The Art of Solipsism

Ellena Basada considers Zia Anger’s “My First Film.”

By Ellena BasadaNovember 4, 2024

• Film

• Cultural Studies

FILMMAKER ZIA ANGER is all about herself. In her MUBI profile, she proclaims that her narrative films are “always self-driven, mostly self-funded, and totally self-motivated.” Though many emerging artists share this approach, Anger takes the ethos further, bringing an obsessive focus to the self across both personal and commercial projects. Even in her work directing music videos for artists such as Mitski and Angel Olsen, Anger maintains her solipsistic focus by continually engaging with her own artistic journey. Campy, highly choreographed, and often focused on a single female subject, Anger’s videos sometimes feel less like collaborative contributions to a wider cultural landscape than snapshots from an ongoing self-portrait.

Anger’s inward gaze climaxes in her latest feature My First Film, released on MUBI last month. Using metafictional techniques reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019), Anger turns the director’s plight into the film’s very subject. Yet she goes beyond merely breaking the fourth wall—she walks right through it, immersing herself in the action entirely, directing and performing in a raw, sentimental interplay with her actors. This self-insertion complicates the line between final cut and behind-the-scenes footage, transforming the film into a hybrid of cinema and performance art. By entangling the audience in her emotional landscape—most poignantly when she is shown crying near the film’s conclusion—Anger simultaneously challenges the boundary between art born of personal experience and sheer self-indulgence.

In other words, what distinguishes My First Film from its metafictional others is Anger’s willingness to blur the line between solipsism and narcissism. Unlike other works within the solipsistic tradition, Anger doesn’t use her medium’s self-reflexivity to probe her flaws or confront her limited perspective. Instead, she constructs a complex hall of mirrors that deflects rather than invites self-critique. Engaging with problems of failure, creativity, and artistic ambition, Anger’s most compelling quandary emerges indirectly. When an artist’s work is obsessively and unironically self-referential, does it invite an audience in, or alienate them entirely? At what point does a self-portrait cross into self-aggrandizement?

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My First Film is an experience defined by absence—an exploration of the should-nots and could-nots and failures that have shaped Anger’s artistic journey. “This probably shouldn’t be a film … but it is,” is the first line of the film, typed across the scene letter by letter, accompanied by the sound of keystrokes. Alluding to the history of authorial provocation in films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (1967)—which begins, “This film was found in a dump”—Anger’s introduction continues with a collection of absurd video clips. She wears a snorkel and twirls her fingers in a ravey hand show; the camera whacks her bare bottom, perched upon a rock, over and over again. “Still I thought the first thing you see should be ‘joy,’” Anger writes next. This heavy-handed bid to steer the audience’s experience—to balance negativity and joy—is Anger’s signature move.

Typing on screen in pseudo–real time is one of the many video-collage elements that comprise My First Film, which evolved from a COVID-19 lockdown–era live performance piece of the same name. Both the film and its antecedent performance are postmortems of Anger’s first feature, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. Originally produced in 2010, Always All Ways collapsed due to on-set tensions, including accusations of the director’s narcissism and an accident that nearly killed an actor. Throughout this film, Anger connects her aborted project to experiences with two abortions, using this metaphor to reflect on creative “conceptions” that were never fully realized.

If gestures like these seem to position Anger’s work as feminist in nature, she tends to obfuscate any direct pipelines from the personal to the political. She invokes experimental filmmaker Maya Deren by splicing in video clips from At Land (1944) without ever utilizing Deren’s techniques or surreal, body-oriented imagery. Similarly, Anger conjures the raw intimacy of cinema verité while missing its ethos of minimal intervention and manipulation.

In other words, Anger stages an autocritique that never quite steps out from behind the curtain. All the elements are there—script, set, costumes—but the performance never actually begins. To say this about Anger’s work is somewhat ironic, given that the core of My First Film is theater stripped of all these traditional elements, leaving behind only performance and audience. Unlike the live production of My First Film, however, where Anger uses her laptop to reveal personal emails, texts, and footage while speaking directly to the audience, the film adaptation of My First Film struggles to recreate this intimacy. It almost feels like Anger chokes, so caught up in her references and her own fraught relationship to cinema that she is unable to deliver the same message her 2019 performance piece did.

As a result, the film teases access to an authorial truth that it never delivers. Anger’s is an autocritique that remains insufficiently “auto”; it’s self-reflexive, without much reflection. In My First Film, the failure of Always All Ways is not presented as the consequence of Anger’s own relatable shortcomings. Instead, it seems as though she wants us to believe that it occurred because the world simply isn’t fair. Consequently, Anger’s self-portrait comes across as disingenuous—more an act of blame-shifting than of true self-revelation.

