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fore, or ever read before, the psychiatric establishment says, "You invented that," and everybody else says, "You thought of that." Nobody, not even the psychiatrists, want to know how horrible the stories in your head are. I have never had a psychiatrist ask me, "And what do the voices say to you?" No one has ever said, "What do you mean by the insane monologue in your head?'' Nobody wants to know because they're too scared. They think that the person is insane and hears voices is making them up and is in some way as evil as the voices.
It's a real old thing. Instead of putting you in iron chains, they put you in drug chains. They've done a lot of drug pushing over the years. Speaking of drugs, another thing that's in the diary is the drugs I've chosen to use at timesa lot of pictures of alcohol, of cigarettes, of pot smoking, a few of cocaine, and the prescription drugs. I thought I'd focus on all the things I ever did that were wrong, and then I'd put them, one by one, into the films, along with the bingeing, and get perspective so I could shed bad habits.
So far every subject I come up withexcess apologies, thoughts about suicide (for three years, from 1976 to 1979, I heard voices saying, "I want to kill myself"it was my voice) . . . every subject has been affected by being included in a film. I made a film about suicide [
Suicide,
1979] illustrating some of the ways I thought I'd kill myself, and literally edited it in about an hour and a half and screened it, and as I watched the film, the suicide voices stopped in my head and they haven't come back since.
MacDonald:
Did that happen with bingeing, too?
Robertson:
Yeah, it happened with bingeing, when I made
Magazine Mouth,
which we watched last night. I was taking Polaroid pictures of myself with my mouth wide open, and closed but bulging like I had a lot of food in my mouth. I filmed all the objects going into my open mouthfood, fish, baubles of the rich . . . all kinds of things going into my mouth. And bingeing stopped being a major subject in my life soon after.
MacDonald:
When you had the breakdown last year . . .
Robertson:
In September and then again in November.
MacDonald:
Did it have to do with preparing for the show we had scheduled? Are there passages in the films that create problems for you when you watch them?
Robertson:
I can handle things once they're on film. But it's hard to know what I can have others see.
MacDonald:
You're remarkably good with a Super-8 camera. I don't believe I've ever seen more beautiful Super-8 footage. Sometimes it's very subtle and precise. When you're looking through the camera, how fully are you thinking in terms of texture and color and framingwhat the image will look like?