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trying to make things match up, they'll match up anyway. It's like fate. It's happened to me when I've just played a whole stretch of unedited tape, and it's happened to me with dubbed excerpts. You put little pieces of tape next to film, without looking at the film, and synchrony happensor an interesting contrast.
The sound that goes with Amy's reel is an original stretch of a tape I made when I was just keeping the diary tape along with the diary film. But most of the tapes I've been making lately are dubs of the best of the best.
I have several hundred hours of tape. My problem is that in the last couple of years I've been sending most of my diary tapes away to a guyTom Baker again.
This last year the sound on my camera broke down, but I didn't know because, as usual, I didn't look at the film until a year later. Consequently, in 1989 1 have stretches of film and no sound to put over them. I figure I'll read some of my political letters. A fifty-one page letter should cover up several reels! And the audience will get an idea of the verbal delusions I have. Well, I don't know if they're all delusions. But some of them are pretty farfetched, I'd say.
MacDonald:
Who do you send those letters to?
Robertson:
I send them to the United Nations, to representatives, congressmen, governors. The first batch were sent to women representatives. I've sent them to show-business figures and music stars, Susan Sontaga whole bunch of people. I've sent them to the president of the United Statesthat was probably my biggest mistake. Mostly, they're just sort of your all-purpose liberal-green-politics letters.
MacDonald:
How many times have you shown the whole diary?
Robertson:
I've only done the marathon three times: at the Massachusetts College of Art as my thesis, at Event Works in Boston, and in New York at the American Museum of the Moving Image. I'd like to do it a lot more.
Last night was the third or fourth time I've done a sample show, using a cross section of time, sampling from reels that cover the same time period each year.
MacDonald:
That's an interesting way to show it.
Robertson:
Yeah, it is, except this spring show I did last night was really full of breakdowns. Actually, probably the whole film is! I don't know how many people have documented breakdowns. I understand Carolee [Schneemann] did.
MacDonald:
In
Plumb Line
[1971] she documents a breakdown. Can your films be rented anyplace but from you?
Robertson:
I don't have any copies. I don't make prints of any of my films.