Anne Charlotte Robertson

Quote:
A MassArt student film that finds Robertson experimenting with the complex multiple voices that would play a major role in “Five Year Diary”.

— Punto de VistaRead More »

Quote:
Apologies explores Robertson’s compulsive sense of guilt and the corresponding need to make apologies. Although the film deals with the quite serious subject of mental disability, the candidness of Robertson’s self-exposure begets a playfulness and a sense of wit. The film consists of a play with multiple temporalities through editing both image and sound.

— Taryn Marie Ely, Ghosts in the Closet: Catastrophizing and Spectral Disability in Anne Charlotte Robertson’s ApologiesRead More »

Quote:
“Intended as a longer film, this proved sufficient to vignette the nuances of my sadness.”

— Anne Charlotte RobertsonRead More »

Magazine Mouth 1983 – 7 min.
Depression Focus Please 1984 – 4 min.
Talking to Myself 1985 – 3 min.
Kafka Kamera 1985 – 3 min.
Subways 1976 – 13 min.
Going to Work 1981 – 7 min.
My Cat, My Garden, 9/11 2001 – 6 min.
Apologies 1986 – 17 min.
Locomotion 1981 – 7 min.Read More »

Includes reels : 01, 02, 03, 09, 22, 23, 26, 31, 40, 47, 80, 81, 83

Anne Charlotte Robertson, born in 1949, was a Massachusetts-based filmmaker who used her Super-8 camera and acute self-awareness to forge a radically intimate mode of first-person cinema. Although she was celebrated as an artist in her lifetime, only today is Robertson finally being acknowledged as an influential pioneer of the first-person diary cinema that has long flourished in the Boston-Cambridge area, perhaps best known in the work of Ed Pincus and Ross McElwee. Gripped by mental illness, Robertson discovered a vital form of self-therapy in the diaristic filmmaking practice invented and refined across her magnum opus, Five Year Diary (1981­–1997), whose eighty-one individual chapters, or “reels,” meld bold formal experimentation, self-depreciatory humor, and raw emotion into a charged yet lyrical chronicle of an often painfully difficult life. Cathartic and devastating, rough-edged and poignantly delicate, disarmingly funny and meditative, Robertson’s Five Year Diary 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.Read More »