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love is kicking breadsticks across the table and reading the definition of 'fat' from a 1936 dictionary."
I've got notes in my film log for the first two hundred rolls of my film. I've got starting and stopping dates, right down to the minute I took a picture. I know Allen Ginsberg dates his diaries down to the minute. I thought that would be a good thing to do, so that later I could prove synchrony with somebody who was willing to keep a notebook with
him
and make jottings of images or the thoughts that come unbidden and you have no way of tying them to anything.
Tom Baker was born in 1934. Tom Baker has two hundred dictionaries. If I can predict my father's death, I might as well believe I've predicted that there's this guy who is interested in me, who happens to have a collection of dictionaries. The whole diary started when I became fascinated with this old dictionary and its crazy definitions.
Sometimes I think I'm going to go back and reinsert the naked parts back into my diary, but I have a feeling probably I won't. I kept them all on reels. Supposedly, they're in order. Some reels got so mishmashed by my paranoia last fall, I could never put them back in order again.
When I started the film, I thought I'd lose weight; and the second thing I thought was that I'd try to tell a story, as my father told me to; and the third thing I thought was that the film would be a trousseau; and the fourth thing was my realizing that my children would be watching.
MacDonald:
One of the things that struck me last night when you showed sections of the diary at Utica College (I don't remember this so much from when I saw the film at the Museum of the Moving Image; I guess it depends on which sections you're showing) was your startling openness about your hospitalization.
Robertson:
Well, I've got to be! Otherwise, as Kate Millett says, you're a "ghost in the closet."
MacDonald:
Is the history of your being institutionalized simultaneous with your making of the diary? How do
you
see the two things relating?
Robertson:
Well, I think Mekas's comment, "I make home moviestherefore I live,"
is
really apt for me. You see, I didn't have any way of explaining why I was into bingeing, but I knew the bingeing was going to go at the beginning of the film. The film had a theme. The theme was I wanted to lose weight, because I didn't want to die like my father had. Yet, I couldn't explain why I had gotten into overeating, eating literally until I got sick, until I had to lie down because it was too painful to stand up.
MacDonald:
You said last night that you had never been a bulimic, that you never purged.
Robertson:
No, that's true. I wouldn't do that. But there's such a