Page 206
Anne Robertson
I first became interested in Anne Robertson because of her unusual relationship to her films. At the time when her
Diary
was shown, complete, at the American Museum of the Moving Image in 1988, it was over forty hours long, and was shown in a room that Robertson had decorated with childhood artifacts. The extended screening invited viewers out of their lives and prearranged schedules and into hers. Robertson's use of three sources of sound during the screeningsound-on-film, sound-on-tape, and in-person commentaryconfirmed the viewer's immersion in Robertson's experience. That the diary reels were often startlingly beautiful was an unexpected surprise.
As this is written in July 1990, the film continues to grow, though some reels have recently been censored by Robertson (see her comments in the interview). The diary is essentially every film she's made: even films listed under separate titles in her filmography
Magazine Mouth
(1983), for exampleare sometimes included in presentations of the diary. As I've grown more familiar with Robertson's work (to date, I've seen about eight hours of the diary), I've come to understand that the relationship of this filmmaker's life and work is even more unusual than I had guessed. For Robertson, whose manic-depressiveness has resulted in frequent hospitalizations, making and showing the diary has become a central means for maintaining psychic balance, her primary activity whenever she is free of the mental hospital and free enough of drug therapy to be able to produce imagery.
Robertson's
Diary
can be experienced in a variety of ways. She most likes to present it as a "marathon": complete and as continuous as