure experience. You know, I've been in so many theatres where somebody tells somebody else to shut up and I always think 'what's worse than being told to shut up when you don't understand something, and you're just asking a question?' That, to me, is not pure. That to me is again this hierarchy of cinema where the most quiet people understand the film the most which just isn't true in my experience.
A/K: And this tool, as you put it, that you've brought into your practice, do you see it as belonging specifically to this story or do you imagine that you'll want to explore further the possibilities of this kind of work?
ZA: I think that no matter what kind of traditional cinema I might make - cinema films that go and play in theatres - they will have the potential to then be brought into this work. Or the failures that I have, will have the potential, right? This is an ever-expanding, morphing piece. But I don't know if there's other parts of my life, beyond cinema, that this piece would be able to digest. If only because it's so clear that my work as a filmmaker reflects so much my life as a human being. I don't have any other thing in my life that is that great or that deep, or that is a true reflection. I mean, I just got a dog and dogs are perfect mirrors of you, but I'm not gonna go and do 60 minutes on my dog.
A/K: Well, not yet. You only just got it.
ZA: Right. Exactly. I mean, a lot of filmmakers have done dog films, so who knows?
Zia Anger will be performing My First Film at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on Saturday 21 March, 2020.