My Art Practice is Masochistic Behavior

By Ayanna Dozier and Zia Anger

Walker Publishing Filed to Moving Image

Ayanna Dozier, Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water, 2024. Image courtesy the artist.

Brooklyn-based artist-writer Ayanna Dozier’s often utilizes experimental film to examine how transactional intimacy, such as sex work, redistributes care from the private sector into the public. In the lead up to a screening and conversation of their work at the Walker, Dozier sat down with Zia Anger (My First Film) to discuss pain, pleasure, and filmmaking.

Text from Ayanna to Zia (sent March 1, 2025):

“I think Patricia reached out to you to let you know about an interview we can do for the Walker. I already have an angle/topic to purse that I think would be interesting: sadism/the director as sadist/sadist films/autofiction as sadomasochism. Lmk if that idea works for you. If so, could we schedule a Zoom call end of next week-ish?”

Zia: Yeah, sounds good!

Ayanna Dozier

To start, I feel like my art practice is masochistic behavior. Because my life would be easier if I wasn’t an artist.

Zia Anger

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because filmmaking is expensive. Why am I drawn to film out of all these other art forms I’m interested in? And there’s the obvious answer of really liking getting together and collaborating with a group of people. The other thing is that filmmaking slows down and repeats ideas—which I see in your work. Oftentimes these are not ideas; they’re personal events, and the act of making a film is repeating the shot until it’s quote-unquote right. There’s obviously a therapeutic element to it, but then there’s exposure and re-exposure to the memory, which is why I do it. Because some of these things I am exploring don’t have words.

Scholar Avgi Saketopoulou has a book called Sexuality Beyond Consent (2023), and one of the themes she gets at is returning to your trauma to make it malleable. And that’s why I work with film; I subconsciously or consciously choose sequences of life that I’m not over and that I need to play with, returning to something I often run away from. My work as a filmmaker is me repeatedly triggering myself and, because of that, I do want the audience to be in a little agony as well.

What I felt when I was watching the It’s Just Business, Baby trilogy by you was this feeling of a regular viewer being divorced from their own pleasure, their own deep and wordless understanding of their own experiences. And what I saw when I watched your work was somebody who was revisiting both pleasurable and painful experiences. Culturally, we’re really divorced from those feelings, so watching somebody investigate those ideas in a wordless way without a content warning—not because your work is inherently triggering, but because people just can’t deal with it—your work becomes esoteric, which is something I’m super familiar with. Even in making a film that explains everything in detail and repeats it [My First Film], there’s still an esotericness to the experience because people cannot understand why one would want to investigate the pleasure and pain of life.

Still of a woman with light skin, brown hair in a ponytail, and a gray hoodie kneeling, crouched over and screaming. — Zia Anger, *My First Film*, 2024. Image courtesy MUBI.

The stream of pain and pleasure you’re talking about is very relevant to me. Deleuze describes sadomasochism as a desire to exist in the stream of pleasure and pain. In that stream, you don’t know what’s gonna happen next: it might be a gentle touch or a slap. And that anxiety is the thing that drives you to it. This is important as we exist in an environment where we’re supposed to know everything, which is weird because life is not a tangible experience. I also think people get uncomfortable with scenarios where they feel they’re emotionally responding incorrectly to something.

Totally. There’s been a big outcry of people laughing in theaters at inappropriate times. I find it’s totally relatable to just laugh: laughing because you don't know what else to do, how to access these other emotions, or even use it as a starting point to further investigate oneself. Another is the criticism of a film being too personal. For years, it was all about making films more personal, and I found a home there because I realized that the best art I make is the art that is heart centering, the stuff that is personal to me. There’s this line in Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water from the guy who is the sub in the hotel room . . .

Yeah.

. . . “I just want to feel whole again.” And I have to say, that is it. Bottom line. It resonated with me because, to boil down to one thing I am trying to do with my work, I just want to feel whole again. And if I’m gonna feel whole again, I really want my crew around me to feel whole. I want the cast and crew to feel that I’m not doing this personally for myself. I’m doing it for all of us to try to find a new wholeness when it comes to like making films. Can we do this differently? Can we be better to each other? And I think your work also speaks to trying to find a wholeness.

Ayanna Dozier, *Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water*, 2024. Image courtesy the artist.

So maybe, in that way, it is sadism. That we’re constantly trying to prove this wholeness not only to ourselves, but to those critics around us saying, “You’re not whole.” When I made my film, I was surprised that in writing about it, nobody talked about the labor that went into it that came from the actors, cinematographer, editors, and all my collaborators.

Audiences take that labor for granted. You know what the aesthetic differences are between a well-made film, but it’s often not something they’re going to notice: that labor of the crew.

A film crew of six young people with equipment standing and crouching, looking directly at us. They are outdoors in woods. — Zia Anger, *My First Film*, 2024. Image courtesy MUBI.

When I look at your work, there’s a lot of labor there. Like, the cinematography is incredibly well thought out. I want to give everybody credit: viewers are smart, but without exposure to a lot of different types of film, they might not necessarily be able to understand the labor behind the cinematography in your films. It is a shame because it keeps people in that same zone of being able to look at an abstract painting because it’s aesthetically pleasing. And so the barrier for entry for films like ours into their lives becomes even harder.

It is a lot of work. I am my own cinematographer. I didn’t realize this until I went on several dates with cinematographers who revealed this to me when talking about my work with them.

