This article appeared in the November 8, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

A Picture for Parco (Ayanna Dozier, 2022)

I had the last of my six colposcopy surgeries—a procedure that cuts out cancerous cells from a cervix—in December 2020. To commemorate the one-year anniversary in 2021, I did my makeup, put on a fascinator, and filmed myself eating half a dozen boiled eggs while simultaneously crying and gagging beneath the blinding heat of stage lights. The short film that captured this, A Picture for Parco (2022), was a recreation of a 1980s Kazumi Kurigami ad for the Japanese department store–chain Parco, in which Faye Dunaway slowly eats a hard-boiled egg on camera. In re-creating the piece, I wanted to memorialize my terrifying experience and elevate it into something concrete and beautiful—something less pathetic than the reality of the repeated, invasive procedures I had endured for the prior three years.

A Picture for Parco is perhaps a ridiculous film, but it was born out of a lineage of other women’s films that find ways to return to—and even reframe—painful events through filmic dramatization rather than through the performance of testimony usually expected of women and marginalized subjects. Memoir construction is a field that women filmmakers have often elasticized to envision themselves, experimental artist and autobiographer Kym Ragusa writes, “as more than their bodies or emotions . . . as actors in and witnesses to their place and time.” In retelling my gruesome experience on my own terms, I could acknowledge that it had happened, even though I had been so quiet about the ordeal in my personal life.

I viscerally recalled this sense of a secondhand time—felt in my body as abdominal pains—while watching Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022) by Elisabeth Subrin. It is a 24-minute short that reenacts a seven-minute interview with the titular actress, which aired on French television in 1983. In that conversation, Schneider addresses how the film industry presents a limited vision of women, and makes a point of demarcating her “self” from her persona as an actress, gesturing to a capacious life of desire beyond the enclosure of her work. Just as the interview seems to head toward a rich exploration of Schneider’s artistic fantasies beyond acting, the interviewer brings up her experience on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), in an obvious reach for salaciousness. During production of that film, Schneider, then 19, was infamously coerced into performing an unscripted rape scene by Bertolucci and her co-star Marlon Brando—a violation that would shape her approach to filmmaking for the rest of her career. Faced with this abrupt change of tack, Schneider refuses to engage and chides the interviewer for trying to make the conversation about the role of men in her life rather than about her.

In Maria Schneider, 1983, Schneider’s refusal is performed three times by three actresses—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—who each play with different elements of her speech, mannerisms, and identity. Subrin first cast Maïga, who is of Senegalese descent, taken by the actress’s bold public rebukes of racism and sexism in France’s film industry. Schneider’s commentary, reworked through the voice of Maïga, becomes a critique of the absence of Black women’s subjectivities in film beyond the industry’s own limiting frameworks. Issa and Sandoval deliver more “faithful” reproductions of Schneider’s interview, though Sandoval’s rendition draws out the queerness of Schneider’s life, which was often overlooked by the media, seeking to present her as a vehicle for male desire. The film becomes something of a palimpsest, dramatizing the constant processes by which women artists use cinema to erase the imprints of men on their experiences, and add new information to restore or reclaim their agency.

Schneider’s refusal to recount what she had already discussed in other public forums is not a denial of her experience, but rather an assertion of a public identity beyond one film, beyond the presence of two men in her life. This is a type of no that is not a withdrawal but a swerve, intended to affirm one’s existence outside the narratives of others. Zia Anger’s My First Film (2024) takes a similarly meta approach to dramatizing the director’s public and private, professional and personal refusals. The film chronicles the making of Anger’s first feature, Gray (aka Always All Ways, Anne Marie), which was produced on a shoestring budget and then rejected by every festival it was submitted to. For many years, Gray was listed as “abandoned” on IMDB, and Anger failed to secure funding opportunities for other projects because she languished in the limbo of being perceived as a first-time filmmaker. In 2019, Anger took charge of this experience via a hybrid performance piece titled My First Film, in which she provided live commentary while screening clips and outtakes from Gray. During the course of this performance, Anger tells us that she has had two abortions, and draws parallels between her thwarted launch as a filmmaker and the termination of her pregnancies. Neither experience is meant to be viewed as a “failure,” but rather, as open-ended possibilities that were left behind in order to pursue something else… that also did not work out.

I attended a live performance of My First Film at New York City’s Metrograph theater in 2019 while hemorrhaging blood. The day before, I’d had a colposcopy—neither my first nor my last. I had been “gifted” a cancerous strain of HPV from a failed relationship that I was forced to recall corporeally each time I went under. Though the surgeries were terribly violent, involving a speculum, scissors, a knife, and stirrups, the healing was worse. The first weeks following these operations often left me bleeding profusely and feeling like my insides were going to drop. But it was all an internal terror. I had no visible scars or bruising. The hardest part was feeling like life was outpacing me: I could not do the things one does to get over a failed relationship—like date, dance, and go out—and my burgeoning film practice also halted. I had to suspend my ambitions and desires until my body could catch up with me. This is all to say that My First Film hit a little too close to home.

I was moved by Anger’s desire and commitment to speak about something that had no real evidence of existing—to speak to the pregnant ambitions of many women that are derailed due to health issues or sexual injustice. How many of our creative passions are considered “abandoned” because we took time off to deal with trauma, afterbirth, reproductive failure(s), terminated birth(s), or assault? This year, Anger premiered a feature-length, narrative adaptation of the live performance, also titled My First Film, with actress Odessa Young playing her on-screen surrogate, Vita. The movie takes a surprisingly traditional approach to narrating the turmoil of Anger’s experience making Gray. This includes a clingy boyfriend who admits to impregnating her without her consent due to her supposed neglect of him; the abortion that allows Anger to return to production; her father’s illness; an addiction to Adderall; and the enduring pains of trying to be a filmmaker in an industry that refuses to trust, let alone accept, the terms by which women choose to imagine their lives.

Having experienced the live version, as well as the virtual editions Anger performed during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, I felt nostalgic for the other lives and selves of My First Film while watching the feature adaptation. I longed for Anger to allow time to leak out of her story rather than containing it in a narrative form. Or maybe I am simply too attached to the blood bond I had forged with the film in that theater in 2019. It doesn’t matter, though, because Anger has birthed the film she wanted.

In conventional accounts of history, women’s “lost time” simply does not count. But through these cinematic returns, Anger and Subrin invite us to witness failures and refusal, imbuing them with significance through re-performance. French writer Annie Ernaux puts it perfectly in her 2000 memoir, L’Événement, as she returns to the memory of terminating her pregnancy almost 40 years before: “Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer working in performance, film, printmaking, and photography. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020), and is a professor of film studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.