Anne Charlotte Robertson​

American filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949-2012) used her Super-8 camera and acute self-awareness to forge a radically intimate first-person cinema. We present a selection of her shorts and Reel 23 – a half hour segment of her Five Year Diary.

Today Robertson is finally being acknowledged as an influential pioneer of the first-person diary cinema. Gripped by mental illness, Robertson discovered a vital form of self-therapy in the diaristic filmmaking practice invented and refined through her magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1981-1997), a 37 hour-long film combining bold formal experimentation, off-beat humour, and raw emotion in a charged yet lyrical chronicle of an often painfully difficult life. Cathartic and devastating, rough-edged and poignantly delicate, disarmingly funny and meditative, it offers a remarkably frank and revealing self-portrait of an artist and woman struggling to understand the overwhelming desires and dark shadows that defined her world.

Program

• Reel 23 - A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital, Sep 1. - Dec. 13 1982, Super 8, 26min
• Going To Work, 1981, Super 8, 7min
• Magazine Mouth, 1983, Super 8, 7min
• Apologies, 1986, Super 8, 17min
• My Cat My Garden 9/11, 2001, Super 8, 6min