Anger’s presentation examines her “abandoned” movie by showing clips and interacting digitally with the audience.
Do not turn off your phone before the next Spotlight Cinema event. You would not want to miss an AirDrop from the visiting filmmaker.
Spotlight Cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art has showcased global cinema and American independent films every fall for several years now. Spotlight continues that mission with an “expanded cinema” twist.
Spotlight will present My First Film, a multimedia performance where filmmaker Zia Anger explores the apparent failure of her first feature, Always All Ways, Anne Marie (2012). Check her director credits on iMDB, and see the word “abandoned” in red letters after the title. That can only mean that the film is not worth looking at, right?
We’ll learn the story behind that “abandoned” label during Anger’s presentation, as she sits somewhere in the MMoCA auditorium in front of her computer and has at least two windows open on her projected desktop. In one window, she will play back a file of Always All Ways, Anne Marie, and choose scenes using the timeline control. In another window, she will communicate in real time with the audience by typing into TextEdit. The trailer for My First Film hints at the experience, but the publicity for the performance is deliberately silent on what we will see, hear, read … and download.
“What makes this performance perfect for Spotlight is that in many ways it works as a piece of cinema,” Spotlight programmer Mike King explains. “Anger uses the screen and shared theatrical space to build on and open up what we think of as a moviegoing experience.”
Anger also investigates the institutions that support independent filmmaking in the United States. The most intriguing praise for My First Film comes from Miriam Bale, artistic director at the Indie Memphis Film Festival, which hosted the performance in 2018. “I have attended dozens, maybe hundreds, of talks about the lack of women feature film directors — an issue I care deeply about,” Bale explains. “But after a while, they all sound the same. Zia Anger has figured out a new way to discuss these issues, in an incredibly moving, personal and creative way.”
Anger’s career has not been defined by her “abandoned” first feature. Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2015. She has been a frequent music video collaborator with Mitski (“Geyser,” “Your Best American Girl”) and Jenny Hval (“Innocence is Kinky,” “Conceptual Romance”). Her short films have been featured at the New York Film Festival and the New Directors / New Films series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
My First Film has been presented at film venues and festivals around the country. The Spotlight audience will see the performance the night before Anger presents it at the Milwaukee Film Festival.
Don’t wait to see this on Netflix — not gonna happen. This Spotlight Cinema performance of My First Film only will exist on Oct. 23 at MMoCA, 7 p.m.
James Kreul does programming for MMoCA’s summer Rooftop Cinema series.
