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. Over the course of the almost twenty years Robertson spent working on the cinematic part of the project, she would come to understand it 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 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”2 that David E James

2 David E James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 37.

2 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 conceptual vision undermines.

The Spirit of My Very Own Living Room The Historical Context of Robertson’s Work

The moment in experimental film history most important for understanding

Robertson’s oeuvre is the period between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. Demarcating a style of avant-garde practice explicitly autobiographical, these two decades saw a utilisation of small gauge or home movie technology; a focus on the home or domestic environments of the filmmakers; and a diaristic or semi-diaristic recording of everyday events. In the late 1950s, Jonas Mekas started “photographing the fragments of his own life,” which James has articulated as “his practice of film. Practising … found itself as praxis.”3 These “fragments” would later be released as the diary film Lost Lost Lost

(1976), a look into Mekas’s early life in New York. The practice of carrying a camera with you “on every trip away from the house (even to the grocery store)”4 becomes a marker of this attention paid to daily living. This constitutive aesthetic focus was evident from the early 1960s onwards in the work of Stan Brakhage, starting with his capture of the birth of his first child in Window Water Baby Moving (1965), and extending into two decades of experimental 8mm films that focused on the domestic life of his family in their cottage in Colorado. In 1971’s “In Defense of Amateur,” Brakhage

3 David E James, ‘Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden’, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David E James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 149. 4 Stan Brakhage, ‘In Defense of Amateur’, in Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings, 1964-1980, ed. Robert A Haller (New Paltz: Documentext, 1982), 168.

3 explains this position, noting that “I am guided primarily in all my creative dimensions by the spirit of the home in which I am living, by my very own living room.”5

Homes would be at the forefront of this turn to what James calls the “domestication of cinema:” Brakhage filming his family, but also the exuberant fucking and working and cleaning in the home of Carolee Schneemann, in her autobiographical trilogy of films in the 1960s and 1970s.6 The homes and the bodies within them were the focus of these films, a period in which, as Ara Osterweil has argued, “in addition to its transformative representations of bodies, experimental cinema also formed an inextricable part of a rich visual and political culture devoted to exploring the embodied experience of subjectivity.”7 Given the centrality of the personal and autobiographical in the culture at large (as James has pointed out, including the Confessional poets, and the work of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Ginsberg),8 this emphasis on the home as an extension of the autobiographical is not a surprise, neither is the embrace of the diary as a form that embodies the ethics and aesthetics of both the home and the autobiographical. It is in a distinctly more politicised manner — and in this way only reflected by the manner Schneemann employs the form — that the diary gets taken up by another movement that starts to foment at the same time as the American avant- garde are making their home movies. The women’s movement, built on the personal experiences of women and thus a re-thinking of certain pivotal forms, particularly the home and the body, would designate the diary as “that most female and feminist genre,”9 and is the second crucial context for understanding Robertson’s work.

5 Brakhage, 168. 6 James, Allegories of Cinema, 37. 7 Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 11. 8 James, ‘Film Diary’, 149. 9 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 217.

4 Robertson was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1949, the same year Simone de Beauvoir’s

The Second Sex was first published in France. As one of four children to a middle-class family of a lawyer father and librarian mother, she grew up in an America where the women’s movement was slowly gaining prominence. By the time she was in high school, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was the bestselling non-fiction book of

1964, and Robertson was already into a years-long diary-writing practice. Her entries from early adolescence are a reminder of the type of femininity Friedan was revolting against. There Robertson urged herself to “catch up on church! Home life must be improved! No more yelling!” and notes that “I have sticked to my diet! I’ve lost about 2 lbs and 2 in around the waist. Hope I can take my diet to camp!”10 Robertson was still writing a diary when she left the house at 19 to go to college, a personal “revolution” she would later position, in Reel 31: Niagara Falls,11 in terms of the larger feminist revolution that took place in the late 1960s, after the Miss America protest organised by the New York Radical Women.

Robertson flitted between colleges and programmes from the late 1960s to the early

1970s, studying psychology and a range of artistic endeavours, including acting and photography and weaving.12 Across the country, the burgeoning women’s movement was making its way into aesthetics, a move that Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard describe as “a major watershed in women’s history and the history of art.”13 Choosing

10 Childhood five year diary entry, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #44]. 11 19 to 28 August 1983. 12 Robertson started and dropped out of programmes in Ohio and Massachusetts, including a stint at Boston University and what she referred to as “museum school,” and the Massachusetts College of Art. Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 5, #272]. Screening notes, date unknown [Folder 9, #213]. 13 Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 12.

5 the end of the 1960s as the point of convergence for feminist activism and feminist art,

Broude and Gerard note that until

1970, there had not yet existed a self-conscious and universalizing female voice in art — self-conscious as articulating female experience from an informed social and political position, and universalizing in defining one’s experience as applicable to the experience of other women …14 From the beginning, second-wave feminism was invested in excavating the personal, autobiographical experiences of women. This was reflected in the early feminist documentaries like 1971’s Janie’s Janie and Growing up Female, and in core practices like consciousness-raising, which became a praxis of not just activism, but also art. Speaking about the working process at the pioneering Feminist Art programs at Fresno State

College and the California Institute of the Arts, taught by Judy Chicago and Miriam

Schapiro, Faith Wilding notes,

By fortuitous accident, it seemed, we had stumbled on a way of working: using consciousness-raising to elicit content, we then worked in any medium or mixture of media — including performance, roleplaying, conceptual- and text-based art, and other nontraditional tools — to reveal our hidden histories.15

Second-wave concerns and the way they get taken up in feminist art of the time, where

“personal history was being ransacked, analyzed, displayed and re-invented …”16 form an important backdrop of Robertson’s early adulthood. While she kept food diaries and tracked her weight, a practice that would later form part of Five Year Diary, Eleanor

Antin carved her flesh through dieting, Adrian Piper fasted alone in an apartment in

14 Broude and Garrard, 12. 15 Faith Wilding, ‘The Feminist Arts Program at Fresno and CalArts, 1970-1975’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 34. 16 Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 18.

6 New York and recorded it in photographs, and Carolee Schneemann stood before a crowd unfurling a written monologue from her vagina. Feminist body art from this moment, which Amelia Jones describes as one “in which the body emerged into the visual artwork in a particularly charged and dramatically sexualized and gendered way,”17 formed a constitutive lineage for Robertson’s later weight loss diary, but so would other important second-wave concerns. Most important of these is the movement’s focus on women’s work, and on traditional forms of women’s aesthetic expression, or what, in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed frames as the second-wave focus on the home as a way of articulating “feminism as happening in the very places that have historically been bracketed as not political: in domestic arrangements, at home, every room of the house can become a feminist room, in who does what where.”18

By the mid 1970s Robertson was just about to start experimenting with film, and spent the latter part of the decade making short films and eventually started her domestic diary in 1981. During this period where Robertson learned how to frame her stove and her kitchen table, Silvia Federici published Wages Against Housework, Martha Rosler angrily bashed together spatulas in her kitchen, and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne

Dielman (again/still) scrubbed the bath. Throughout this period, the home was a central concern: both as a space in which much of grassroots feminist activism and consciousness-raising was articulating itself, and as a conceptual point of focus.

Thinking about both the potential for resistance and the political limitations of the domestic sphere, works like Womanhouse, organised by Judy Chicago and Miriam

17 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 15. 18 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 3–4.

7 Schapiro, form part of this larger history in which Robertson’s own work a few years later follows suit.

By the time Robertson had started to shoot the cinematic portion of Five Year Diary in the early 1980s, she was enrolled as an MA student in Filmmaking at the Massachusetts

College of Art in Boston, was reading P Adams Sitney’s designation of Jonas Mekas as diary filmmaker in Visionary Film, and leaving notes to herself to watch more of Mekas’s work.19 Mekas later outlined this tradition to include films by Robert Huot, Howard

Guttenplan, Peter Hutton and Andrew Noren,20 a lineage of works that were often silent, relatively impersonal, not strictly chronological or clearly delineated temporal markers. Although Robertson corresponded with Mekas in the 1990s, sending him reels of her films (in one letter to the filmmaker he designates Five Year Diary as the “true diary film”), she more explicitly aligned herself with a more personal instance of the diary film mode, in the form of Ed Pincus’s Diaries (1971-1976). Released in 1981,

Pincus’s film focused on five years of his life with Jane Pincus, a member of the collective that wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves, as the couple were navigating an experimental open marriage. As a diary film it functions as a major departure for the form: very based on conversation, explicitly personal, considerably less fragmentary, and a text Robertson would specifically reference as vital to her own film, noting in a screening program that the title for her own film was inspired by the duration of

Pincus’s film.21 The explicitly relational focus of Pincus’s film would also, given the

19 As discussed by Sitney in Visionary Film. P Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 20 Sitney, 424. 21 Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 5, #275].

8 emphasis Robertson places on her own diary as a trousseau for a future true love, be aligned with how Robertson conceived of her own diary.

If Pincus is one important anchoring point for thinking about the larger diary tradition which Robertson both fits into and radically recasts, the other would be Carolee

Schneemann. Schneemann’s autobiographical trilogy (comprising 1965’s Fuses, 1972’s

Plumb Line, and Kitch’s Last Meal, made between 1973 and 1976) featured a similar focus on relationality and love, featuring her life with partners James Tenney and Anthony

McCall. But the diary trilogy also captured many elements integral to Robertson’s own understanding of the everyday: a focus on the domestic sphere, a careful recording of daily events across a long period of time, and a privileged relationship between female filmmaker and feline.22 As a multi-modal project, Kitch’s Last Meal also bore formal similarities to Five Year Diary.23 As Carlos J Kase explains in his writing on the film,

Kitch’s

embodies a telling kind of hybridity. On the one hand, in its production … [the film] perfectly achieves the incredible intimacy and autobiographical texture of non-fiction diary filmmaking. On the other hand, as an exhibition component of Up to and Including Her Limits (1973- 1976), a multi-screen, multi-media performance work, Kitch would continue the interactive, kinetic variety of expanded cinema … of earlier pieces of Schneemann’s career.24 Similar to Robertson’s layered soundtrack of different recorded audio diaries, Kitch’s Last Meal employed “a carefully-coordinated but non-synchronous soundtrack played off cassette tapes that blend audio from the

22 Robertson’s cats, Zouina, Buddy and others feature prominently throughout the film. 23 Robertson was familiar with Schneemann’s work, and specifically mentions Kitch’s Last Meal in an interview with Scott MacDonald in 1992. Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press, 1992), 215. 24 J Carlos Kase, ‘Kitch’s Last Meal: Art, Life, and Quotidiana in the Observational Cinema of Carolee Schneemann’, Millennium Film Journal, Fall 2011, 73.

9 home environment, car noises, radio bits, and fragments of conversation with acerbic narration, which she recently described as ‘1970s feminist gender rants.’”25 As Brett

Kashmere explains, Kitch’s complex soundtrack, along with the film’s system of dual projection and “modular design” where the “top frame is always projected slightly larger than the bottom, intentionally shattering the illusion of a single, rectangular, continuous space”26 also speaks of a type of diary film highly conceptual in its design, and reliant on a formally rigorous system of tight editing and continuous reworking and layering of image and sound. In their level of formal rigour and specificity,

Schneemann’s diary films pose a challenge to how the diary film has traditionally been sketched.

A Question of Form Redefining the Mode of the Diary Film

The challenge that Schneemann’s diary films pose to the traditional theorisation of the diary film is a challenge which Robertson’s Five Year Diary continues and expands, one which calls for a radical rethinking of the mode. From Sitney’s positioning of the diary film as “a series of discontinuous presents”27 to Marjorie Keller’s designation of the

“fragmented, cutoff or hurried registering of event or images,”28 that results in a

“fragmentary style,”29 much of the early writing on the mode of the diary film was sketched around a thinking of Mekas’s work. In particular, what Kase has called the

25 Brett Kashmere, ‘Seen Missing: The Case of Kitch’s Last Meal’, Millennium Film Journal, no. 54 (Fall 2011): 65. 26 Kashmere, 66. 27 P Adams Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 208. 28 Marjorie Keller, ‘The Apron Strings of Jonas Mekas’, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 86. 29 Keller, 94.

10 “more unrestricted, open-ended diaristic mode of filmmaking”30 would be associated with a number of elements of Mekas’s approach that have been singled out by theorists.

