Recording the Work of a World Anne Charlotte Robertson’S Diary Film and the Domestication of Cinema

Recording the Work of a World Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Diary Film and the Domestication of Cinema by Anjo-marí Gouws A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cinema Studies Institute University of Toronto ©Anjo-marí Gouws 2020 Recording the Work of a World: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Diary Film and the Domestication of Cinema Anjo-marí Gouws Doctor of Philosophy Cinema Studies Institute University of Toronto 2020 Abstract Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary is a multi-modal project that comprises cinematic, written, audio and food diaries that span forty years of the artist’s life. Robertson would come to understand the work in different ways: as a weight loss diary; as a “trousseau” for her “one true love,” to present to him when they meet; and, in periods of psychic breakdown, as a film that would encompass the history of the entire world. This dissertation takes up these three ways of framing the project to describe and make sense of Five Year Diary. In doing so it positions Robertson more prominently in terms of two scholarly histories: the history of feminist art in the United States, and the history of experimental film, particularly in the form of personal or diary filmmaking. When Robertson begins her multi-modal Five Year Diary in 1981, she is ii doing so at the tail-end of the women’s liberation movements that coursed through the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The diary project takes up many of the concerns of second wave feminism, including gendered labour, women’s time, and feminist desire. Robertson thus uses the diary, which historically has often been one of the only forms easily accessible to women, for the project of feminist world-making that Five Year Diary engages in. Her intervention here lies on two fronts. First, as an artist that makes of the most extensive and conceptually rich use of the diary within feminist art and filmmaking; and second, in her veneration of domesticity and heterosexual marriage, as forming part of an alternative history of second-wave feminism. It is Robertson’s treatment of the domestic that forms one axis of her intervention in the history of experimental film: by collapsing the labour of the home and the labour of the filmmaker, hers is, I argue, the true “domestication of cinema” that David E James attributes to Stan Brakhage. The second axis relates to form and how the diary film has traditionally been sketched in experimental scholarship, as fragmented, often formless, an assertion Robertson’s rigorous formalism and carefully pieced together aesthetic vision undermines. iii Acknowledgments I could not have imagined more careful readers or dogged champions than Brian Price, Meghan Sutherland, and James Cahill. Nor could I have hoped for more generous examiners than Professors Ivone Margulies and Sara Saljoughi. Thank you. This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, Arthur and Susan Scace, Robert Lantos, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Alumni and Friends. The generosity of the Harvard Film Archive has made my work in the Anne Charlotte Robertson Collection much easier than could have otherwise been the case. Haden Guest, Amy Sloper, Mark Johnson and Robert Vaszari have facilitated my time in the collection over the five years I have spent visiting the archive, and I am highly indebted to them. I am however most indebted to Elizabeth Coffey, former archivist at the HFA and a champion of the Robertson collection. Liz spent hours watching many of the reels with me over the years, and her enthusiasm for Robertson’s work, coupled with her broad knowledge of the project, was indispensable to my writing. On a practical level, I am grateful for the institutions that made my archival travel possible, and also facilitated travel to a range of conferences where early iterations of this project was shared: the Visual Studies Department at the University of Toronto Mississauga, the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto, as well as my home department, the Cinema Studies Institute. This thanks extends to the home where I wrote most of this work: Café Pamenar in Kensington Market. iv The continued interest and enthusiasm of colleagues and friends at the University of Toronto, both for Robertson’s work and for my own, has been a highlight of this time. Thank you to Justin J Morris, Amber Fundytus, Kevin Chabot, Celine Bell, Claudia Sicondolfo and Karina Griffiths. Special thanks to the friends who I spent the most time with discussing the project, and whose labour also marks these pages: Madeleine Wall, Natasha Hay, Carrie Reese, Andrew Young, and Caroline Klimek. Tess Takahashi, Mike