Director:
Five Year Diary, Reel 22: A Short Affair and Going Crazy, 27 mins, U.S.A., 1982, Super 8 on digital video, Colour Five Year Diary, Reel 23: A Breakdown and After the Mental Hospital, 26 mins, U.S.A., 1982, Super 8 on digital video, Colour Five Year Diary, Reel 80: Emily Died, 27 mins, U.S.A., 1994, Super 8 on digital video, Colour
This film screened 20th January 2016.
For its inaugural screening, aemi Projections presents the work of the exceptional, if little known, film artist Anne Charlotte Robertson in a programme curated and introduced by Benjamin Cook (Director of LUX), in association with Harvard Film Archive.
Begun in the early 1980s and eventually running to over 38 hours of material, Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary stands as one of the major works of diary filmmaking, an approach initiated by pioneers like Jonas Mekas. Over the course of her diary, Robertson unflinchingly documents her often precarious mental state. Though often painfully raw and emotional, Robertson’s work also demonstrates a highly developed aesthetic sensibility and her films are leavened with self-awareness and humour. For Robertson, cinema ultimately becomes a redemptive form of self-therapy, tracing “the story of a mind’s survival.”
After the screening at the IFI, a discussion with Benjamin Cooke addressing Robertson and her legacy will take place at Temple Bar Gallery+Studios, Studio 6. For further details see www.ifi.ie
AEMI is a creative platform dedicated to the support and exhibition of artists and experimental moving image