Anne Charlotte Robertson started keeping a diary when she was 11 and never stopped. By the time the artist died in 2012, she had amassed a collection of written, audio, food and film diaries that record almost 40 years of her life. These form part of her magnum opus, Five Year Diary, a multi-modal project whose main component is a 40-hour long diary film recorded on Super 8mm, chronicling Robertson’s life between 1981 and roughly 1998. Although it was only exhibited in this form a handful of times, Robertson envisioned marathon screenings of her always-expanding cinematic diary in a living room-style space: what she called “a home rec-room fall-out shelter”.¹ Here, audience members could watch the reels of her diary while also reading the many written diaries she had kept over the years; they could look at the food diaries recording what she ate every day and how much she weighed; and listen to the audiotape diaries that recorded her days and fluctuating states of mind and also acted as letters to the man she was in love with. Although Robertson was by no means the first filmmaker to work in the mode of the diary film, which is perhaps most closely associated with Jonas Mekas and also practiced by Ed Pincus and Carolee Schneemann, the multidimensional nature of Robertson’s diary project set her apart from earlier predecessors, as did the unorthodox exhibition setup she envisioned.² Screened this way only three times – twice in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1985-1986 and 1987, and once in New York at the Museum of the Moving Image in 1988 – Robertson’s curatorial choices re-created the home in the screening room, emphasising the conceptual importance of the domestic within her home movie and presenting both the home and the diary as tools for a gendered rethinking of the world, where the home itself becomes “an institution of art on par with the […] gallery.”³
After Robertson’s death in 2012, her body of work was acquired by the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). The HFA has spent the past six years restoring and digitising the 83 finished reels of the cinematic diary, a process now almost complete.⁴ The different diaries that comprise the project chronicle the things that concerned Robertson throughout her life: her abiding love of cooking and gardening; her obsession with weight loss; her relationship with her mother, with whom she lived for much of her adult life; the frustrations and financial precarity of experimental filmmaking; vegetarianism and activism against environmental destruction; her desire to have children and her decades-long romantic obsession with Tom Baker, the fourth incarnation of BBC’s Doctor Who, whom Robertson believed to be her “divine husband” (a love which was never reciprocated); and her experience with bipolar disorder with schizoaffective overlay. Robertson’s life was marked by an endless list of counsellors, therapists, social workers and psychiatrists. She was on ever-changing regimens of medication, rosters of antidepressants, tranquillisers and antipsychotics, and was hospitalised multiple times every year for much of her adult life. It was through a reference to her illness that I first came across a mention of the artist’s work in 2013. At the time, I was writing about an early medical film from 1908 by neuroscientist Professor Camillo Negro and filmmaker Roberto Omegna, La neuropatologia, in which the pair filmed a female patient believed to be suffering from hysteria. The film claims to show the woman in the throes of a hysteric attack, with the frame containing only the flailing woman, her hospital bed, Negro and another doctor. In both subject matter and formal simplicity the film is strikingly similar to the “scientific archive”⁵ of hysteria that Jean-Martin Charcot started capturing on camera in Paris in the 1870s, which was subsequently published as Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière in 1878. With the assistance of Albert Londe and other photographers, Charcot’s images of women capture them in what he theorised as different stages of the hysteric attack: facial muscles contorting and the mouth agape in a cry as the patient experiences the epileptoid phase; progressing through “clownism, the phase of contortions or so-called illogical movements; ‘plastic poses’ or ‘attitudes passionnelles’; and finally delirium, so-called terminal delirium, the painful phase during which hysterics “start talking”.”⁶
In the history of female pathology, Charcot’s representations of ill women are both a classic fixture of the canon and illustrative of its central dynamic: the image of the woman on-screen is recorded and directed by a doctor who is also always a man. In Robertson’s work, however, there is no doctor inducing her to perform her ‘madness’ – she is both in front and behind the camera. The highly personal, confessional nature of her work offers an unprecedented opportunity to see what happens when a disabled woman presents herself as the central focus of our gaze. In the history of mental illness women’s voices are largely elided from official documentation, and scholars have often turned to personal diaries as offering the few instances of documentation that exist for centuries of treatment or internment.⁷ When it comes to photographic or cinematic recordings of these experiences, the official narrative, which is the doctor’s story, is all that exists. Robertson was not allowed to film while she was in hospital. Yet when not interned she could cinematically capture decades of her own symptoms and experiences, creating a unique record. Over the course of the film we see Robertson document the onset of various psychotic breaks or the tasks delusional voices assign her in the midst of a breakdown: of removing all the root vegetables from her fridge and returning them to the earth; of sloppily eating tofu and miso with her hands. We also see the side-effects of the antipsychotics and mood stabilisers she would refer to as her “stew”⁸ – the tardive dyskinesia in her face, characterised by repetitive, involuntary movements like the clenching of her jaw, the grinding of her teeth.