Centred around Mekas’s approach of capturing spontaneous fragments of daily life, this conception of the diary film places an emphasis on the moment of filming as opposed to the reflexive space of editing. There is thus a collapse of the space between experience and recounting,31 also reflected in the relatively low degree of reworked diary footage, especially when compared to Robertson and Schneemann’s densely reworked original footage. The ephemeral moment of the present is privileged to a greater extent than is the sense of conceptual form. As Sitney notes, speaking of Mekas’s film, “The three categories, diaries, notes, and sketches, share a negative relation to lapidary, fully constructed and finished achievements; they are quotidian lyrics, spontaneous, perhaps tentative, records of a sensibility in the midst of, or fresh from, experience.”32

Over time this “spontaneous … tentative”33 designation of the diary film would become exceedingly marked as essentially feminine, with theorists like Keller positioning

Mekas’s style as reminiscent of the diaries kept by pioneer women on the American frontier. Mekas’s work, which relies “on the temporality of the fragment,”34 is in sharp distinction, Keller argues, to the textual diaries usually kept by men, which tend to be

“purposeful,” which always move toward a “revelatory end.”35 As she mentions in “The

Apron Strings of Jonas Mekas:” “Theirs are more calculated self-reflections. Their plans

30 Kase, ‘Kitch’s Last Meal’, 73. 31 As David E James argues, “For the written diary, events and their recording are typically separate, but in film they coincide.” James, ‘Film Diary’, 153. 32 Sitney, Visionary Film, 424. 33 Sitney, 424. 34 Keller, ‘Apron Strings’, 85. 35 Keller, 84.

11 are announced and determined before the work begins.”36 Much of the form of the diary film is theorised by Keller as an extension of the working lives of women, where “short bursts of images of daily life” are a result of “grasping for bits of time in the midst of the events of the day … historically asserted as characteristic of women’s creative rhythms.

Domestic life has its temporal exigencies, and the artistic life is often wedged in between them.”37

The notion of the diary film as fragmentary and thus not formally rigorous is not particular to its theorisation in film. In Daily Modernism, Elisabeth Podnieks outlines how both men (Pascal: “The diary is spontaneous, fragmentary, and immediate …”)38 and women (Jelinek: “episodic and anecdotal, nonchronological and disjunctive”)39 have positioned the diary in this way.40 Women’s diaries, Podnieks explains, quoting P.A

Spalding in his Self-Harvest: A Study of Diaries and the Diarist, “lack, as it were, solidity, a third dimension.”41 Podnieks shows how theorists have often linked this lack of solidity to the diary’s association with the domestic environment:

In her foreword to Revelations: Diaries of Women, Mary Jane Moffat suggests that women write diaries because the form ‘is an analogue to their lives: emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest, not to be taken

36 Keller, 84. 37 Keller, 85. 38 Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 30. 39 Podnieks, 40. 40 Podnieks is not the only theorist who has pointed out that diaries are not regarded as formally rigorous. As Judy Lensink argues in ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography,’ “The few diaries included in the canon are read for their content, rather than for their innovative literary form.” Judy Lensink, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography’, Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1 January 1987): 40. 41 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 50.

12 seriously, private, restricted, daily, trivial, formless, concerned with self, as endless as their tasks.’42 Podnieks forms part of a growing group of recent theorists that push back against this single designation of the diary, and who have argued that many diaries take the form of

“essentially everything that we assume diaries not to be: comprised of daily events written up en masse, aesthetically designed, and revised — in short, contrived.”43 In so doing, these scholars have also questioned whether the fundamental lacuna that diaries seem to present in formal terms is based on the diary’s larger status as women’s autobiography.44 Seen as a more personal, confessional type of writing, women’s autobiography has traditionally not been taken seriously in formal terms. Like the domestic realm from which it often appears and of which it often speaks, Irene Gammel notes in Confessional Politics, rehearsing this line of argument,

The female voice relating personal experience, like the sinner’s and the patient’s, belongs not to the realm of abstract and official langue but to parole, to familiar and intimate speech, and is thus characterized by a low degree of formality and authority, as it is perceived as ephemeral or trivial.45

Although Five Year Diary takes much from the larger tradition of female diary-keeping that Keller, Podnieks and others outline, and which will form a through line of

42 Podnieks, 67. 43 The question of reworked material is central to the argument Podnieks and others make, as she notes: “The diary’s status as a finished work must further be considered in terms of editing. Diarists edit their texts themselves, from the mental process of selecting what to include and exclude to rewriting and crossing out words and passages and, in the most extreme cases, to preparing typescripts of their diaries …” Podnieks, 35. 44 As Gammel accounts for the lack of attention paid to women’s diaries before the process of feminist excavation began, “… the diary is resisted because in both form and content it comes closest to a female version of autobiography.” Irene Gammel, ed., Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 40. 45 Gammel, 4.

13 discussion in this dissertation, Robertson’s project troubles the homogenous image of feminine form that the diary and the diary film has amassed over time. Hers was less of a casual notebook to jot down moments throughout the day than many of the films designated as part of the tradition. This tradition includes what many theorists, including Keller, and Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, consider the first diary film, Marie Menken’s aptly-titled, Notebook (1962).46 Instead Five Year Diary was from the beginning an explicitly “purposeful” text, and indeed always moved toward

“a revelatory end,”47 even when that end shifted and was recast. It was also explicitly not fragmented: similar to Schneemann’s project in Kitch of filming her domestic life for three years, not finding time alongside doing the dishes to film but collapsing the two and setting up the camera while she works, so Robertson’s project was not reliant on the furtive fragments available to her. Instead she made the home her primary site of focus.48 Her extensive use of repetition of certain aesthetic tropes across the work also pushes back against the fragmentary claim of the mode. But perhaps the most succinct example of how Robertson’s diary was never simply a spontaneous capture of the everyday lies in its multimodality itself: by extending her project from the cinematic

46 Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, ‘Marie Menken, Carolee Schneemann, Marjorie Keller, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Rose Lowder’, in Women and Experimental Filmmaking, ed. Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2005), 7. 47 Keller, ‘Apron Strings’, 84. 48 Keller is not alone in framing the diary film as a text capable of existing in the midst of the domestic bustle of a home. Literary diaries are traditionally theorised in a similar manner. In Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, Rita Felski discusses Estelle Jelinek’s position that “From earliest times, these discontinuous forms have been important to women because they are analogues to the fragmented, interrupted, and formless nature of their lives.” In Daily Modernism, Podnieks sketches the interrupted schedules of Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin and Adrienne Rich, noting that for them “the time spent writing her diary had to be accommodated to the time spent performing domestic chores.” Rich herself describes “the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children’s constant needs.” Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 86. Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 56. Rich, On Lies, 43.

14 reels into her written diaries, she is able to enlarge the scope of her diary, to stretch back in time to long before she ever had a camera, to (almost) marking the beginning of the diary as the beginning of her life. But the incorporation of other diaries also filled the gaps left by broken cameras or hospital stays. During Robertson’s lengthy hospitalisations, which happened multiple times a year from her thirties onwards, she would not be allowed to film and would rely on written diaries to cover this time. What

Robertson was consistently trying to retain was continuity, an aesthetic whole. What that aesthetic whole looked like, the next few pages will show.

Small diaries with locks and keys A Description of Five Year Diary and the Process Through Which it Comes About

Providing a definitive description of Five Year Diary is a tricky endeavour. The Five Year

Diary that exists today, packed away in boxes in the Harvard Film Archive, is the version of Five Year Diary at the time of Robertson’s death in 2012. As a project with different iterations over the course of the 30 years it was screened and exhibited, to describe the work is as much a description of the process through which the work comes about. This process is one that draws from two female/feminist spaces that draw together the different diaries that comprise the project. The first is what Adrienne Rich calls the “feminist” space of revision and review; and the second the “female spaces” of the autobiographical, the personal, and the domestic. I return to these spaces at the end of this section.

Written Diaries The first collection of diaries that form part of Five Year Diary is a group of written diaries that span almost fifty years. These diaries were exhibited along with the film.

Robertson would sometimes read from them during screenings, and viewers were also

15 actively encouraged to read both during the intermissions that took place during the lengthy screening sessions, and sometimes during parts of the reels that were rather monotonous, as she explains in the program notes to what was, at that point, Reel 4:

“written diaries can be read during the lengthy car ride to North Carolina, flashlights will be provided”49 or in a later screening note: “Please read the 1984 journal; it shows a psychosis in its extreme form, flowering and trembling and strident.”50

The earliest written diary that forms part of Robertson’s project dates back to childhood.

A small diary, bound in soft pink faux-leather, with the phrase Five Year Diary embossed on it in golden lettering, a little lock clasping it closed, the key long lost. On its cover someone, presumably Robertson, has written the date 1960-1961, scribbled in thick black marker. In screening notes for the film, Robertson noted that the title of the film “refers to the small diaries with locks and keys which give a person 5 lines each day for five years, only enough for a glimpse of a life, which this is.”51 This reference to the “small diaries with locks and keys” was not incidental: this first diary, which she kept at the age of 11 onwards, takes this exact form. Each page of the diary is devoted to one day in the calendar year, with a column of five lines available for each of the five years the diary covers, so that the entry for every April 3rd over the course of five years is written on the same page, and the diarist writes that day’s events while reviewing what happened in years past.

The early childhood diary is the only commercially produced diary found in

Robertson’s collection. The other written diaries take different forms. During the 1960s

49 Screening notes, 1986 [Folder 3, #26]. 50 Screening notes, 1986 [Folder 3, #27]. 51 Screening notes, 1987 [Folder 3, #21].

16 Robertson kept two types of diaries. The first was a set of index card diaries where, instead of dates, the diary is arranged alphabetically, and consists of particular entries with personal information.52 The second type of written diary from this time, a type that extends through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, is more conventional in form: cheap, spiral- bound or softcover lined notebooks, or binders with handwritten or typewritten diary entries. Robertson’s cursive script often leaves little white space on a page; in some entries the writing is angled to take up all available space. As would be Robertson’s habit throughout the rest of her life, some of these entries or journals include exact dates, but many do not. The pace of recording is also not consistent: a notebook might be filled over the course of two days, or span the duration of a few months, and there are instances where Robertson was keeping more than one diary at a given time. All

Robertson’s diaries vary in content, in keeping with what Helen M Buss has called the

“healthy eclectic[ism]” of the genre.53 They include what we would traditionally associate with the diary: the recounting of daily events or discussing of feelings or situations. But they also feature other, distinct forms. Robertson’s diaries can include plays (like the pre-adolescent diary play titled The Tortured Mind, about a “career girl” who gets tortured and starts thinking she is mad); autobiographic pieces written in the third person; and a lot of different lists. Entries are also often addressed to particular people, in the form of a letter.

Food Diaries A set of food diaries were also available to be read by the audience during screenings of the film. Robertson kept these diaries from the late 1970s onwards, throughout the

52 Under I, for example, the reader finds an entry for Insects, favorite (the earthworm), while A sports a card that charts Robertson’s changes in Allowance. Under H we find both a card that indicates the author’s Hobbies, as well one that lists her Habits, bad. 53 Helen M Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (Montréal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 37.

17 1980s and early 1990s. They mostly consist of large spiral-bound notebooks with entries in thick black marker and capital letters. Robertson devoted each page to her food and drink intake that day, like the entry for July 24th (year unknown), which reads:

14 CUPS COFFEE 4 CUPS SOY MILK 3 CUPS LEMONADE TOFU AGÉ RADISHES RICE SALAD SALAD CORN CHERRIES RATATOUILLE 2 ENGLISH MUFFINS MARGARINE Another entry, for January 8th (year unknown) reads:

6 CUPS COFFEE 4 + CUPS SOY MILK 1 CUP WINE 1 CUP ORANGE JUICE 2 CUPS CIDER 2 TOFU HOT-DOGS MASHED POTATOS CABBAGE, TURNIP, CARROT MARGARINE LOTS OF FRENCH BREAD 3 BIG PIECES OF CAKE

18 Each page also indicates Robertson’s weight the following day, and whether the scale had been moved.54

Audio Diaries A third type of diary that forms part of the project is a set of diaries recorded on audio tape, from the early 1980s onwards. These recordings take different forms. Some are recordings of parts of Robertson’s day, and capture conversations, or the sounds of work (like the typing and beeps of data entry) or other ambient noises, like a hymn recorded during a church service. Other diaries are monologues where Robertson discusses her day or her thoughts about particular things. A third type of diary entry is the audio letter addressed to particular people. What remains in the Anne Charlotte

Robertson collection at the Harvard Film Archive are copies: originals were sent to the men they were made for — most consistently Tom Baker, but at other times, also David

Copperfield, Tom Wolfe, and others. Robertson used the audio diaries as additional layers of audio for the film diary, which, for the first few years, contained very little sound on film. During screenings Robertson juggled different tapes that were meant to be played at different points of the film, sometimes more than one at the same time. As the written diaries are available for reading while the film plays, Robertson hoped the audio diaries could be utilised in the same way, proposing a cassette wall with a few

Walkman players as part of the screening setup.55

54 One of the consistent delusional thoughts Robertson experienced was the feeling that things around her living space were being moved or removed. 55 There does not seem to be evidence that this ever materialised. Written diary entry, 1985 [Folder 5, #563].

