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possible. But in recent years, she has also begun to fashion shorter programs (the most recent I've attended was four hours long). The scheduled show date has become a means for sampling from the diary. If Robertson schedules a show for April 25, for example, she may show all the reels that were shot during April: viewers are able to see the development (or lack of it) in her life from year to year. In general, we see Robertson simultaneously from the outside (within her recorded imagery and sound, and usually as the in-person narrator) and from the inside, as she expresses her moments of clarity and delusion in her handling of the camera and her juxtapositions of sound and image.
While my original interest in Robertson was a function of the fascinating and troubling interplay between her filmmaking and her illness, my decision to interview her was determined both by the compelling nature of her presentation (particularly her courage in submitting her films and herself to public audiences) and by her frequently breathtaking imagery. The single-framing of her activities in her tiny Boston apartment in early reelsshe flutters around the rooms and through the weeks like a frenzied mothand her precise meditations on her physical environment make her
Diary
intermittently one of the most visually impressive Super-8 films I've seen. And the way in which she enacts contemporary compulsions about the correct appearance of the body (her weighing and measuring herself, nude, is a motif) and about the importance of meeting "the right guy" provide a poignant instance of those contemporary gender patterns so problematic for many women. Robertson's
Diary
along with films by Su Friedrich, Diana Barrie, Michelle Fleming, Ann Marie Fleming, and othershas re-personalized many of the issues raised by the feminist writers and filmmakers of the seventies.
I talked with Robertson in April 1990.
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MacDonald:
You remind me of a line in Jonas Mekas's
Walden
: "I make home moviestherefore I live." For Mekas, the ongoing documentation of his life is very important. But as important as his filmmaking is to him, I think the line is metaphoric, rather than literal: Mekas has a busy organizational life, as well as a filmmaking life. His statement seems more applicable to you. When you're not able to make films, your life seems in crisis. Could you talk about the relationship between your films and your life? Perhaps you could begin with how you got started making films.
Robertson:
I started the diary November 3, 1981, which, it turns out,