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Starting in the late Renaissance, the advent of mirrors allowed for artists to depict themselves with near-perfect accuracy. Yet, many of the most memorable self-portraits have emphasized the final dissimilarity of the artist’s likeness to reality—the near-perfection. Take Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), which depicts the artist’s features distorted by the bent surface of the titular mirror. In the periphery of the mirror, his hand, resting on the table, appears grotesquely enlarged, nearly the size of his head. But the most captivating element of the portrait is Parmigianino’s expression—smug and amused by his own visual sleight of hand. This genre places the artist’s subjective experience, emotions, and identity at its center, often questioning the tension between their self-perception and how others perceive them. Parmigianino’s demeanor reminds us that self-representation is always, in part, a performance—transforming the individual into something simultaneously vulnerable and meticulously crafted.

My First Film possesses the qualities of a self-portrait, but Anger stubbornly resists the pressure to transform, almost as if her ultimate goal is to be the audience of herself, not the creator. The film follows Vita (Odessa Young), a lightly fictionalized version of Anger who dresses like her, looks like her, and speaks with the same Upstate New York accent. Vita, whose Adderall addiction is evident in her wide, glassy eyes and smudged mascara, delivers monologues that sound like they’ve been taken directly from Anger’s journals while leading the dramatization of the tumultuous production of Always All Ways.

In addition to elements from her interactive performance piece, the scenes that follow Vita’s narrative are shot like a traditional realist drama, spliced together with footage from Anger’s original film, shots from Deren’s At Land, and more intimate home video–style glimpses of Anger’s parents. The plot of Always All Ways is itself a kind of inverted version of Anger’s own life. It follows a pregnant woman whose father dies, so she goes on a search for her estranged mother. “This is a true story, except […] I have two moms,” Vita announces; also, her father didn’t die.

Rather than working within the “true … except” genre—in the spirit of Parmigiano’s portrait—Anger inserts several more layers of metafiction that change the gestalt of her project. Vita casts the protagonist of Always All Ways, Dina (Devon Ross), because of her likeness to herself: she’s Vita’s “perfect muse” because they both have brown hair, grew up in the same town, and slept with the same boys. Similarly, Anger cast Odessa Young both out of admiration and because of the way Young slouched in her chair, which reminded Anger of her own lazy femininity. This recursive self-replication is only one facet of Anger’s unrelenting attachment to herself. In her creation of not one but several mirror-image selves, Anger emphasizes the project as an inward, almost therapeutic journey.

Put another way, Anger seems less interested in her own potential for transformation than in how many others she can shape to mirror herself. Her desire to redefine the external world as an extension of her internal one is what pushes her art from solipsism into the terrain of narcissism. As in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), the filmmaker in Anger’s echo chamber is a witness to herself: she is both the protagonist and director, patient and analyst. Kaufman’s Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) pathologically casts and recasts himself and other members of his own life into a play of his life in a way that mimics the cycle of existence. Yet, while Kaufman’s film ultimately satirizes this endless vortex of witnessing oneself over time, Anger shows no sign of such self-awareness. Instead, she presents her compulsions without irony, pushing us to accept them at face value as both the subject and substance of her work.

Unlike other solipsistic artists, whose self-reflections may resonate universally, Anger’s cycle of self-replication and replacement speaks to her desire to magnify herself rather than metamorphose. This obsession with seeing herself on-screen constitutes a critical misstep, insofar as it positions the audience as passive observers rather than active participants in her art: it traps us in a vision that is entirely hers. By positioning herself as both creator and audience, Anger transforms not herself but the viewer, making them an appendage to her own perspective.

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Anger is overbearingly concerned with how her work is interpreted, which further restricts the viewer’s agency and access to truth—both subjective and objective—in My First Film. She establishes that the film is a “funeral for American independent filmmaking” in its materialist critique of both form and conditions. On her Instagram, she has documented hundreds of behind-the-scenes shots of her cast and crew, and even snippets of how choices were made on set. In a collaboration with Letterboxd, she lists 15 films that influenced hers; they are meant to provide a road map for understanding her project.

Often jokey, Anger’s paratextual metacommentary feels like a safeguard—a way to preempt criticism rather than engage in genuine self-reflection. A short anecdote at the film’s beginning shows Vita googling the definition of “esoteric,” with a voice-over reiterating that her film is “intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people.” Moreover, one of My First Film’s repeated lines acknowledges how the content might be taken as narcissistic and offers a platitudinous answer to dispel our doubts. When Vita gets pregnant, and again when Always All Ways doesn’t get accepted to a single film festival, she asks, “Why am I the only person I know who this has happened to?” In both cases, someone else responds, “It happens to a lot of people … It’s just that nobody talks about it.”