19 Diary Film The main collection of diaries that currently comprise Five Year Diary is a set of 84 film reels, of which the last reel is incomplete. The reels have a running time of around 25 minutes each, and were all shot on Super 8mm, on a range of borrowed cameras, until the purchase of her own Nizo 801 in 1983.56 Most of the reels have their own titles, a summary of the main events in Robertson’s life during the time it covers, a period indicated, along with the title, on the screening notes provided during screenings. The amount of lived time a reel covers is not consistent — Reel 5: Mourning (23 to 30 January

1982), which follows in the wake of the death of Richard Robertson, the filmmaker’s father, covers just seven days of the family going through their father’s papers, taking walks in the snow and huddling inside watching football. Other reels could span weeks or months, like the straightforwardly titled Reel 76: Fall to Spring (30 October 1991 to 28

March 1992), which covers six months of Robertson’s life, during which she started sending tapes to Tom Wolfe, canned 300 jars of produce from her garden, and was fighting with her family and mental health treatment team.57

Building towards the final 84 reels was not a linear progression. Early screenings of the project, when Robertson had only been gathering footage for two or three years, already featured a large number of reels, and as time passed and more footage accumulated,

Robertson cut and recut the reels so that the line-up of diary reels contracted and expanded over the two decades she actively worked on the project. These early versions of the film were also distinctly different in form, most significantly because Robertson had chosen to not edit any of the material. The reels started out silent with small stretches of sound on film, to which Robertson added the extra soundscape of the audio

56 Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 5, #275]. 57 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #1333].

20 tape diaries, played from a boom box.58 In 1984 she purchased a new Nizo camera which allowed her to record sound,59 and would henceforth shoot with as much sound stock as she could afford, which was admittedly not always very much.

Performance and Screening/Exhibition Setup As has been mentioned, the first few years of the project included little sound on film.

In the absence of some kind of voice-over, Robertson attempted to elucidate the material on-screen by adding another modality to the project, that of performance.

During screenings Robertson performed in person, where she read from her diaries, and provided in-person commentary on what was happening on-screen.60 This performance took place in a particular screening setup Robertson envisioned for showcasing her different diaries, a close approximation of the home. The earliest screenings of the film did indeed take place in Robertson’s actual home.61 Later, once the project grew, Robertson would, throughout proposals for screenings, describe the space she wanted to create in the screening room as a “home rec room fall-out shelter,”62 or “a home movie basement viewing room, a diary den, a bomb shelter, a comfortable living- room filled with artifacts from the life of a 20th century woman.”63 Robertson considered different iterations of what these artefacts may include, mentioning

cot and bedding, water jugs, food, living necessities, books, paintings, written diaries, autobiography on paper plates, snapshots, photographic portfolio, weaving, religious art, political letters to be given away, artifact accumulations about war and peace, vegetarianism, feminism, and the ending of animal-abuse products: a personal surround for the audience.64

58 Screening proposal, 1987 [Folder 5, #18]. 59 Robertson filmography with equipment information [Folder 5, #276]. 60 Screening notes, 1985 [Folder 3, #11]. 61 Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 1, #4]. 62 Five Year Diary overview written by Robertson, date unknown [Folder 5, #200]. 63 Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 3, #279]. 64 Five Year Diary overview written by Robertson, date unknown [Folder 5, #200].

21 Five Year Diary and Female and Feminist Spaces Taken individually, the different diaries that make up the larger project overlap in important ways. Perhaps most pertinent in this regard is the extent to which the earliest written diaries mirror the concerns that mark the much later cinematic diary. The soft pink Five Year Diary, written in 1960-1961, features early pages that outline the different members of Robertson’s family, an important focus of her diary film; but also lists of things to work at, a labour list Robertson would continue to make for decades, in different diary modalities. Here, as in later diaries, she uses her daily recording to account for her financial matters (how much money to save so she can redecorate her room),65 the politics of the day (the election between Kennedy and Nixon),66 religion, and weight. In addition, the childhood five-year diary also already anticipated a reader.

In more than one instance, Robertson annotates the diary, adding a footnote to explain a term.67 The idea of the diary having an audience is extended in the larger, later project, where many of Robertson’s written and audio diaries are in the form of letters, addressed to specific people.68

In addition to these similarities, Robertson’s different diaries also all operate within two conceptual terrains: the practice of review, or revision, as a feminist space of analysis; and the personal/autobiographical/domestic environment as a female space. When it comes to revision, the earliest diary also sets the tone for the diaries to follow. From the beginning, Robertson positioned her diaries as an aesthetic project, which registers in the self-reflexivity of these texts. As part of her initial intentions for the childhood diary,

65 Childhood five year diary entry, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #43]. 66 Childhood five year diary entry for 7 November 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #231]. Also see undated diary entry [Folder 10, #232]. Also see entries for November 8th and 9th 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #233]. 67 Childhood five year diary, 28 September 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #235]. 68 Robertson ffilmography, date unknown [Folder 5, #275]. Screening notes, date unknown [Folder 3, #16].

22 recorded on its first page, Robertson noted that she wants “to make my diary like Anne

Frank’s, only not so famous.”69 She often criticised what had already been written, then added to a piece of writing, reviewed later, that it was “boring,” and reminded herself to read an article in the magazine Calling All Girls about diary writing, in the hope of tips for improvement.70 On October 12 she asks, “Diary, do I really express myself completely in you? I just do not know.”71 The diary as aesthetic object is also reflected in the layout of the childhood diary, which ensured that not just recording takes place, but also review: in writing what happened today you are also faced with what happened on this day in years prior, apparent on the same page. But Robertson also emphasised this notion of periodic review to herself, noting in the diary that there are parts of it she should “read each month,”72 and included revision as part of this practice of review.

This early diary features amendments to the text that were added later. For instance, the entry for September 27th reads, “What does catechism mean?” Later she added, written with a different pen, in subscript just above the question: “Been answered.” 73 Another instance of this type of amendment is found on a page where she listed her new year’s resolutions, which included wanting to lose weight. Later she returns to the page, and comments on the past self’s resolution by noting, “Quite right! Good one!” 74

Robertson is not alone in this practice of revising the diary. Both Podnieks and Judy

Lensink provide many examples of diarists who amend or edit their diaries, including

Virginia Woolf, who Podnieks argues was able to “preserve … [stylistic and thematic]

69 Childhood five year diary, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #40]. 70 Childhood five year diary, 23 December 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #50]. 71 Childhood five year diary, 12 October 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #49]. 72 Childhood five year diary, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #40]. 73 Childhood five year diary, 27 September 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #48]. 74 Childhood five year diary, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #40].

23 continuity” of her diaries partly “because of her passion for rereading past entries,”75 and editing them. The formal continuity of Five Year Diary, I would argue, is based on the same practice, where, like Woolf, Robertson “was just as determined to assert control over the medium of her diary as art.”76 In the few years that lead up to

Robertson first recording her life in a cinematic diary, she re-read and analysed old diaries: “I wonder about all my ways. I think I will … look through old journal + copy thoughts + think about them here + maybe I will do an analysis of my shoebox high school journal, index cards.”77

Once the cinematic portion of the project developed, revision also became a way for

Robertson to impose order and clarity on the material. In the cinematic diaries, this review and revision was found in the practice of editing. As I explained a few paragraphs back, the cinematic diary reels were initially screened in their unedited state. The decision to edit followed events that are captured in what is now Reel 26: First

Semester Grad School,78 when early reels of the diary were screened for and critiqued by

Robertson’s professors at MassArt, and which I discuss at length in chapter 3. This review board session marked a pivotal conceptual turning point for the project. It is at this point, following the example already set in her reviewed and revised written diaries, that the cinematic diary starts to become a way for Robertson to make sense of her own nonsensical behaviour to an outside audience. Editing the cinematic diary — on an Elmo editor she positioned on her kitchen table — provided Robertson the chance of analysis, of imposing form on the morass of her days.

75 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 22, 103. 76 Podnieks, 103. 77 The entry also contains a list Robertson is making of the best albums of the past decade, which includes Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (1975), Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book (1972), Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Derek and the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs (1970). 78 28 February to 20 May 1983.

24 It is at this point that editing and shaping the diary material also became a form of agency that allowed Robertson to continually write and rewrite her life. Here I am taking my cue from how revisionist diary scholars have positioned the diary as not simply reflecting identity or a life, but as a constitutive part of constructing it, a strand of theory heavily influenced by Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement.” In his piece, de Man argues that “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life …”79 Within the context of second-wave feminism, the practice of review and revision, as a way of making the self, also became an explicitly feminist task. In 1979, Adrienne Rich typified this process as follows, in a description which clarifies the larger stakes of Robertson’s project:

Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction — is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.80

As the project developed, Robertson found more and more ways to incorporate revision and review, which included her performances during screenings. Given the second- wave propensity for autobiographically-fuelled performance art,81 this conceptual decision is not a major surprise. The performative aspect of the work allowed Robertson to articulate her story in her own words, using her own voice, a practice emphasised by

79 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 39, 88–89. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 69. 80 Rich, On Lies, 35. 81 Roth, Amazing, 11.

25 both feminist performance pieces and films, from Liane Brandon’s Betty Tells Her Story

(1972) to Faith Wilding’s Waiting (1972), and Lisa Steele’s A Very Personal Story (1974).

Providing her voice to recount “as in home movies,”82 was another way to keep revising and rewriting the material and her life, which Robertson described as her process to

“transcend or censor or comment on the self-reflective,”83 a process already hinted at in the etymology of recounting, which includes “back to the original place; again, anew, once more,” and also: “undoing.”84 In this regard it is also worth considering the different uses of performance. On the one hand, to perform is to present: as Jones has argued, presenting one’s body to an audience “as an integral component (a material enactment) of the self, the body artist strategically unveils the dynamic through which the artistic body is occluded (to ensure its phallic privilege) in conventional art history and criticism.”85 But to perform is also to accomplish: to show to an audience that you have become “more beautiful and more sane,”86 or, as it happens, when you have not, when you have failed, when the weight is not lost, when the mania does not depart.

Robertson’s performances and the screening setup she envisioned for the different diaries are pivotal to the second conceptual idea that binds together the different diaries, that of a focus on the personal, autobiographical and domestic as female spaces.

In The Amazing Decade, Moira Roth draws on the work of Schneemann, specifically

Interior Scroll (1975), to articulate how feminist performance art “insist[s] on the validity

82 Screening notes, 1987 [Folder 3, #21]. 83 Screening proposal, 1987 [Folder 5, #18]. 84 ‘Recount | Origin and Meaning of Recount by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 8 October 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/recount. ‘Re- | Origin and Meaning of Prefix Re- by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 8 October 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/re-. 85 Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, 5. 86 Written diary entry, August 1992 [Folder 7, #50].

26 of ‘personal clutter.’”87 Robertson’s performances, where spectators would not only be confronted with Robertson’s personal clutter on-screen and in the written and audio tape diaries, but would be enveloped in personal effects taken from her actual living space, can be read as an extended litany of personal clutter: innumerable mental breakdowns, financial precarity, birthday parties and Christmas trees and seedlings and freshly fried doughnuts, unrequited but ever hopeful love, dead cats, a dead father and a dead child, unending exercise, binge-eating, getting a new job and then losing it, meals around the table and recording the gurgling of babies, hours spent watching

Doctor Who, winter and a garden killed by frost.

The straddling of both the diary and domestic realm as what have traditionally been positioned as female spaces is,88 to some extent, associated with this idea of personal clutter, which Podnieks, drawing from Naomi Schor’s Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, identifies as the aesthetic category of detail. As Podnieks writes, “detail … encompass[es] both the ornamental (associated with ‘effeminacy’) and the everyday

(associated with women’s domestic sphere),” two elements also found in the diary.89

The link between these two female spaces also extends further. In situations where women did not have access to other forms of aesthetic expression, they had one of two choices. The first was to make the home. The second was to “manipulate” the space of the home, as a “ready-made work facility”90 to engage in a practice suited to its rhythms, and which took no money away from the household. The most common practice in this regard was diary-writing. As Silvia Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller

87 Roth, Amazing, 16. 88 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 57. 89 As Podnieks notes, “In the nineteenth century, ‘journal’ became associated with men and public value, and ‘diary’ devalued as domestic and feminine.” Podnieks, 57. 90 Podnieks, 47, 56.