Zryd and Sarah Keller have been important guides along the way, and have made this a much less lonely process. My family is the sustaining thread of my life and work. Thank you to Tom Gouws, Retha Gouws, Tom Gouws junior, Danel Gouws, Margreet Gouws, Daniël Gouws, Janie Gouws, Emma-maryn Gouws, Josua Gouws, Annetjie Fourie, Helen van der Horst, Linda van der Horst and Evert van der Horst. This is also true for the friends who have been around long enough to have secured familial bonds. Thank you to Stella Viljoen, Marguerite Mulligan-Maseela, Gerhard Mulder, Runette Kruger, Thys Kotzé, Riëtte Basson, Chris Broodryk, Amelia Broodryk, Albertus Breytenbach, André Rautenbach and Corné Müller. Most importantly I thank Johannes van der Horst, for conversation, baking bread, and building me a writing table. v Vir Tom Gouws, natuurlik vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction 1 Intervention 2 The Spirit of My Very Own Living Room 3 The Historical Context of Robertson’s Work A Question of Form 10 Redefining the Mode of the Diary Film Small Diaries with Locks and Keys 15 A Description of Five Year Diary and the Process Through Which It Comes About Written Diaries 15 Food Diaries 17 Audio Diaries 19 Diary Film 20 Performance and Screening/Exhibition Setup 21 Five Year Diary and Female/Feminist Spaces 22 A Lacuna, a Depression 29 Exhibition History of Five Year Diary and the Lack of Scholarship on Robertson’s Work The Confessional 33 Feminist Theory as World-making 35 Notes on Methodology On Being Sick 41 A Note on What’s Missing 46 On Archival References 49 Overview of Chapters 49 vii 1 The World-Making of Women’s Work 52 Chocolate Won 55 The Gendered Labour of the Body A Million Tiny Stitches 74 Gendered Labour and the Avant-garde I’m Washing the Dishes and Making a Movie 94 Domestic Labour as World-Making Conclusion 111 2 The Cinematic Trousseau 115 Love Waits 118 Love Conjures 123 Love Contracts 131 Words for a Conversation 136 The Fact of Marriage 149 3 The World Movie 162 EXTREMELY BAD MONOLOGUE IN HEAD 165 A Medical History Closed-circuit TV for God 173 The Dual Movement of Illness in Five Year Diary Making Sense to Oneself 180 Making Sense to Others 184 The Rationality of the Cut 188 Rendering the Psychotic Impulse in Sound 194 The Confessional Register 199 The Close-Up: Movement, Imbalance, 206 viii Crisis. Crack. Photographic Endoscopy: Robertson’s Face 209 and Female Pathology “I Will Talk and I Will Talk”: Speaking as 213 Structural Silence in the History of Female Pathology Failure and Form 220 Conclusion 225 Conclusion 229 Anne Charlotte Robertson Filmography 236 Bibliography 243 ix Introduction In April or May 1983, Anne Charlotte Robertson first screened Five Year Diary to a group of guests in her home.1 What guests were watching was five hours of footage, the early reels of a multi-modal diary project that would eventually chronicle Robertson’s life over the course of almost forty years. The cinematic part of the project, which spans 1981 to 1998, would eventually amount to a diary film around 40 hours in duration. The film covers Robertson’s life with her family; her consistent efforts at weight loss; her endeavours in cooking and gardening; her life-long romantic obsession with Doctor Who; her multi-decade experience of suffering from bipolar disorder with schizoaffective overlay, chronicling the regimes of drugs, therapy and hospitalisation that marked her life; and the conceptual importance of recording itself, of the diary as a means of rendering visible the lifeworld of a woman. Shooting exclusively on Super 8mm, on a range of borrowed and often broken cameras, Robertson filmed daily, sometimes weekly, at times setting up a camera in her house to film an entire day where she cooked, slept, and edited the reels of the film. The film was presented to the audience in reels with delineated dates, indicating which period it covered, and screened in chronological order. What viewers watched was footage recorded regularly or in time-lapse and then sped up, Robertson moving across the screen at frenetic speed, parts of it silent and others overlaid by audio diaries recorded on tape and played by Robertson from a boom box, to form an ad-hoc soundtrack. She was cooking tofu, she was foraging raspberries, she was driving upstate to visit her grandmother and showing her camera to the many children that populate the film, she was composting, she was exercising, she was burying her father, she was editing the film, she was losing her mind, she was finding it again. 1 Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 1, #4]. 1 Intervention Five Year Diary was a work in progress until at least 1998, with new diaries being added, and the cinematic diaries being continuously edited and re-edited.

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