What do cinema and the diary form offer this auto-ethnography of the disabled body? On the one hand, Robertson’s use of particular formal elements, like the layering of different audio tracks to approximate the schizophrenic impulse in sound, allows her to demonstrate her particular experience of the illness.⁹ On the other hand, the cumulative density of duration, the 40-hour film, allows the viewer to witness something of the endurance that marks Robertson’s life: her many doctors, drug regimens and hospitalisations; an ever-changing list of symptoms and side effects; and the world-making that Robertson engages in in order to survive. She meticulously captures the work of planting a garden from scratch, films the waxing and waning moon every night for decades on end, a sign of the man she awaits, and records hot summers in cool kitchens, bottling and pickling all that she’s grown. It is exactly this sense of world-making that further distances Five Year Diary from other filmic diaries. Although it plays a constitutive part in the work, Five Year Diary is much more than Robertson’s illness. As a diary, the work is always in conversation with the gendered history of recording. Historically the personal diary has been one of the very few aesthetic forms from which women were not barred. A space in which the often overlooked details of women’s daily lives can be recorded and female subjectivity explored, the form is what Adrienne Rich has rightly called “that most female and feminist genre”.¹⁰ Documentation of the personal is thus always a political act, and it is no less political in Robertson’s hands, in a work that finds its very being in the act of documentation.
As Sara Ahmed notes in Living a Feminist Life, “documentation is a feminist project”.¹¹ To document can be a way to describe the world otherwise: we realise, as Rich argues, that “feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognize that the world that they have described is not the whole world.”¹² In Five Year Diary, this missing world is brought back through women’s work, through a recording of the quotidian so often ignored in the accounts of men: of baking bread, of growing seedlings, of endless rounds of composting, of dinners with family shucking corn and blowing out birthday candles. But this is also a world of broken bodies, a world where the labour of gaining visibility is ongoing, the diary a way of allowing Robertson the iterative and repetitive process of writing and rewriting the self over the course of a life. Borrowing Miriam Schapiro’s sentiment, Robertson’s project asks: “If I repeat the shape of my being enough times will that shape be seen?”¹³ Or in her own words:
WHEN WILL DESPAIR STOP?
~ when I read,
write
film
every moment
Anjo-marí Gouws recently completed her doctorate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. She is working on her first monograph, Recording the Work of a World: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Diary Project and the Domestication of Cinema, with another article on Robertson forthcoming in Camera Obscura.
1. Anne Charlotte Robertson, from an overview of Five Year Diary, date unknown. Forms part of the Anne Charlotte Robertson Collection at the Harvard Film Archive. 2. This is by no means an exhaustive list: Mekas’s contemporaries, like Robert Huot, Howard Guttenplan, Peter Hutton and Andrew Noren, among others, also worked in the mode of diary filmmaking. 3. Helen Molesworth,‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, Art Journal 57, no. 4, Winter 1998, p. 52. 4. The other components of Five Year Diary, Robertson’s audio diaries, written diaries, and food diaries, are still being processed. 5. Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Alisa Hartz, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, p.30. 6. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014, p. 115. Italics author’s own. 7. Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, p. 30. 8. In Reel 71: ON PROBATION, ETC. (3 February to 6 May 1990). 9. For a more in-depth discussion of this, see Anjo-marí Gouws, ‘Hearing and Seeing the In/Visible: Anne Charlotte Robert- son’s Five Year Diary’, in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, ed. Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, Cham: Springer, 2019, pp. 165–78. 10. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 217. 11. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, p.26. 12. Adrienne Rich, p. 207. 13. Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life, New York: Harry N Abrams Publishers, 1999, p. 172.