27 remind us: “Women succeeded in entering the artistic realm when they gained access to it via the adjoining ‘pre-aesthetic’ realms … Since … diaries have no clearly defined literary niche, it was all right for women to practice on them.”91 The screening setup

Robertson envisioned continues a process the project’s diaries place at the forefront, one of centring the home and the work of making and maintaining that home as an aesthetic object and aesthetic process. The coupling of home and studio is of course not a lacuna in the history of art, yet in Robertson’s case the home is not only the studio but also the aesthetic object itself, the focus of much of the project, in various different types of diaries. But it becomes especially significant in the cinematic portion of the work. What

I am suggesting here is that Robertson engages in a shift first articulated by Helen

Molesworth, where she discusses a series of images of ready-mades photographed in

Marcel Duchamp’s studio-home. As Molesworth writes,

we see ambiguous rooms filled with curious objects. Ambiguous because these rooms are not only Duchamp’s studio, they are also his home. If Duchamp’s work can be used to understand that art’s meaning is bound to its institutions, then these photographs broaden the understanding of what those institutions are … his inclusion of these photographs of the readymades installed in his home points to the home … as an institution of art on a par with the museum or gallery.”92 In Robertson’s Five Year Diary, the apparatus indeed becomes a household object, a

“kitchen camera clicking away in the corner,” a fridge filled with film;93 her home “an institution of art on a par with the … gallery.”94

91 Silvia Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller, ‘Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?’, New German Critique, no. 10 (Winter 1977): 132–33. 92 Helen Molesworth, ‘Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades’, Art Journal 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 52. 93 Throughout her diaries Robertson refers to the fact that her fridge is overflowing with film. 94 Molesworth, ‘Work Avoidance’, 52.

28 A Lacuna, a Depression Exhibition History of Five Year Diary and the Lack of Scholarship on Robertson’s Work

As has been noted, Five Year Diary is a project that contracts and expands over time. The cinematic portion grew, was aggressively trimmed back, grew again. The project as a whole would also expand: it enveloped all of the short films Robertson shot from 1976 onwards, which she screened in-between reels during screenings; and swallowed all the written diaries from before the film was made, as well as her audio diaries, her food diaries, an array of personal clutter from her home, and her live performances. But the project would also contract: reels were edited down, footage taken out, and as

Robertson moved into more and more precarious personal circumstances in the 1990s up until her death in 2012, more and more of the larger project fell away. Five Year Diary as I have described it was exhibited as a marathon screening only three times: twice in

Boston in 1985-1986 and 1987, and once in New York at the Museum of the Moving

Image in 1988. During that decade Robertson also showed single reels or sets of reels in group programmes at Super8 festivals, galleries and cinematheques (most notably the

San Francisco cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives in New York). But as she moved into the 1990s the project was exclusively presented this way, with just the film and some overlaid audio diaries and, in the case of solo shows, Robertson’s commentary in person. At some point in the 1990s Robertson started the project of recording her in-person commentary and layering that onto the reels in the form of a voice-over, so that the additional information relayed through her speaking in person could still form part of the project in cases where she could not travel to perform with the film. The voice-over project was never completed: Robertson could afford to have less than 10 of the 84 reels processed.

29 Tracing this exhibition history is in part an effort to understand the lacuna that exists on

Robertson’s work. An interview with Scott MacDonald, included in his A Critical

Cinema Volume 2, marks the first instance of engagement by the experimental film theory community and would be followed by, well, very little. Although Robertson was featured in some newspaper interviews in her hometown, and is the subject of a piece of writing by German filmmaker and writer Christine Noll Brinkmann,95 she would remain a stray mention or footnote for the few decades between the original

MacDonald piece, and one or two other pieces he wrote on her, and her death. This lack may be attributed to the fact that although the conceptual richness of Five Year Diary as a multi-modal practice seems ripe for extensive theoretical criticism, it is screened only thrice. By the time MacDonald interviewed Robertson in the early 1990s, the film was already the only part of the original project that was still screened, and their conversation never extends to the other materials.96 The reason for not continuing to exhibit the project in its complete form is one never explicitly voiced by Robertson. I would point to the difficulty and expense of launching the marathon screenings in venues outside of Boston, opportunities that Robertson would not have had the money to pursue, nor necessarily the energy to logistically navigate. Precarity, in both financial and mental health terms, haunts the entire project and the way in which it has been and not been taken up. Although Robertson spent much of her diaries speaking about her mental state, the severity of it, and its impact on her day to day living and the making of

95 I have found a reference to this work in Robertson’s personal archive but have not been able to track it down. 96 The notion of the larger multi-modal project also does not come up in MacDonald’s discussion of Robertson’s Melon Patches (1998), a short film that forms part of the larger diary, published in Petrolle and Wexman’s Women and Experimental Filmmaking and in his The Garden in the Machine (2001). Scott MacDonald, ‘Avant-Gardens’, in Women and Experimental Filmmaking, ed. Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2005), 208–38. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Petrolle and Wexman, ‘Marie Menken, Carolee Schneemann, Marjorie Keller, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Rose Lowder’.

30 the work, is not fully reflected in the film. Throughout the initial period of exhibition in the 1980s Robertson suffered multiple breakdowns that often required hospitalisation, and suffered through scores of different drug regimes, treatment and therapy programmes, and shifting diagnoses. This state of affairs continued and grew progressively worse over the course of the 1990s and 2000s, with Robertson hospitalised multiple times a year, often for weeks or months at a time.

The extent of her illness qualified Robertson for disability benefits,97 and she tried to supplement the meagre allowance with a long range of part-time jobs — including census enumerator, making deliveries for a flower shop and a library, data entry, stock taker at the Co-op — but she seemed to only ever have managed employment for a few months before a breakdown struck and she lost or quit her job.98 She subsisted on food stamps and loans from family members,99 and as she became older and more ill, was progressively faced with the possibility of losing a place to stay, and having to move

97 Robertson mentions her benefits in various reels of the diary, including: Reel 17: End of the Job (25 June to 2 July 1982), Reel 23: A Breakdown (and) After the Mental Hospital (1 September to 23 December 1982), Reel 41: California, Massachusetts & Wyoming (27 August to 25 December 1984), Reel 47: I Thought the Film Would End (21 October to 2 November 1986), Reel 79: Untitled and date unknown. She also mentions it in a variety of diary and personal documents, including: Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #216]. Written diary entry, 1983 [Folder 1, #240]. Anne Charlotte Robertson CV, 1990 [Folder 13, #2]. Letter addressed to Robertson, from an investigator at the Bureau of Special Investigations for the state of Massachusetts, about her welfare benefits, 1 April 1994 [Folder 14, #4]. 98 Anne Charlotte Robertson CV, 1990 [Folder 13, #1]. This turn of events is also outlined in a letter Robertson writes to a doctor who had been responsible for her during one of her hospitalisations, at St Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital in 1992. Letter addressed to Dr Baranovsky, 11 February 1992 [Folder 14, #2, 258, 3]. 99 IOU between Robertson and her mother, June, date unknown [Folder 14, #1]. Promissory note between Robertson and her parents, June and Richard Robertson, for the sum of $1684, over the course of six months in 1980-1981. Dated 19 March 1981 [Folder 14, #5]. Robertson also mentions financial support from her parents in her CV, 1990 [Folder 13, #2].

31 into welfare housing.100 Robertson’s precarious finances are not unique in this regard: as

Joanna Russ has indicated in How To Supress Women’s Writing, women’s often disadvantageous financial positions are a structural obstacle to their creative work.101

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Robertson could never afford to have copies made of the diary reels, and would show the originals wherever she travelled. “Every time I see a scratch, I wonder if it’s a new one,”102 she mentions to MacDonald in 1992. By the mid

2000s, the diary was relegated to boxes in Robertson’s bedroom closet.

To some extent then, it is not a major surprise that Robertson’s work has received a dearth of attention. As we have seen in the case of other films that are difficult to screen, like Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), which requires two simultaneous projectors, and Carolee Schneemann’s double-screen Kitch’s Last Meal, these works have historically not been widely seen, a factor scholars highlight to explain the relative lack of critical writing about them.103 The difficulty of exhibiting Five Year Diary in its full form, coupled with Robertson’s inability to perhaps champion the work in the way an able-bodied and less financially precarious filmmaker, with at least some institutional backing, might have done, plays a key role in thinking about this lacuna. For parts of the last decade the film was also simply not available to most scholars: there were few screenings of the work in the years preceding Robertson’s death from cancer in 2012.

Since then a very small part of the work, around nine reels, have been available to screen while the Harvard Film Archive, who now owns the project, restores and digitises the original reels.

100 This is outlined in an individual service plan drawn up for Robertson, by what seems to be her social worker, in March 1999. [Folder 9, #230]. 101 Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 6–7. 102 MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 33. 103 Kashmere, ‘Seen Missing’, 66.

32 The Confessional There are also other factors at play in thinking about this lacuna, specifically how

Robertson’s work, in its specificity as personal diary, made by a woman in a confessional register, in the 1980s and early 1990s, manages to affront both scholarly interest groups — experimental film theory and feminist film theory — to which it would ostensibly belong. On all accounts that matter, Robertson’s work is wrong. In her

Women’s Experimental Cinema, Robin Blaetz sets out the extent to which theorisation of what we consider the American avant-garde has happened only around the work of men. Despite the many women working in experimental film from the 1950s onwards,

Blaetz notes, there has been a scarcity of scholarship on them, a scarcity that further cements the idea that “the field of avant-garde cinema was institutionalized as a thoroughly masculine one called the American avant-garde.”104 Since the publication of

Blaetz’s book in 2007 many scholars have worked very hard to address this issue. Yet it is still the case that the only monographs devoted to a woman filmmaker in the

American avant-garde are two on Maya Deren: Sarah Keller’s Maya Deren: Incomplete

Control, published in 2014, and John David Rhodes’ Meshes of the Afternoon, published in

2017. In Robertson’s case, the form her work takes on — diaristic, autobiographic, confessional — compounds the problem. Because of their “use of domestic space and autobiography,”105 Blaetz notes, “women’s films in the avant-garde tradition are often

104 Robin Blaetz, ed., Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 105 This does not only count against Robertson: as Kashmere notes about the lack of scholarly interest in Kitch’s Last Meal, especially when compared to the interest in Schneemann’s other work, “The topics of these three disparate projects — the visceral fusion and representation of heterosexual intercourse, the atrocities of the Vietnam War and the visualization in North American media, and the artist’s corporeal and psychic reinterpretation of gestural painting while suspended from a harness, naked, for many hours — helps to explain their recognition relative to KLM. KLM likely appears quaint and unsexy by comparison, given its emphasis on daily routine, its rural backdrop, and its use of the folksy medium of ‘home movies.’” Blaetz, 11. Kashmere, ‘Seen Missing’, 67–68.

33 “dismiss[ed] … as simple diary.”106 This does not betray much hope for the form. The overt confessional nature of the work also plays a role here: confessions are amorphous, that which is not ordered by “the logic of aesthetic form,”107 or, to return to a familiar refrain, it is “diaristic indulgence/persistence of feelings/primitive technique.”108

These factors — the diaristic, the autobiographical, the confessional — also contribute to the lack of scholarship devoted to Robertson’s work from the second disciplinary faction: feminist experimental film. She was, it seems, just too late for how the discipline was moving its focus. In Women of Vision, Alexandra Juhasz explains how,

Although the field of feminist media scholarship initially developed in response to the women's movement's interest in images, the field shifted focus within only a few years. Influenced by developments in film studies, the newly-translated-to-English theories of psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics, and the legacy of the new Left's interest in Marxism, feminist scholars began to ask questions about patriarchy with a different vocabulary; they were less interested in the power of images of women than they were in the very notion of woman 'as image.'109 Juhasz notes how this shift resulted in the work of many experimental women filmmakers, including Barbara Hammer, Schneemann, Michelle Citron and Vanalyne

Green, being ignored by scholars, a state of affairs which has led to “the direct consequence of unarchived, unrented, now-deteriorated films and videos, the winning of fewer grants and shows … and a sense of being betrayed by the very community that

106 Blaetz, Women’s Experimental, 8. 107 Felski, Beyond, 98. 108 Carolee Schneemann, ‘Interior Scroll, 1975’, Carolee Schneemann, accessed 1 August 2019, http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/interiorscroll.html. 109 Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 23.

