Angus came to my attention in late 2018 during the “When Hands Touch” debacle. She live tweeted her experience watching the movie, in which a black girl falls in love with a Nazi during the Second World War, and just like that she blew up. Its director Amma Asante blocked her on twitter and accused her of bullying her and her movie. Hunter Harris interviewed her for Vulture where she said something that I still think about every other day when I see the kinds of movies that get made as part of Hollywood and the wider film world’s attempt to finally give voice to underrepresented people in movies. “Yes, the rep for WOC within the film industry is minimal, but that doesn’t mean we should accept the lowest bar of representation.” It echoes now not simply because it’s still true (it was only two years ago, Hollywood didn’t magically get better) but because she decided to do something about it by making movies herself the only way she knew how to: with her voice, her computer, and whatever images made the most sense.
In “last night I dreamt that somebody loved me” Angus took Super 8 footage of a happy couple in Chicago from a few decades ago and recorded a voicemail to a missing lover or maybe just a friend. The sound of the phone ringing is loud, alarmingly so. Her voice by comparison is faint, a crackling whisper. She apologizes for bothering the person on the other end of the line before spilling almost immediately into heartbreak. “I have no one else to turn to …” She ironically juxtaposes the happy couple with her trying to make peace with this person, who we don’t see or hear. The Super 8 couple appear to be as much a projection of Angus’ past with the person on the other end of the line as a kind of repudiation of older narratives of love and togetherness. Love, like everything, is different now than it was in the cinematic past. Her voice, lonely, harried, fragile, moves into a future unwritten by our foundational texts.
There is for instance, next to nothing in the popular cinema like her second film, a 30-second sketch called “anti depressants are so not a big deal.” Sandwiched between the phrase “Why can’t I take … My anti depressants?” are Kuleshovian close-ups of her face, her hands, her mouth, and her medication, all photographed on a cell phone camera. The insistence of the images, the softness of her gaze, the exhaustion of this ritual implicitly happening every day. This is what life is like, and yet she renders it in such antique terms it feels like it should be some long forgotten ritual.
