Vita sits alone in her childhood bedroom, brooding over her film project. The film exists only as a folder of files she pulls up on her computer: videos, emails, message chains, photographs. We’re watching a film about the making of a film—called My First Film—and the film’s director, Zia Anger, masterfully handles the layers of artifice. Not only is she making a film out of her earlier film’s making and unmaking, but Anger’s original project, as much as the one that follows it, is an autofictional work that combines the real and not-real. It offers a warped mirror on Vita’s—and hence Anger’s—life.

So, Anger’s My First Film is and is not her first film. Like Sandi Tan’s celebrated Shirkers (2018), which tells the story of the director’s unfinished first film, My First Film builds its narrative out of the development and “failure” of an earlier feature, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. Whereas Tan’s footage was stolen from her before it was edited, Anger shot and cut her film on a shoestring budget between 2010 and 2012. She submitted it to numerous festivals, but it was rejected by all of them. It was never exhibited as a complete work.

Women’s unfinished films are, in fact, what I’ve been researching over the last few years; and my research has revealed essentially the same things as Anger’s My First Film. My collaborators and I have found that since incomplete projects unveil the conditions of film production, they also highlight women’s determination to make films, in diverse contexts and often against great odds. Such an emphasis on process over product makes scholars and viewers reimagine our models of film authorship to accommodate the collaborative, interdependent processes by which films do—and just as often don’t—get made.

I say just as often because even though, as Anger reminds us in My First Film, we don’t usually talk about unfinished films, the fact is that incomplete works aren’t mere curios in or interruptions to the usual business of cinema. If we include everything from the idea for a film scribbled on the back of a napkin to “complete” but undistributed films like Anger’s Always, then it’s more than likely that the majority of films are unfinished.

My First Film isn’t an attempt to redo Anger’s earlier film but instead to finish what it started—to realize the incomplete film’s potential without denying its failures. By Anger’s admission, her earlier film isn’t a good film, and however painful its serial rejections, the circumstances of its nondistribution are in retrospect a kind of gift: an interlude that allowed for reflection and transformation in filmmaking practice and, just as importantly, filmmaking ethics.

The porousness of art and reality in My First Film opens onto the film’s key preoccupation, which is not only what women should make but how they should make it. Anger’s film turns on a growing understanding of the filmmaker’s responsibility: how the needs of making must be balanced with the needs of those doing the making. It elaborates filmmaking as a collective and ongoing activity, an art of people in space and time—even in the intervals when the camera isn’t rolling.

Watch as the woman turns away from us and begins to walk purposefully across the dunes. Her curly hair bobs in the wind, her black dress stark against the horizon of sand and sky. The panning camera pauses as she passes over a hill and vanishes beyond the ridge. It pans again, searching among the dunes. Soon she emerges, head and then body rising from behind a different ridge; once more, the camera holds as she ascends another sandy peak.

The woman disappears and reappears, but each time she is farther away than we expect her to be, farther than her swift pace should allow. We feel the distance that separates us from her as it stretches; we feel the loss of time as it sinks into intervals in which the camera stops shooting but the woman, unseen, keeps moving. Start, stop, pan, hold: The camera’s rhythms trace the undulations of the landscape in which, by invisible cuts, time is made to defer to space.

This sequence is from At Land, a landmark 1944 short film by the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren. And it reappears at a crucial moment in Anger’s My First Film. Anger’s new docufiction reconstitutes her earlier filmmaking via dramatic reconstruction and meta-artistic confession. Though IMDb designates the 2012 feature as “abandoned,” Anger is not a first-time filmmaker—and it shows. My First Film is an assured, inventive, and carefully controlled film that meditates on the drives and vagaries of independent film production via a coming-of-age narrative centering on Vita, Anger’s youthful, self-serious avatar, played with a ragged sensitivity by Odessa Young.

Since incomplete projects unveil the conditions of film production, they also highlight women’s determination to make films, in diverse contexts and often against great odds.