34 should have been the most appreciative and responsive.”110 This study is a step in redressing that imbalance.

Feminist Theory as World-making Notes on Methodology

My methodological approach in this study has taken two forms. Since so little has been published on Robertson, I have been engaged in an ongoing practice of sifting through archival material in what today exists as the Anne Charlotte Robertson Collection at the

Harvard Film Archive. Piecing together Robertson’s many different and intersecting histories — of her life and career, her mental illness, of her work on Five Year Diary — has been a necessary labour in understanding the text itself. Some of this information has been drawn from Robertson’s paper diaries, and from materials related to the exhibition history of Five Year Diary, but it has also been gathered from personal documents that do not form part of the project. Bank statements, personal letters that are not in diary format, credit scores, hospital discharge sheets and prescriptions, letters of reference and IOUs are some of the many types of personal ephemera that sketch the particulars of a life beyond what we are able to glean from the diary materials. Given the very large size of the collection of documents this is an ongoing practice, in which I am able to gradually refine the particularities outlined in this version of the research. I see my work in this regard as part of the larger tradition of what E Anne Kaplan has termed “archival feminist film research”111 that is explicitly concerned with bringing women’s work that has been overlooked by scholars into the canon of critical thought.

An important part of that project for me has been not just doing the historical work of outlining Robertson’s life and career as a woman experimental filmmaker, but of

110 Juhasz, 79. 111 E Ann Kaplan, ed., Feminism and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 21.

35 critically engaging with her work so that, paraphrasing Johnston, I can “create a structure in which” her work “can be examined in retrospect.”112

The question of structure or form comes up again and again in this introduction to the study, and is indeed a through line to the entire dissertation. It is to some extent born out of my frustration with how often women’s creative work is derided as formless, a claim that I have felt, from the beginning of working with Five Year Diary, does not square with this material. In giving time and labour and resources to understanding the form that is so hard-won in Robertson’s case, through close-reading and theorising the different concepts Robertson’s works with, I have organised my thought around a number of factors. The first lies on a practical level: the magnitude of the work means that my method of reading and analysis rests to some extent on the imagery and formal choices that Robertson repetitively invokes: in a work this large repetition is a means of figuring out where to focus first. This approach is strengthened by the form of the diary, in itself predicated on a steady measure of repetition, recording something in the same way each day, a form which also mirrors what is being recorded, the events of the everyday, the repetitive rhythm of daily life.

The second organising factor is an explicit foregrounding of the multi-modal nature of the work, and of paying attention to the specificity of the different types of diaries

Robertson works in, and the different formal functions they fulfil. There is no thinking

Five Year Diary without recognising this distinction. If, as Stanley Cavell points out in

“What Photography Calls Thinking,” that “this process of mutual revelation, between a

112 Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema’, in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140.

36 work and the work’s medium, being hermeneutic, is circular, global,”113 then the interplay between different mediums in the same work has informed my conceptual plotting of what I think Robertson is trying to do. So has the centrality of the diary as object, but also as idea or concept, and its history and conventions, not the least of which is its association as “an unprecedented space for girls and women.”114 I see this study as part of a very long lineage of feminist work that has been concerned with paying attention, and taking seriously, “an area of visual expression,” as Broude and

Garrard note, “that had long been gendered as feminine by male Euroculture and hence devalued.”115 That’s the case for the diary, but also for other important elements of

Robertson’s practice, particularly her focus on the world of the domestic, and how she frames both as aesthetic forms in themselves.

Paying attention to the specificity of Robertson’s form means I spend a lot of time describing the work. This is in part a practical consideration, given the relative lack of familiarity people have with her work. But it is also a methodological decision: “I am trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work,”116 Sara Ahmed notes, and also: I am trying to show how descriptive work is historical work, too. In women’s history documentation of the personal is a political act, and it is no less political in

Robertson’s hands, in a project that finds its very being in the act of documentation. To describe that work is also the work of the theorist. “Documentation is a feminist project,”117 Ahmed notes, where to document can be a way to describe the world otherwise, when we realise, as Rich notes, that “feminism means finally that we

113 Stanley Cavell, Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 118. 114 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 45. 115 Broude and Garrard, Power Of, 25. 116 Ahmed, Living, 13. 117 Ahmed, 26.

37 renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognize that the world that they have described is not the whole world.”118 If I position documentation as a feminist project for

Robertson, I do so with the idea that my own documentation falls in the same category, one where “feminist theory is [indeed] world-making.”119

Describing Robertson’s work, and the work that goes into making the work, is also an attempt at acknowledging the labour it requires from those that seriously engage with it: the work that is my work. Robertson’s project can be completely overwhelming: on many levels it is simply too much. There are too many diaries, the film is 40 hours long, it contains too many shifting parts to keep in mind, hospital visits to track, delusional periods to take heed of. A different woman might, as Susan Brownmiller outlines, choose differently: “she might have chosen to scratch off a very small piece, a modest, negligible portion, to claim as her own: she would deal in the miniature, the cameo, the sketch.”120 But not Robertson, with a project that she hoped would “extend over all time.” And it is not just the film, but Robertson herself who can appear too much for a single viewer to labour with: the breakdowns, the utter despair, the precarity. But understanding Five Year Diary means understanding how, in both form and affect, being too much is the only thing that will be enough: if one diary is not sufficient to

“pound … her thoughts into hard-edged shape,”121 and for that shape to be acknowledged as a shape, maybe fifty years-worth of diaries, in four different mediums, are. Or as Ahmed notes, in a line that seems to have been written for Robertson: “Some bodies have to

118 Rich, On Lies, 207. 119 Ahmed, Living, 14. 120 Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (Linden Press, 1984), 126. 121 Brownmiller, 126.

38 push harder than other bodies just to proceed; this argument might be true for arguments as well as bodies.”122

My documentation-description and analysis of Five Year Diary thus assumes a porous barrier between Robertson’s life and work. This assumption could be read as another vestige of second-wave feminism, where the life of the everyday is a crucial component to the works produced, where the two cannot be separated. This assumption has also guided my choice of secondary sources, relying most heavily on two figures, Stanley

Cavell and Sara Ahmed, whose writing I consider “animated by the everyday,” whose texts reflect the idea that “the personal is theoretical.”123 In the case of Cavell, I have drawn from his ontological outline of the medium of film and its engagement with the world of the ordinary and in the creation of worlds. In the case of Ahmed, I have employed her ways of thinking about gendered bodies and their labour to elucidate how Robertson employs film, as a world-making medium, to explore the different types of labour her body engages in. In addition to bodies of work located in film theory and philosophy, and in writing on women and mental illness, I lean most heavily on a canon of texts that belong to the movement of second-wave feminism. This is to some extent also an effort to draw Robertson into the canon of second-wave art, to place her work in conversation with the work of others working before her, relying on the practice of conversation so pertinent to second-wave movements, as Rich states: “One of the most powerful social and political catalysts … has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets …”124

122 Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 20. 123 Ahmed, 20. 124 Rich, On Lies, 259.

39 Yet working alongside the second-wave sentiments that so clearly inform much of

Robertson’s work, like the project to recast traditional forms of women’s work into the realm of the aesthetic, has also meant registering the ways in which her work clearly diverges from second-wave thinking. Robertson is, for all intents and purposes, a different type of feminist, one interested not in abolishing the domestic environment or marriage or the nuclear family, but in remaking it in an almost utopian manner. Had

Robertson been showing her film ten years earlier, her obsession with getting married, and her at some points vehement-stance as pro-lifer,125 would have drawn the ire with which second-wavers reacted to Carolee Schneemann’s joyful heterosexual fucking in

Plumb Line,126 or the distancing Valerie Solanas experienced in the wake of her violent

Scum Manifesto. Robertson perhaps belongs to the realm of problematic feminists that form part of an alternative feminist history that is not as clear-cut and politically pure as the standard narratives of second-wave thinking. Although the particulars of

Robertson’s position differs from these other examples, they, and others, particularly the figure of Lee Lozano, have helped me think about the ways Robertson has succeeded, and failed, within such a feminist context.127

125 Robertson oscillated on this issue: at times pro-life, at times pro-choice, her position was also influenced by her religious beliefs over the years, including her conversion to Catholicism somewhere in the 1990s. 126 As Schneemann relates in an interview with Alexandra Juhasz: “… in the 70s, when I show Plumb Line at a festival mostly for woman-identified women, the lesbian women in the audience see the man’s image and they give it about five seconds. Then they began howling, ‘We don’t need him!’ It was the only time I had to leave a showing of mine – not because of the police or the men going crazy – but because of women going nuts. I had to crawl out of the showing on my hands and knees. I crawled down the aisle, trembling, and out into the hall, into the elevator, and left.” Juhasz, Women of Vision, 58. 127 Although not directly discussed within this study, I have, in this regard, found a number of works important in formulating my position on Robertson. These include works on Lee Lozano by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jo Applin, on Barbara Rubin by Ara Osterweil, and on Valerie Solanas by Avital Ronnell. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (London: Afterall Books, 2014). Jo Applin, Lee Lozano: Not Working (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). Osterweil, Flesh Cinema.

40 On Being Sick Finding a way to write about Robertson’s illness has been an enduring concern for this work. I have struggled with how to indicate that it permeates so much of Robertson’s life and of Five Year Diary, while not reducing either life or work to the illness. Similarly,

I have thought much about how to position gender as an important factor in how

Robertson represents her illness in the project whilst not falling prey to the essentialism of “Western thought … [that] has long conflated femaleness and disability.”128 As

Rosemarie Garland-Thompson continues to explain, this is always a gendered question:

“the female body has been medicalized in modernity,” a situation in which “both women and the disabled have been imagined as medically abnormal — as the quintessential sick ones. Sickness is gendered feminine.”129 This gendering of sickness has been especially true in the case of mental illness. As she describes Robert-Fleury’s painting of Philippe Pinel freeing the asylum inmates, Elaine Showalter articulates this coupling of gender and illness as the “dual images of female insanity — madness as one of the wrongs of woman; madness as the essential feminine nature unveiling itself before scientific male rationality.”130 Yet it is not only a question about gender. While much of this study draws from second-wave literature, in this case it is an archive that has not sat easily with me. In particular, I have struggled to sign onto the particular enmeshing of patriarchy and women’s mental illness that certain early texts, like Phyllis

Chesler’s Women and Madness and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Madwoman in the

Attic, espouse. Patriarchy drives women mad, one part of this narrative argues: women are not really sick but are merely rebelling against patriarchal strictures.131 On the one

Avital Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas’, in SCUM Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004), 1–34. 128 Rosemary Garland-Thompson, ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’, in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 18. 129 Garland-Thompson, 22. 130 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 3. 131 As Phyllis Chesler argues about, among others, Sylvia Plath and Zelda Fitzgerald.

41 hand, I concede that there are indeed ways in which patriarchy can make us feel insane, what Avital Ronell has called “the steady psychoticization of women,”132 or as Barbara

Susan notes in “About My Consciousness Raising,” “I got into the women’s movement and began to see that other women were also called crazy.”133 Yet there is a distinct difference between what certain groups of women experience in their capacity as women,134 and what the mentally ill experience as part of a very particular lifeworld.135

Here it is necessary to go further, to insist on the specificity that gets lost in these discussions, where madness becomes a catch-all term for each and every type of mental illness, a move that collapses the very real differences between them.136 I have thus tried to attend to the specific form Robertson’s diagnosis took on, and to the particularities of her delusional thought.