Oh my god! That’s incredibly sadistic, too!

Oh, it is. I am absolutely my own sub in that regard. I do want to talk about that invisible labor of the crew in relation with an intimacy coordinator. I worked with [intimacy coordinator] Allison Jones, as I did not want to get lost behind the camera in those scenes and forget about the actors. I think all directors do that. I know with your film there were similar instances with having the actors re-enact these intimate moments.

For My First Film we had an intimacy coordinator, Olivia Troy, who was amazing. I feel like, when you’re making such personal work, part of it is digging through your own shit. The moments that I’m showing on screen that involved an intimacy coordinator are challenging, but not traumatic. And most of them are more emotionally challenging than they are physically. And it was cool to have an intimacy coordinator there to help me choreograph these challenging moments in my life while also reaching this new level of understanding of those moments, all while not traumatizing the actor. Because you can get lost in watching your own challenging traumatic moments happen. It was really great to have somebody there to decide before we start this how many times we’re gonna do this with the actors. And honestly, as somebody who makes things, it was thrilling to see how they choreograph intimate scenes.

Upside down head-and-shoulders shot looking down at a woman with brown hair and bangs, laying on a dirt and gravel. — Zia Anger, *My First Film*, 2024. Image courtesy MUBI.

I was talking to Allison because I quite naively did not know that most directors just let actors figure out those scenes. That puts a lot of onus on the actors having to make the scene look good, and it expects a lot of experience on their part to do so. With Allison it was great that that we both have a dancing background and so we did rehearsals where we blocked everything with the actors before the shoot. On set, she acted like a second pair of eyes where she helped make those scenes aesthetically fit a frame and critically provided aftercare to the actors.

Right. There were one or two times where we were shooting other things, and I found myself relating to Olivia things about the making of the film that felt very intimate. And I wanted her opinion on those things that had nothing to do with sex and asking for help for approaching an actor about this difficult experience they will act out. I wonder if the audience even sees this labor. I still am on the fence because I don’t know how much the release of a film matters compared to the making of the film.

I can’t say. I’m a workaholic so labor is the only thing that ever feels real to me. I always chase the doing of something rather than its end.

I’m the opposite of a workaholic. Maybe I’m a bit obsessive and that’s why I get stuff done, but I’m not interested in work. The only place that I can feel totally whole is during the making of it. I wrote down after watching your films: “Healing is weird as hell, especially when it’s in public.” And that’s not only showing the film to people, but it’s also being on set with others. What could make our work seem esoteric is that we are putting some sort of healing on display, both in the process and the product. And that is weird if you’re not used to healing, which most people are not.

I don’t know how you got about it with Odessa Young, but because I didn’t have any actors that look like me in this film, as my stand-in Cleo Ouyang does not share my racial or physical likeness; there was a lot of separation in watching her as a version of me. And even Ben Frankenberg’s character, Dave, has a lot of me in it as well. But they’re both so outside of me that I know when people watch the film, they’re not going to clock that I’m splitting myself in the film because it is not self-representational. So, when the actors would ask me for their character motivations, I had to disassociate them from myself. But I also don’t know what my motivations were in the decisions that are playing out in front of me. That’s why I’m making the film to make sense of the elements that I don’t know about myself.

I kept the character [Vita] separate from myself. But it was great that when there were questions, I could pull on this well of self-knowledge. In the editing process, it became very clear, though, that there were things that I didn’t know, and there were answers that I didn’t have. And a part of me wishes that I had worked those things out sooner, and then another part of me is happy that I was able to say this sequence is mysterious. I want to stop assigning meaning to it. I just want it to be. But it’s hard today when people are afraid of mystery.

I think Francis Bacon said the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery. And that’s it for me. To deepen the mystery of my life.

Every famous male filmmaker is making a film about themselves. And the standards are totally different in terms of who is allowed to make something that is not one-to-one with their life, but still about them, and then whatever we’re doing.

That’s David Lynch’s work! And I get frustrated that Maya Deren is not listed more frequently in the assessment of his films because he is modeling his detective practice of his subconscious from her work.

Deren talks about how there’s horizontal cinema and then there’s vertical cinema. And what she is doing is vertical cinema rather than this narrative, horizontal thing that is linear and ends. She’s diving deep, and that is poetry. I’m in between. Because though I’m doing narrative, I’ve always been interested in finding the verticalness of these horizontal stories.

Sometimes I come up against narrative because it’s hard. I’m not saying experimentation is easy. But narrative puts a container on something. And I think trying to then keep it open when you need to enclose it in something that has a definitive end—even if the ending is ambiguous—is difficult. Experimentation keeps everything open. And I want that generosity of openness. The difficult task is to find those filmmakers who do both, and I think your work does that.

That’s also just the way my brain works. That’s just what I’m copying: the repetition. It’s saying the word “banana” a million times in a row, and then it sounds and means something different. And I think that that openness is also totally what your work is doing. And it’s a difficult task—especially the less words you use, and you’re using way less words.

I kept editing the script and thinking “Say less, say less,” which is the opposite of my day-to-day persona. I do want to continue to work with narrative, though. I have the sadomasochist dream of making a feature film despite its challenges because, when it works, it works. And at the end of the day, my favorite films are narrative.

Oh, me too! That might be a good place to end it.

Yeah, me too.▪︎