Film Screening
December 12, 2009, 7:30pm
I think of my diaries as a materialization of the present, which is a storehouse. I used to think of them in terms of showing them to a man who would say to me, ‘What have you been doing all your life?’ and then I’d show them to him.
— AR
Totaling over thirty-six hours in length, Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary constitutes one of the most epic works ever recorded on Super 8: a densely collaged audio-visual chronicle of her daily life in Massachusetts and her battles with manic depression, paranoia and borderline schizophrenia. In the course of the Diary (which, begun in 1981, now covers well over five years), Robertson documents her own breakdowns and hospitalizations, her obsessive love for Doctor Who actor Tom Baker, her battles with weight, the side effects of drug therapies, and the death of her three-year-old niece, Emily. As Robertson describes it, her often harrowing Diary tells “the story of a mind’s survival.”