An insistence on specificity is also an insistence on acknowledging the fact that there is indeed actual, medically-diagnosed illness involved.137 To discount the existence of real

132 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback’, 17. 133 Barbara Susan, ‘About My Consciousness Raising’, in Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Leslie B Tanner (New York: New American Library, 1971), 241. 134 As BIPOC voices during the second-wave made clear, and which has resounded during contemporary intersectional feminism, it is impossible to see all women as part of a universal category which does not consider the differences in lived reality based on ethnicity, race and class. 135 It also bears noting that an acknowledgment of the reality of a particular illness involves conceding that the illness is not pathologically linked to the sufferer’s gender: it is not a female malady. 136 This tendency might have its roots in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, which commentators have critiqued for the fact that, “in proposing to reconstruct an ‘experience’ of madness, Histoire de la folie sometimes confuses more than clarifies, suggesting some kind of structural coherence underpinning the apparent diversity of the forms in which madness is thought and treated within a certain field of space and time.” Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009). Nikolas Rose, ‘Of Madness Itself: Histoire de La Folie and the Object of Psychiatric History’, in Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s Histoire de La Folie, ed. Arthur Still and Irving Velody (London: Routledge, 1992), 144. 137 Chesler: “Most women who are psychiatrically hospitalized are not ‘mad.’” Or, perhaps especially salient in the case of Robertson, this note that Chesler earmarks as “a romantic thought of my own”:

42 illness is itself a form of violence. “We have fought hard for every inch of clinical corroboration and for the symptomal housing projects that shelter our anguish,”138 but also: to not acknowledge the illness results in eliding the immense suffering Robertson endured throughout her life. It is the evidence of this suffering that also forces me to reject the second central narrative that runs throughout second-wave texts on women and madness. This narrative sees madness as what grants women the possibility of feminist revolt, where women “escape … the half-life of …[their female role] by ‘going crazy.’”139 There is nothing “divine, prophetic, or useful”140 about Robertson’s illness, least of all when it comes to feminist revolt. Here I cast my lot with Elizabeth J

Donaldson who points out, in “Revisiting the Corpus of the Madwoman,” that

“However it is romanticized, madness itself offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion.”141

“Perhaps the angry and weeping women in mental asylums are Amazons returned to earth these many centuries later, each conducting a private and half-remembered search for her Motherland — a search we call madness. Or perhaps they are failed Goddess-Mothers, Demeters, eternally and miserably unable to find their daughters or their powers …” Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), 164, 4. 138 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback’, 18. 139 Chesler, Women, 15. 140 Chesler, 34. 141 Elizabeth J Donaldson, ‘Revisiting the Corpus of the Madwoman: Further Notes toward a Feminist Disability Studies Theory of Mental Illness’, in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 93. This romanticising bears a remarkable similarity to some of the rhetoric of, respectively, anti-psychiatry and Michel Foucault’s History of Madness. Foucault’s argument that that our conception of mental illness coincides with a particular fashioning of the subject, where “Mental illness, which medicine took as an object, was slowly constituted as a mythical unity between a legally irresponsible subject and a man who troubled the social order, all under the influence of the political and moral thought of the eighteenth century.” This move, Foucault argues, stripped the mad of the particular power they had before the Age of Reason commenced: which held that “while men of reason and wisdom see only fragmentary figures that are all the more frightening for their incompleteness, the madman sees a whole, unbroken sphere.” Scholars have pointed out how Foucault’s positioning of madness was embraced by the adherents of antipsychiatry. Geoffrey Pearson notes that “David Cooper’s ecstatic foreword to [the English edition of] the book — ‘Madness has in our age become a sort of lost Truth’ — guaranteed a kind of initial readership with a certain cast of mind.” Showalter has in turn shown how the ideas of RD Laing, the main proponent of antipsychiatry, were embraced by women for whom “antipsychiatry seemed to offer

43 Yet: throughout this study I insist that women will make do with what they have. And sometimes, all you have is an ill body or an ill mind. I have thus chosen to treat

Robertson’s text, in particular the parts that seem to be, or that she admitted to have been produced during periods of psychotic breakdown or delusional throes, not as

“merely or solely demented.”142 Diary records of women’s mental illness are of the few instances of documentation that exist for centuries of treatment or internment, diaries which are, Roy Porter explains in A Social History of Madness, “of quite extraordinary length and detail.”143 Following Porter’s lead I have modelled my analysis of the

“psychotic” elements of Robertson’s work as “concerned with how the mad tried to explain their own behaviour to themselves and others in the language available to them,”144 in the case of Robertson, specifically how she uses the cinematic diary to impose form on the excesses of her illness. This involves listening to what Robertson is trying to say, a courtesy, it seems, often not offered to her by her doctors. From the history of female pathology we know she is not the only one.145

important new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between madness and femininity … Madness itself became intelligible as a strategy, a form of communication in response to the contradictory messages and demands about femininity women faced in patriarchal society.” Foucault, History, 128, 19. Geoffrey Pearson, ‘Misunderstanding Foucault’, in Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s Histoire de La Folie, ed. Arthur Still and Irving Velody (London: Routledge, 1992), 112. Showalter, Female Malady, 222. 142 Ronell, ‘Deviant Payback’, 17. 143 Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 30. 144 Porter, 29. 145 I write about this in more detail in chapter 3. Jean-Martin Charcot’s behavior seems to be representative in this regard: “But while Charcot looked carefully at hysterical women, he paid very little attention to what they were saying.” Porter notes that this continued well into the nineteenth century, where “doctors were distrustful of engaging with what the mad actually said … Mad people’s autobiographies habitually complain that their attempts to communicate are stifled, unheeded or willfully misinterpreted.” Showalter, Female Malady, 154. Porter, A Social History, 33.

44 Finally: I have also been interested in trying to explain what I see as Robertson’s attempt at describing world(s) different from those experienced by most of us, what

Ahmed has called “a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it.”146 Balancing the lived reality of bipolar disorder and schizoaffective overlay with the general scholarship on illness means that I thus employ both terms in this study: when I refer to

Robertson’s illness in particular I use the term mental illness, and resort to madness when discussing the theoretical work on the subject. What the reader of this study will thus also find is a careful treading of the entanglement of women, mental illness and the medical establishment. The history of medicine offers a stark array of doctors behaving badly, some of which I recount in my third chapter. I have read these histories, which

Vicki Pollard summarises as “Doctors are always enemies of women,”147 and Mary Daly, more loquaciously, as “the Ice Age of Gynocidal Gynecology.”148 Yet I am uncomfortable with this wholesale rejection of medicine. Although I try to track the ways in which the medical establishment failed Robertson, it is also impossible to recount her life without recognising that without the assistance of doctors, therapy and medication, her life would have been severely less liveable than it already happened to be.

146 Ahmed, Living, 13. 147 Vicki Pollard, ‘Producing Society’s Babies*’, in Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Leslie B Tanner (New York: New American Library, 1971), 194. 148 Daly describes this “Ice Age” as follows: “The various types of psychotherapists are the theologians of gynecology. These theologians and the specialized ‘ministering’ physicians whom they legitimate represent the two complementary functions of the holy ghost. Both function to keep women supine, objectified, and degraded – a condition ritually symbolized by the gynecologist’s stirrups and the psychiatrist’s couch. By their combined efforts, these specialists keep many women in the state of perpetual patients whose bodies and minds are constantly invaded by foreign objects – knives, needles, speculums, carcinogenic hormone injections and pills, sickening self-images, festering fixations, debilitating dogmas.” Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology, the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 230.

45 A Note on What’s Missing The scope of Robertson’s massive body of work has meant that I have had to be selective in what I try to cover within this study, and it thus also means that there are some major gaps in the pages that follow. With the exception of one or two cases, I do not analyse the many short films that Robertson made between 1976 and the early

1990s, which she also saw as forming part of Five Year Diary, and which were screened in-between reels. These shorts, of which the most famous and most-screened examples are Magazine Mouth (1983), Apologies (1983-1990) and Melon Seeds (1990), are an important part of the larger project and work with many of the core elements that I discuss in relation to the diary reels, including that of repetition, labour, failure, the confessional, and thematically touches on concerns that mark the diary reels as well:

Robertson’s struggles with weight loss and mental illness, her political activism, and her relationships with her family. These films deserve more attention than I could devote to them in this iteration of the project.

Although I have tried to focus my attention in close-reading to representative samples of the 40-hour long film in a way that approximates some form of equal distribution, a lot of the material that gets covered in depth is skewed toward the nine reels that were available in digital form up until the last months of writing this manuscript. Although my analysis of Five Year Diary includes a fair amount of reference to the non-cinematic diaries that form part of the project, particularly the written diaries and food diaries, I did not have the space to extend this focus in an equal measure to the collection of audio diaries. Although they are discussed at length in certain chapters, in the context of their use as additional audio tracks for the cinematic diaries, the sheer scope of this collection, of what I judge to be around 100 hours of recorded material, could not be incorporated in a sufficient manner.

46 Robertson’s work is not only excessive in its scope, but also in its thematic and conceptual reach, and there are many vital aspects of it I have not been able to address.

Much of this dissertation takes up the different forms of gendered labour Robertson engages in across the different diaries, but there are forms of labour that had to be left on the cutting floor. Most prominent of these is the labour lists that proliferate throughout Robertson’s written, audio and cinematic diaries, of ways she needs to improve different aspects of her life, and which are largely grounded in particular gendered expectations and an understanding of femininity as that which, as Sianne

Ngai argues, “no woman (or man) can ever stop working at.”149 Another element that I mention in brief but which deserves more fleshing out is the role that conversations between women, which Robertson records and adds as audio tracks to certain parts of reels, play in the film. I read this strategy as inspired by or in response to the larger tradition of second-wave consciousness-raising, and “its assumption that women can and should identify with one another and with each other’s stories.”150

Another remnant of second-wave thought that figures prominently in Robertson’s work, and which has gotten short thrift in this study, is how her understanding of herself as the White Goddess is in conversation with the larger tradition of great goddess engagement seen in the work of, among others, Schneemann, Ana Mendieta,

Judy Chicago, and Mary Beth Edelson. Furthermore, the importance that mysticism plays in Five Year Diary can be read as part of a much larger (and older) part of women’s history. Far exceeding the parameters of the second-wave, the medieval history of mystic women is one where, as Amy Hollywood argues in Sensible Ecstasy, “women’s

149 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 221. 150 Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12.

47 religious authority depended on extraordinary visionary, auditory, or somatic experiences of the divine presence.151 Robertson strongly identified with this tradition, seeing herself as a reincarnation of Jeanne D’Arc, and many of this tradition’s elements are prominent in Five Year Diary: the body of the mystic and also her autobiography, hysteria, desire, and the mystic’s relationship to food. A final element related to

Robertson’s mystic identity that I neglect in this study is her consistent and extensive efforts at political letter writing. Over the course of twenty years, Robertson often wrote to some of the most influential figures in the world, including the presidents of the

United States, and the pope, about issues related to world peace, violence against women and children, abortion, world hunger, and animal cruelty. These letters were exhibited along with the diaries, and were often signed by Robertson using the moniker of Fire and Light, the mystical names of her and Baker.

These lacunas notwithstanding, the largest gap in the current study relates to the role that gardening, and Robertson’s desire for children, a desire never fulfilled, play in the larger work. Along with the domestic labour I discuss at length in chapter 1, gardening is one of the prime ways Robertson goes about the project of world-making, of rendering the everyday into an aesthetic object and experience. Robertson kept extensive gardens throughout her life, and footage of her gardens, and the various processes involved in keeping these gardens, are a through line across the forty hours.

Robertson’s engagement with the vegetal carries within it a form of utopian potential, of a return to earth as part of making the world anew. But her gardens also become the consolation in the absence of a family of her own, as she mentions in Reel 81, Mourning

151 Amy M Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 12.

48 Emily: “I didn’t have any children, but I had a 25-year old avocado tree.” It is these depressions that I hope to address in the next iteration of this project.

On Archival References As of October 2019, the Anne Charlotte Robertson collection of documents at the

Harvard Film Archive is not yet catalogued. All of my research took place in the uncatalogued collection, parts of which I was able to photograph for my own, smaller archive of Robertson’s diary and personal materials. As the uncatalogued collection at the HFA does not include indications related to fonds, folder or document numbers, and the order in which documents are currently kept in boxes will soon change once the cataloguing process begins, there are no archival references in this text that map to official document designations at the HFA. In consultation with the HFA I have decided to instead describe the documents I am drawing from, and indicate where the document can be found in my own Robertson archive, to make for easy recall in the event of questions or further elaboration.

Overview of Chapters

My consideration of Five Year Diary is structured around the three ways Robertson conceived of the work: as weight loss diary, as trousseau, and as world movie. Chapter

1 thus takes as its focus the diary’s first iteration as a document that tracks Robertson’s weight loss, a form of gendered labour that she presents in a register of repetitious drudgery that inevitably ends up in failure. Close readings of Robertson’s engagement with diet and exercise, in the form of constant exercising filmed in accelerated motion, binge-eating on camera, the keeping of food diaries and constant other references to weight are considered within the larger genealogy of women presenting their bodies for measurement in second-wave art. This form of gendered labour is in stark contrast to

49 another important form found in Five Year Diary, that of the work located in the domestic realm. Presented in a decidedly different register of repetition, one rooted in joy, Robertson’s time-lapse and stop motion sequences record her efforts at cooking and cleaning, relying on time-lapse’s transformative quality to use domestic labour as a form of world-making. At odds with the way the domestic realm is presented by the women’s movement as what keeps women captive in a never-ending cycle of repetitive, meaningless work, this chapter offers close-readings of different scenes of domestic labour that Robertson records and presents not just as a means to an end, but as an aesthetic object in itself.