Within the film, Deren’s 1944 At Land emerges as a touchstone for Vita’s artistic ambitions, especially her desire to push back against ideas of what women should do with their lives—and what they should produce with their bodies. “A girl enters and crosses the frame at a diagonal,” declares Dina (Devon Ross), the beautiful friend Vita has cast as her star and alter ego in the film she is making within My First Film. “She disappears behind a sand dune in the foreground at the edge of the frame.” Dina is quoting Deren’s description of the At Land sequence in her major work of film theory, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946). As Dina recites Deren’s words from memory, we cut to the woman crossing the dunes.

Played by Deren, the woman in At Land is an abstract figure adrift in a hostile world. Following her progress through diverse spaces—sutured together through her body’s movements and match-on editing—At Land’s loose narrative culminates in the woman’s escape from the world of the film. She runs down the beach and through the locales she previously navigated: the dunes, a forest, a home, a dining room, and then back to the beach, her flight tracked by her footprints along the shore. As in the earlier sequence on the dunes, we find ourselves behind her, unable to catch up to her, and, finally, unable to see her at all. Indifferent to a world that is indifferent to her, the woman makes her own way.

For My First Film’s aspiring filmmaker, Vita, Deren’s woman is a model for her own lead character, with her feelings of alienation and uncertainty. Since that character is made in Vita’s image, the woman in At Land is also a model for Vita herself—who, like Deren, uses film to remake reality.

The real intervenes in the fictional throughout My First Film. There are flickering glimpses of Anger’s name rather than Vita’s at the top of the rejection emails from festivals, and Anger herself appears several times, wearing a baseball cap and holding a clipboard in footage spliced in from behind-the-scenes footage of the original production.

These cameos track with moments of realization in which Vita, and the film itself, confronts the ethical responsibility that flows from the cinema’s purchase on the real. The most profound of these stem from a chaotic night of shooting in which Vita puts her actors at risk in service of generating “real” performances. A tragic accident leaves one of the actors in hospital, the crew walk out on the project, and Vita and Dina are left to pick up the pieces.

The crew of the film-within-a-film on location in Zia Anger’s My First Film. Courtesy of MUBI.

This event is central to the film’s ethical drama. Hamstrung by her immaturity and in thrall to her creative ambitions, Vita must face up to the reality of the people whose bodies are on the line in the making of her film. Their realness is her responsibility: to respect the difference between art and life, and to recognize the cinema as a form whose truth is secured through artifice.

This aligns with Deren’s theories of film. Deren insisted that the cinema’s measure of reality—its capacity to record rather than to represent visual experience—was essential to its status as an autonomous art form. For her, what turned cinema into art was the application of artistic imagination and control upon its grounding reality. And cinema’s grounding reality was also the source of its ethical imperatives. As Deren wrote near the end of Anagram, an essay composed in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a preeminent demonstration of human power and its depravity: “And so, ready or not, willing or not, we must come to comprehend, with full responsibility, the world which we have now created.”

Dina has also memorized this line and she shares it with Vita in My First Film. “This is the best part,” she tells her. Deren’s statement of the creator’s responsibility to face their creation becomes the film’s moral compass, its final law. The film becomes a kind of manifesto for filmmaking shaped by an ethic of care and as an essentially collaborative art.

It makes sense, then, that the line about film’s responsibility is passed reciprocally between Vita and Dina, director and actor, whose friendship sustains their making and vice versa. Dina quotes Deren to Vita, who has forgotten that she sent Deren’s essay to Dina; later on, Dina tells Vita that that line is the “best thing” Vita ever said to her, but, Vita replies, “That was actually the best thing you ever said to me.”

In other ways, My First Film is not exactly Anger’s first film. In 2019, Anger toured a live theater performance with the same name in which she presented the materials of Always and its abandonment. The following year, when the COVID-19 pandemic quarantined many of us in our homes, Anger pivoted online, presenting interactive, improvised desktop performances via live stream.

I was present at one of those events from my too-small apartment in Cardiff, Wales, in April 2020, a month into the first long lockdown in the UK. Anger would announce on social media that she was giving a performance and then send the access link to those who responded first. My friend Stefan had told me about Anger’s performances, and we were both eager to attend, not least because we’d begun working on our collaborative research project about women’s incomplete films.

