Sound And Vision: Zia Anger
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: the music videos from Zia Anger.
What's in a name? Just like the emotion that is her last name, Zia Anger's music video protagonists seem on the edge of exploding. On the verge of bursting their emotion out in the open. It seems curious that Anger herself only recently made her first feature film, aptly named My First Film, as she herself has been taking a long build-up to the Big Explosion that is a first feature. It is only fitting that all her music videos to date seem like little bursts of energy. There was a reason why Anger, for the longest time, seemed your favorite music video director's favorite music video director.
Anger's music videos, also often feature women protagonists, often the artist themselves, converging with nature. From her first music video, the one for Julianne Barwick's One Half (below) on, there is a palpable sense of both serenity and anger. Barwick walks through a forest, an ornate looking knife in hand. The forest is leaking unnatural fluids, like blood or semen, and Barwick is interacting with it. Nature is bursting too, like the woman on screen herself. She is still, barely moving... but waiting to erupt.
The same is the case for every music video Anger made for frequent collaborator Mitski. The performer, whose interpretative dances feature front and center in all of Angers videos, seems like she can barely hold it in. Sometimes this is used to funny effect, like in Your Best American Girl, sometimes to horny effect, like Washing Machine Heart, but it is mostly there to convey the fact, yet again, that nobody can contain Mitski's energy. Least of all Mitski herself. The last silent minute of Working For the Knife (also below) takes the central premise of the memey Silent Music Video internet-meme, and reworks those to stunningly disquieting effects: we only hear diegetic sounds, the huffing and puffing and gyrating of Mitski. It is exhausting and uncomfortable, in the best way.
The best video Anger made for Mitski is the one for Geyser(also below), a deceptively simple video where Mitski has a meltdown on a beach. Like the natural force that erupts, the music video is just one big burst. Water metaphors show up again and again in Anger's song choices. Maggie Rogers Fallingwater is also an interpretive dance in a natural environment, where the rain pours down. And Zola Jesus Siphon (also below) is just a close-up of a woman being rained upon. A bloody torrent. It's positively apocalyptic.
Even when the protagonist is not front and center, like in the music video for Beach House's Dark Spring (finally below), there is still the energy exploding from the screen, the sense of nature taking over, and the sense of personhood and nature being one and the same thing. I can't speak for Zia Anger's first film, yet, as at the time of writing I have not yet seen it. But that film started partly as a series of live performances, about her failed attempts to make a feature. During covid these bled into a series of internet performances, all with the name My First Film. So My First Filmis a film project that itself was an exercise in exorcizing her demons of not having made a feature yet... and even more than just that final product. What I'm saying is that her first film couldn't contain all that Anger is and all that this first film could be. Her explosion onto the scene is fluid, like water. It overflows.