Labour remains important for the second way Robertson frames Five Year Diary, as cinematic “trousseau” intended for her “one true love,” when they finally meet. The conceptual frame of cinematic trousseau forms the focus of chapter 2, in which I look at the labour Robertson engages in as she makes the “hope chest” that is the diary film, while she waits for her future husband. Drawing from Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s

Time,”152 the chapter discusses how Robertson recasts waiting, traditionally positioned as a passive durational wasteland that is the province of the woman, a form of female time, as an active form of work, a means of agency. Robertson’s waiting takes the form of actively, doggedly, invoking the man she desires through a variety of means embedded in the trousseau. I describe and analyse these different means of invocation: the audio letters she sends to Tom Baker and uses as additional audio tracks to the film; the lists of desired qualities in the man she wishes to meet that proliferate in the written diaries; her rewritten version of Song of Songs, removing “the war and the sexism,” and scripted as the text for her wedding ceremony; and the clues to the man’s identity she records in the cinematic portion of the work, in part to articulate the utopian recasting

152 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 13–35.

50 of heterosexual marriage and children that Robertson envisions. In particular I am interested in the formal means Robertson employs to contract the distance between her and this “one true love,” in the film diary most clearly seen in her extensive and specific use of the zoom. The zoom is an important part of the cinematic language Robertson develops for a film that will be, she hopes, in conversation with the diary film Tom

Baker is making for her, and which will slot into hers. The idea of cinema as “the mode of a relationship’s practice”153 thus relates Robertson back to a larger history of diaristic filmmaking in which Brakhage and Schneemann, among others, loom large.

Chapter 3 takes up the final way Robertson conceives of the project, as that of the

“world movie that extends over all time,” an understanding that stemmed from the periods of psychotic breakdown Robertson experienced throughout her life. This chapter lays out the specificity of Robertson’s history of illness, and how film both, at different instances of the project, facilitates her obsessive states of delusion and becomes a tool for pushing back against the nonsensical. Here I am interested in how Robertson employs particular formal devices to make sense of her illness to herself, but also, in an expanded manner, to make sense of her illness to others. In particular I focus on how

Robertson utilises the functions of recording and review that her diaries offer, most often rooted in a specific utilisation of sound and editing; on her use of the close-up in a register of confessional sequences that proliferate throughout the latter part of the film; and how she incorporates the failure of her apparatus into a larger conversation about the failure of her body. Throughout this analysis I position Robertson’s interventions against the backdrop of the larger history of women’s psychiatric profiling and its capture on camera.

153 James, Allegories of Cinema, 37.

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Chapter 1 The World-Making of Women’s Work

Over the course of the 17 years Anne Charlotte Robertson actively worked on Five

Year Diary, there were three overarching ways in which she thought about the ever- expanding set of diaries. The first was as a document of her life that she would screen for her “one true love” when they finally met, as a testament of what her life before him had encompassed, a set of images and diary entries that constituted, she noted, a

“trousseau.” Heavily influenced by her interest in mysticism and the idea that she was an “akashic recorder,”1 Robertson also thought about Five Year Diary as what she termed “the World Movie, the diary that extended over all time,” her project one that compressed all of the world and all its history within the different diaries that constituted it. But both of these conceptual frameworks were preceded by the original idea behind Five Year Diary: Robertson’s desire to lose weight, and document it on camera. Robertson’s cinematic diary was not the first she kept that focused on this issue. The filmmaker was concerned about her weight from a very early age, with entries from her first childhood diary, exhibited along with the film, already urging the eleven-year-old to “Try and stick on your diet.”2 These admonishments continued throughout the diaries kept between 1960 and 1981, when Robertson borrowed a camera and began to shoot her diary, which she hoped would show her both losing weight and being less depressed. As she mentions in a diary entry from

1 Alice A Bailey, The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: A Paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1927), 275–76. An akashic recorder is someone who records, and has access to, the akashic records, a term that first originated at the turn of the century in Anglo-American esoteric thought. Occultist Alice Bailey refers to it as “like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of the planet.” For more information on the nature of the akashic record and the role it plays in Robertson’s conception of Five Year Diary, see chapter 3. 2 Written diary entry, 1960-1961 [Folder 1, #43].

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1990, “The movie was supposed to show I got better … I don’t want to be looked at as an ugly woman, I wanted to become more beautiful and more sane.”3 On days no camera could be borrowed she documented the changes in her body through photographs, and a meticulous record of everything she ate. But Robertson’s project failed. Instead of losing weight she gained it, instead of getting better she was again hospitalised, her careful documenting derailed by not having access to either camera during the three months away.

As the project started failing Robertson kept changing the title, pivoting her original idea in different directions. The film started out as Fat, and was later titled Loose

Wait.4 Then Robertson changed her idea again, retitling the film Fat:Her, in what she envisioned as a “vegetarian cookbook film,” an idea that dropped off as she continuously forgot to write down the recipes she cooked on-screen. Then the idea changed again. In a 1981 diary entry she wrote, “I cannot get loan to cover school expenses. I shake + shiver + sleep. I lose hope. I get fatter. I miss classes. BUT I FILM

EVERYDAY.”5 In diary entries around this time Robertson noted that she spent less time shooting food and more time shooting the rest of the events of her life, and eventually settled on the final title of the project: Five Year Diary.

This early history of the project is significant for a number of reasons. Although the focus of the weight loss diary is ostensibly more restricted than the form it would take on in later reels (once the concept had evolved into a more general diary),

Robertson’s initial weight loss record already contained many of the themes or

3 Written diary entry, 1990 [Folder 1, #50]. 4 Written diary entry, April/May 1983 [Folder 1, #2]. 5 Written diary entry, 1981 [Folder 1, #72].

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elements that would become markers of her Five Year Diary. From the evolving titles alone (Fat, Loose Wait, Fat:Her) these themes become clear: there is Robertson’s family, who are featured throughout the rest of the diary in a relatively major way; the notion of temporality and the specific practice of waiting, with which the diary is intimately concerned; and an abiding concern with gender. More specifically, this early history delineates Five Year Diary’s enduring interest in gendered labour, and how Robertson strategically employs the failure of her own gendered labour in this project. If Robertson’s initial weight loss diary was a means to “understand the analogies my body of work has to my body,”6 this chapter looks at the ways in which

Five Year Diary records both the labour the female body itself seems to constantly require, and the domestic labour women are expected to perform. Important here is the fact that Robertson presents these two types of gendered labour in distinctly different registers. Both registers are rooted in repetition, but repetition that has radically different manifestations and ends. The repetitive labour of transforming her body is monotonous, drudgerous, almost painful, and accords well with how this type of labour is traditionally presented to us in the discourse of second-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism similarly frames domestic labour in this light, but here Robertson’s take is in sharp relief, and positions domestic labour as a type of repetition that is joyous, almost sublime.

To chart these two different registers, I first consider Five Year Diary as a weight loss document, and analyse the various parts that it comprises, including the food diaries

Robertson kept throughout her life. In particular I am interested in how the labour of transforming her body is always presented as something that fails, and what the function of the diary as a record of that failure might be. I then shift to Robertson’s

6 Written diary entry, 1981 [Folder 1, #72].

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conception of domestic labour. Here I present Five Year Diary’s rendition of cooking and cleaning in relief to how gendered labour gets taken up in two autobiographical works of the avant-garde where men are behind a camera fixated on their wives working on-screen, Stan Brakhage’s Star Garden (1974) and Ed Pincus’s Diaries, 1971-

1976 (1981). This allows for a consideration of how Robertson’s capture of the everyday of domestic life makes visible the invisible labour she engages in, a visibility I think of as a means of feminist world-making. It is thus to invisible labour that we now turn.

Chocolate Won The Gendered Labour of the Body

My invocation of weight loss and domestic work as gendered forms of labour is rooted in the fact that they are acts of labour traditionally associated with women, and tend to be theorised as “invisible labour” within feminist thought. Invisible labour is that which is seen as the “natural” labour of women, that which is often not seen as work.7 It does not earn a wage, and takes place in the spheres of home and personal life, which, as Silvia Federici argues in Revolution at Point Zero: Housework,

Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, makes it impossible to see where “work begins and ends.”8 In the very first reel of Five Year Diary, titled The Beginning Thanksgiving,9

Robertson already registers the expansive nature of gendered labour in her choice of attire, a bright yellow unitard. The outfit, usually just worn for the specific practice of aerobic exercise (itself rooted in repetition), is what Robertson wears as she performs every task around the apartment. Sporting the unitard while she exercises, or cooks,

7 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 16. 8 Federici, 20. 9 3 November to 13 December 1981.

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or watches television, or works on the diary, the outfit extends our understanding of what constitutes gendered labour, and repositions it as a continuous, repetitive means of being-in-the-world.

The invocation of repetition is key here, and central to how Robertson positions invisible labour in the diary. This position, of gendered labour as fundamentally repetitive, is evidenced by the reel’s voice-over. A recording of Robertson repeatedly reads the definition of the word exercise from an old dictionary: “Act of exercising.

Putting into action, use or practice … Effort, exercise, exertion, application, practice, custom, usage, habit, manner,” where the terms are all founded on, and function in, repetition. Of course, Robertson’s choice of the diary is not happenstance: the form of the diary is one rooted in repetition.10 But also: “the work of repetition is not neutral work,” Sara Ahmed warns us in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others: it too shapes the bodies of those who labour. As she continues to explain, “Our body takes the shape of this repetition; we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of this work.”11 In Reels 1 and 2 of the film, as we listen to Robertson read the definition

10 As diary scholars have pointed out, repetition is so central to the form of the diary that analysis often requires paying attention to the “quantity of concrete language … to find out, literally, what ‘counted’ in women’s diaries.” Judy Lensink, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography’, Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1 January 1987): 41. 11Although Ahmed does not explicitly invoke Karl Marx, the way gendered labour has been theorised is firmly within the frame of Marxist discourse. As Kathi Weeks explains in “Life Within and Against Work”: “At the highest level of generality socialist feminism of this period can be said to have focused on the contradiction between processes of capital accumulation and social reproduction,” or, as David Staples succinctly suggests: “The spectre of women’s work haunts capitalism.” Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 57. Kathi Weeks, ‘Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics’, Ephemera 7, no. 1 (2007): 235. David Staples, ‘Women’s Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy’, in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean O’Malley Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 119.

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of exercise over and over again, we watch her enact getting stuck in certain alignments, as she films herself continuously repeating certain movements, like walking in and out of a room, or hanging up a coat, taking it down, and hanging it up again. 12 In these instances, Robertson moves as if caught in a loop, both rendering this repetitive labour visible, and, over the course of the diary, drawing attention to the obsessive alignments it has allowed her to get stuck in.

Repetition is thus not only a founding structure of gendered labour, but Robertson also utilises it in a means to render that labour visible.13 Her strategy here is reminiscent of the one outlined by Luce Irigaray, which Elizabeth Grosz articulates as that “which takes historically given forms and materials of knowledges, of concepts and languages, and attempts to present and use them differently — a deflection and broadening, an opening up rather than a closing down and replacement of existing forms and structures.”14 On perhaps the most superficial level Robertson’s making visible of the “existing forms and structures”15 of invisible labour lies in her repetitive references to weight. These lurk around every corner of the project, and range from a sudden interjection in a written diary entry about her need for being embraced and

12 Reel 1: The Beginning, Thanksgiving (3 November to 13 December 1981); Reel 2: Definitions of Fat and Thin (13 to 22 December 1981). 13 Again, Robertson is not alone in this practice: diaries are traditionally often used for documenting daily labour, what Elizabeth Podnieks calls the process where “the deeds of the day can be marked and given value.” Throughout women’s diaries they use the space to list their work for the day or week, diaries “filled with comments about the pervasiveness and tediousness of sewing,” or with entries like “June 20: I have a stiff neck and shoulder but have made ten pounds of strawberry jam.” Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 65. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 43. Harvey Green and Mary-Ellen Perry, The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 62. 14 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 165. 15 Grosz, 165.

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the rambling dreams she had the night before, noting “still 146 and waiting for my period ….. 145 after shit leaves me;”16 to recorded conversations with family members where they talk about her being overweight as a child, where Robertson notes, “My mother used to buy clothes for me from the Chubbies shops. Ugliest clothes, ugly ugly ugly. Grey green plaid with stupid short sleeves and ugly little collars and tiny little fabric belts.”17 The very ubiquity and repetition of references to weight and weight loss (from the constant reminders of her current weight and exercise regime presented to us in the film diary, to the detailed lists of food consumed in the food diaries) always draw our attention back to a labour that shapes the body, but alas never in the hard body-sense Robertson desires.

