Anne Charlotte Robertson
1949 - 2012Anne Charlotte Robertson grew up in a middle-class Protestant family. She studied film in Boston at the Massachusetts College of Arts where she is a student of the great American master of the Super 8 Saul Levine. She also chooses this medium which, at the time, was the most accessible. She is also influenced by filmmakers as different as Ed Pincus or Carolee Schneemann.
Five Year Diary - A monumental self-portrait, a gigantic 36-hour corpus, divided into 85 reels with a duration of 26 minutes, Five Year Diary is the most important work of the filmmaker. Covering two decades, this chronicle of her daily life in Massachusetts is a vulnerable documentation of the filmmaker's struggle to survive her depression. Dark and intense interior monologues, tinged here and there with the humor and self-deprecation of the artist's consciousness of his illness, give this therapeutic experience in the cinema its fullest depth. (Wikipedia France)
Five-Year Diary
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Influenced by filmmakers as diverse as Ed Pincus and Carolee Schneemann, Anne Charlotte Robertson was a Boston area Super 8 filmmaker who examined and shared her life through her work – a mix of essay, performance and stop-motion animation. Diagnosed with various and changing mental disorders, Anne faced several breakdowns and mental hospitals – experiences she documented and exorcised thoroughly through her films – particularly within the annals of Five Year Diary, a project spanning nearly two decades. Though relentlessly intense and emotional, her films are not entirely bleak, for her bracing self-awareness and humor energize and bring a rare effulgence to the depths of her darkest moments. Anne boldly exposed her most intimate and obsessive inner dialogues – from illness, breakdowns and longing for love to diets, cats and the minutia of existence. She also considered the filmmaking experience therapeutic and cited the process as helping cure her depression.
Five-Year Diary
Five Year Diary, Reel 22: A Short Affair (and) Going Crazy (August 23–September 1, 1982)
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Introduction; a vegetarian dinner; the lover sleeping; sorting garbage; ex-lovers' art; friends and cocaine; moon; composting sable brushes; the kitchen sink; wine; eating with my hands; the kitchen table; self-portraits'; construction machines; hiding behind the curtains; morning-glories at dusk; dinner with my mother; the drawings in the hall, yoga, and the goddess rap; calling the lover; saying goodbye; carnival rides; street scenes; weeping; flowers and bees; shadows on the carpet and empty rooms; esoteric sign language; sorting the compost; walking through Boston, hunting for clues; finding him in a fountain; my favorite statue; the slug incident; paranoia about plastic; putting everything in garbage bags; the construction site outside; calling the lover. (ACR)
Five Year Diary, Reel 22: A Short Affair (and) Going Crazy (August 23–September 1, 1982)
Five Year Diary, Reel 5: Mourning (January 23–30, 1982)
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Reel 5: Mourning (23 to 30 January 1982) follows in the wake of the death of Richard Robertson, the filmmaker’s father. [It] covers … seven days of the family going through their father’s papers, taking walks in the snow and huddling inside watching football. (Anjo-marí Gouws)
Five Year Diary, Reel 5: Mourning (January 23–30, 1982)