While relatable and among the most engaging aspects of her project, the repetitive, declarative nature of Anger’s self-critiques makes them feel more like rote acknowledgments than authentic reckonings. Their mechanical quality sets Anger apart from other self-reflexive artists who deploy solipsism more deliberately, in more ironic or metafictional capacities that guide both artist and audience to a deeper exploration of specific tropes.

Take, for example, the work of Lena Dunham. In the 2012 pilot for Girls, protagonist Hannah Horvath infamously declares: “I am the voice of my generation.” Yet, even as the thinly veiled Horvath played by Dunham, the show’s creator, does in fact become an icon of the 2010s, the nuance of Dunham’s fiction demands a certain amount of agency in the audience. Wielding a combination of self-aware vulnerability and dramatic irony, Dunham grants us the capacity to interpret and connect.

Anger’s film does not offer such flexibility in her self-serious quest to replicate her own experience on-screen. Thinking of the audience as a thing she can attach to herself, Anger takes for granted that they will automatically connect to her pain. Unlike Dunham, who uses her personal lens to explore universal themes, Anger’s insistence on controlling every aspect of the viewer’s interpretation risks reducing the film to a one-sided conversation.

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If Dunham’s work exploits the tension between her personal experiences and the broader social dynamics she explores, Cindy Sherman’s work goes further. Her self-portraits, now emblematic of the genre, evolved from the artist’s interest in dressing up, allowing her to tap into an array of phenotypes that never really reflect her own. In contrast to Anger’s mirror-image selves, Sherman’s litany of characters renders the individual as collective.

In her History Portraits series, Sherman recreates the ratios of traditional paintings in her photographs. Her imitations of the historical subjects are far from traditional, however. Often flimsily costumed, the artist is nearly always detectable underneath. Sherman’s masks peel away at the edges, her prosthetics grotesquely disjoint from her body, and the sensuality of her femininity feels false and abstract. The flaws and traces of obscuration left in her photographs allow for the audience to feel awe at her bravery and play. But it is notably the conventional form of her portraits that allows Sherman the artistic freedom to deconstruct her subjects, and herself.

There is something about spreading the self throughout different characters—like Cotard’s casting and recasting—that diffuses the potential narcissism of art about the self. Indeed, the success of Girls lies in its ability to connect to different kinds of audiences, as Sherman’s portraits do. The show’s subjects, privileged young white women living in New York City, assume a chameleonic form. They are relatable because Dunham shows the variegated abjection of women in young adulthood, which was transgressive content for TV at the time. Not only did Dunham nail these raw but nonetheless recognizable types in her version of adulthood; she also succeeded in producing friction between reality and her fictionalized personas. Did Dunham really get into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop only to drop out? Did she really have a child with Riz Ahmed’s surf instructor from the Hamptons? Of course not, but we still wonder.

Our engagement with Dunham’s and Sherman’s autofictional projects stems from our eagerness to interrogate the mask peeling away from the skin. We work to discern every detail as either reality or fiction. Anger’s work continuously frustrates that effort. In this sense, I wouldn’t categorize Anger’s work as autofiction because she is not concerned with the allure of content. Instead, her deconstruction and innovation center on form. While Anger seems to want to push the medium into something like a video essay, the result feels more like a fragmented scrapbook. However, because film is traditionally intended for public consumption, the unconventionally personal nature of her approach creates a mismatch between audience expectations and artistic intent—raising the question of what obligations, if any, filmmakers have to their viewers.

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In My First Film, all paths circle back to Anger, yet paradoxically, they never quite reach her. Whatever truth exists in My First Film is inseparable from Anger’s subjectivity. Even so, her portrayal of failure resonates universally and manages surprisingly to override the limitations of her autoportrait approach. The final scene of the film takes place in a set construction of a gynecologist’s office. The false nature of the room is reinforced by the doctor and her assistant, who mime an abortion procedure on Vita. This simulation of Anger’s metaphorical defeat reveals a new subtlety informing Anger’s solipsistic focus: it’s not necessarily her image that she’s obsessed with but, more specifically, her failures.

Anger’s self-reflexive metafiction is ultimately most successful, then, when it critiques the conditions of art-making through the lens of her own defeats, capturing the struggle of an artist overwhelmed by ideas that are, in her words, “so complicated” and have been “boiling up inside [her] for so, so long.” The disruption of conventional viewer participation feels at once deliberate and unrestrained, and Anger is less interested in resolving this disorientation than in letting it serve as a testament to her own confusion and alienation. Her project, then, is not really a coherent self-portrait but a stubborn refusal to follow prescribed paths. Informed by her own deficiency in following such paths, Anger echoes Samuel Beckett’s adage: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The final transgression of My First Film is a gesture of defiance, a willingness to embrace failure even at the cost of isolating her audience. And it is this audacity to persist, to keep trying in the face of failure, that leaves a lasting impression.