Anne Charlotte Robertson

Feb 24 2019

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. 

Reel 23 –  A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital, (Super 8 / Sept. 1 – Dec. 13, 1982 / 26 min)

Going To Work(Super 8 /1981 / 7mins)

Magazine Mouth (Super 8 / 1983 / 7mins)

Apologies(Super 8 / 1986 / 17mins)

My Cat My Garden 9/11 ( Super 8 / 2001 / 6mins)