While writing this piece, I dug up the notes I took during the performance more than four years ago. My handwriting is even more illegible than usual, as cramped and tense as I remember being in those early months of global catastrophe. With a running narration delivered in the real-time, misspelled diction of a TextEdit box, Anger’s performance scaffolded QuickTime footage from Always with snippets of Instagram video art, screenshots of emails and iMessage chains, and transitory visits to Google to search for the meaning of certain phrases.

Confessional register, I wrote in my notes. Social function of distribution mode—calling out to livestream audience. Glitchy, in process, liveness.

My academic language was a well-worn habit. But it was also, I suspect, a dissociative mechanism, because the experience of attending the performance was confronting in its admixture of intimacy and distance. Anger’s silence behind the text on her laptop screen and her activities of juxtaposing media made her revealing and vulnerable performance also somehow withholding. Streamed into my spare-room-turned-office, the performance augmented the promise and refusal of pandemic Zoom events: the fragile, thin togetherness that tears apart at the end of the call. Other people’s homes were too full during the pandemic, but mine was too empty, and after an online event I’d feel stranded in the sudden silence, dazed by my aloneness.

Many of the features of the desktop performances are retained in My First Film, which opens with a disclaimer typed onto a blank white page: “Note: This probably shouldn’t be a film … but it is.” Like the performances that preceded it, My First Film feels like a friend walking you through the story of Always. In fact, Vita before her computer in her bedroom is a fictional rendition of Anger before hers, interacting with her audiences along an ephemeral digital tether. Perhaps for Anger, as for me, the isolation of lockdown sharpened a knowledge of how much we need others, how much we owe to them.

The ubiquity and, indeed, normality of the unfinished is registered in the irreverent and self-deprecating humor of My First Film. Like other recent films or film-adjacent works that contemplate or integrate the incomplete—including Shirkers, as well as Laura Conway’s funny and moving lecture-performance tracing her unfinished projects, Lass that Has Gone—Anger’s film doesn’t take itself too seriously. As Always iterated into live and digital performances and then a complete feature film, Anger learned, as she said in a recent interview, to embrace reflection over “regret,” using her past experience “to inform the next thing that I’m going to do.”

My First Film is, Anger says, “a type of film that I initially set out to do but wasn’t able to.” As with the manipulation of space and time that Deren saw as foundational to film art, Anger’s film draws together the past and the present, the unfinished film and the finished one. Yet it doesn’t seek to redeem or replace the former with the latter. And its approach to the unfinished as a site of creative possibility also follows in Deren’s footsteps. Deren’s archive, too, includes many incomplete projects, notably a film about Haiti she worked on in the decade before her death in 1961. Moreover, Deren’s finished films cultivate aesthetic contingency and open-endedness. In 1946, the same year she wrote of film’s responsibility, At Land was among a program of films she exhibited under the title “3 Abandoned Films.”

Like Deren, and like the woman Deren plays in At Land, Anger navigates an uncertain, metamorphosing terrain. But she doesn’t do so alone. As Deren’s woman makes her exodus from At Land, she appears to be watched over by other versions of herself. The film cuts together a series of shots of the woman at different moments in the journey she’s just undertaken: a congregation of women in wordless solidarity.

My First Film resolves in a different, but equally utopic, vision of collectivity. Late in the film—in an inevitable but still effective metatextual twist—Young’s Vita finally meets Anger. In the childhood bedroom, the two directors, fictional and real, hug each other before heading out the door of the set to the backstage area. As they move together through the smiling crowd of My First Film’s crew, the handheld camera captures their point of view and locates us within the crew’s orbit.

When the credits roll at the film’s end, a pronouncement appears on the screen, its ellipsis reaching toward the future work Anger and her friends will make together: “We are all the authors of this film …” Not only is My First Film not exactly Anger’s first film, but it is also not exactly hers. 

Featured image: Odessa Young as Vita in Zia Anger’s My First Film (2024). Courtesy of MUBI.