If repetition is one important tool for Robertson’s larger project, it is one which in itself is dependent on another, that of the recording of labour that she engages in.

Here, the very act of recording is a first step of making things visible, and I see it as a feminist intervention in itself — an acknowledgement of female labour as that which does not belong to just the realm of praxis but as that which can be rendered into text.

Contrary to Siegfried Kracauer’s assertion about the camera’s ability to render legible that which was previously unseen, where he notes that “any camera revelation involves recording, but recording on its part need not be revealing,”18 which is to say that the mere fact of the camera does not reveal something we heretofore were not aware of, Robertson’s focus on her labour forms part of a wider second-wave project where recording is indeed always already revealing. This project, which B Ruby Rich

16 Written diary entry, 13 September 1984 [Folder 1, #86]. 17 From audio recording that forms part of the soundtrack of Reel 31: Niagara Falls (19 to 28 August 1983). 18 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41.

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classifies as “validative” works,”19 are ones where the lived realities of women are the central focus of the cinematic texts. These works thus represent what had not yet been represented in film, that which is usually confined to the background. My understanding of background here is heavily indebted to Ahmed’s conception of the extent to which our focus on the world proper, on the public sphere of men and the work they do within that sphere, elides the space and work of women in the domestic realm. The work and the worlds of women, usually “relegated to the background in order to sustain a certain direction; in other words, in order to keep attention on what is faced”20 is foregrounded in these validative works. In films like the Newsreel Collective’s Janie’s Janie (1971) and Joyce Chopra’s Joyce at 34 (1972), it is not only woman’s lives in general that are at issue here, but their work, in various realms, in particular. As Julia Lesage explains in “The Political Aesthetics of the

Feminist Documentary Film,” these films present “a picture of the ordinary details of women’s lives, their thoughts — told directly by the protagonists to the camera …”21 ordinary details which may include childcare, domestic disputes, or even something as unremarkable as the very many endeavours women engage in to keep their bodies in shape.

Like these validative works, Robertson’s recording makes visible her efforts at weight loss not as something that is normal, a regular form of female praxis, but as actual labour. Writing about Eleanor Antin, one of the first second-wave artists who presented “the ordinary details of women’s lives,” that of the diet, Anne Wagner notes: “… the message seemed to strike many viewers less as critical or ironic

19 B Ruby Rich, ‘The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism’, Jump Cut 19 (December 1978): 13. 20 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 31. 21 Julia Lesage, ‘The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 4 (1978): 507.

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analysis than as realism pure and simple: testimony to the inevitable order of things.

Of course women diet.”22 Robertson was inspired by Antin’s work23 — a series of photographs of the artist’s nude body over the course of a strict 36-day diet she embarked on during July and August of 1972 — and in 1981 started filming herself every day. Standing in a doorway, as Antin had also done, or against a wall,

Robertson filmed herself either nude,24 or clothed in a yellow unitard or red bikini, a placard that indicates each day’s weight also visible in the frame. The pose she assumed, upright, looking into the camera, was one Antin and others had held before her as they documented attempts to transform their bodies: Adrian Piper in 1971, in her Food for the Spirit performance, where she photographed herself every day during a summer of fasting and reading Immanuel Kant’s Pure Critique of Reason; Suzanne

Lacy, Dori Atlantas, Jan Lester and Nancy Youdelman in their 1972 piece I Tried

Everything, where they documented their usage of a variety of breast enlargement devices; and Hannah Wilke’s Starification Object Series in 1974, where the artist adhered tiny vulva models made out of chewing gum to her body, in an attempt to artificially disfigure herself.25 By stepping into that position Robertson stepped into a

22 Cited by Newman in “Dieting for the Sake of Art: Eleanor Antin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Ringgold.” Emily L Newman, ‘Dieting for the Sake of Art: Eleanor Antin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Ringgold’, in American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic, ed. Myra Mendible (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 254. 23 Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press, 1992), 208. 24 Robertson cut out and re-inserted her nude footage from the film throughout the decades she worked on it. Almost all of the nude footage is absent from what is today the final version of Five Year Diary. 25 There are more artists who could be added to this list, including Lynn Hershman Leeson. Leeson’s project Roberta Breitmore (1975-1978), a performance art piece where Leeson took on the persona of Breitmore. As Breitmore, Leeson joined Weight Watchers, and the larger work also included diaries kept by Leeson in that capacity. The coupling of autobiography and exercise is also found in the early work of Linda Montano, like in the 1973 piece The Story of my Life, where the artist, “for three hours, noon to three, on a Wednesday … walked uphill on a treadmill while telling the story of my life into an amplification system which slightly echoed the sound. I wore a blue prom dress over my clothes, had dye on my teeth and wore a permanent smiling device on my mouth.”

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history of feminist art that employed the repetition of the nude female body as a primary political device.

What sets Robertson’s work apart from those of her predecessors is the extent to which she employed medium-specific elements of film and of the mode of the diary to emphasise the repetitive (and often compulsive) labour of that body over time. She captures not just a month or two (in the case of Antin), or of a summer (Piper), but — across the scope of the different diaries that comprise the larger project — makes visible almost forty years of the work of that one body. The compulsive nature of this register of repetition is perhaps best evidenced in the set of food diaries that form part of Five Year Diary. The diaries were exhibited during screenings of the film, and available for audience members to read during breaks between reels. Dated from the late 1970s onwards, these diaries are rather singular in focus, minute recordings of everything she ate on a given day, and often include calorie counts, and what she weighed. The entries take different forms. In certain instances it may form part of an entry in a written diary, like this instance, recorded somewhere during April and

May 1983, where Robertson interjects her narrative of the day to note that she had “4 cups coffee, 5 w[hole]w[heat] biscuits with margarine, sherry + orange juice, (bit of tofu dipping sauce + raw veg), licorice jelly beans.” It may also take the form of a food diary proper, journals or files kept for the express purpose of listing all food consumed, with entries such as that made on July 17th of an unknown year, where

Robertson had:

Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 102. ‘SiteWorks - San Francisco Performance 1969-1985, Linda Montano The Story of My Life’, accessed 22 July 2019, http://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/items/show/228.

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6 CUPS COFFEE 3 CUPS SOY MILK 2 CUPS ORANGE JUICE 3 CUPS LIMEADE 3 CUPS PINK CHABLIS TOFU, LITTLE RICE SALAD POTATO SALAD WATERMELON CHEERIOS 1 W[hole]W[heat] BREAD CHERRY CONSERVES POTATO CHIPS and that she weighed 153,5 lbs that day. Despite the relative simplicity of their construction,26 these food diaries function within a register of obsessive repetition not only because of their concern with the minute details of what enters one’s mouth, hour after hour, day after day, but because of the sheer tenacity and volume of this record-keeping, the body of food diaries that accumulate as the project grows.

This emphasis on the repetitive labour of the body over time also manifests itself in other types of record-keeping, and specifically extends into the cinematic portion of the project. Scenes in which Robertson appears in her yellow unitard or red bikini, holding a placard that indicates her weight, punctuate all 83 reels of the final diary, and consistently reminds the viewer of her labour. The choice of attire is not accidental in this regard: the unitard is the main item Robertson wears during the film’s first ten reels, later replaced by the red bikini, both garments an explicit means

26 Compared to the other diaries that form part of the project.

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of drawing attention to her body. Robertson’s reminders also extend further, employing the technique of time-lapse as a means to showcase the register of repetition in which her abstinent labour takes shape. In Reel 1 we find a number of scenes in which Robertson returns home with groceries from her neighbourhood CO-

OP. Robertson unpacks the different bags of food on a table, with different iterations of this same scenario showing a slightly different subset of healthy options presented to the camera: vegetables, tofu, rice, beans and wholegrains, Robertson performing her good food choices to the audience. A particularly striking scene in this regard, where the camera is positioned just above the counter where Robertson works, captures the process of decanting bag after bag of nuts, grains and beans into freshly washed mason jars recycled from earlier use. Shot in time-lapse and presented to us in accelerated motion, the acceleration of the actions performed on screen suggest a sense of freneticism — this too is a form of exercise: an exercise in asceticism. Again, the labour is to discipline the body: Robertson’s insistence to return to this scene again and again a comment on what Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth defines as the

“cultural fixation of female thinness” as that which actually equates “an obsession about female obedience.”27 Merely being in the world requires the constant labour of exercising self-restraint, as the consistent interjections of neon signs advertising fast food that Robertson’s camera captures makes clear. These bright flashing lights violently interject themselves into the muted, everyday palette and aesthetic of the kitchen table with its empty recycled bottles: PASTRIES. PIZZA. BAGELS & CREAM

CHEESE.

27 Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 187.

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In addition to the consistent recordings of Robertson in her bikini or unitard, or her indications of weight throughout the film, it is the use of time-lapse which becomes for her the prime way of rendering visible the freneticism and drudgery of this gendered labour. She specifically employs time-lapse when she presents her body to us as it is engaged in aerobic exercise, now rendered in accelerated motion. In Reel

81: Mourning Emily,28 Robertson opens with a voice-over where she explains the context of the reel. She speaks about the events around the death of her niece Emily, her subsequent nervous breakdown, hospitalisation and new regime of drugs and therapy, including attending Alcoholics Anonymous. All of this occurs as an introduction to the opening images of the reel in which Robertson is seen exercising in time-lapse. She was, as she notes in voice-over, “lifting weights, doing the Insanity

Fat-Burning Workout, by Joyce Vedral. Trying to lose weight.” This seemingly futile activity, repeated again and again, takes centre stage through much of the film.

Robertson films herself as she does exercises in and around the house: sit-ups, push- ups, squats, all in time-lapse.29 Historically a means that allowed us to see what had before been imperceptible, like Jean Comandon’s 1920s capture of the dance-like growth of plants, time-lapse affords us the ability to speed up that which is slow, and thus brings the unseen into the realm of the seen. The technique functions as what

Oliver Gaycken terms one of “the practices of scientific visualization,” which

“foreground the cinema’s ability to create a view of something — a process, an object

— previously invisible.”30 The accelerated speed of time-lapse both draws our attention to a form of gendered labour that is often merely accepted as natural, that

28 27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995. 29 At points, as in Reel 5: Mourning (23 to 30 January 1982), Robertson does not even interrupt her exercises by first setting up a camera, and instead tries to hold the camera with one hand while she exercises. 30 Oliver Gaycken, ‘A Living, Developing Egg Is Present Before You”: Animation, Scientific Visualization, Modeling’, in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 79.

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which recedes into the background of what female identity entails, but also emphasises the repetitive nature of the exercises Robertson engages in. When it comes to the labour of weight loss, the labour of making and maintaining a female body is consistently framed as a form of repetitive labour that is obsessive, drudgerous.

To some extent the drudgery of this register of repetition lies in the fact that its teleological impetus is consistently thwarted. To some extent labour is always rooted in repetition: to work is to repeat certain sets of tasks or gestures until whatever is laboured at is complete. To labour is to transform something from one state into another, but there is also the ongoing labour of maintenance to sustain the state or object achieved, a durational practice that is already hinted at in the etymological roots of the word maintenance, which speaks of the strenuous acts of perseverance, of

“hold[ing] in an existing state or condition,”31 not only to hold, but to stretch. In

Robertson’s case, the labour of her body, the very many stretches, does not result in transformation that has any staying power, but instead is constantly undone, and is thus a site of repeated failure. What renders Robertson’s instances of exercise as repetitive labour drudgerous is the sense of futility in which they are presented, an exhausting means without a satisfying end. Over the course of 83 reels and over 40 hours of running time the viewer continues to see Robertson exercise, with no lasting results — Robertson might sometimes lose weight, but always gains it back, and becomes heavier and heavier as the film progresses. Toward the end of the film, in

Reel 81, Robertson sits on an unmade bed in a messy room, smoking. She wears her exercise clothing, her hair seemingly unwashed, the tone of her voice markedly

31 ‘Maintain | Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 22 July 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/maintain.

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upset. Speaking directly to the camera, she says, “I’m fifty pounds overweight. Fifty pounds, sixty pounds maybe. I lift weights. I go for walks. I bicycle. I’m afraid I’ve lost my beauty. And WHERE’S THE STORY? SOMETHING SHOULD HAVE TO

HAPPEN, otherwise I’m afraid my despair will make me die.”

This register of repetition is thus rooted in the failure of Robertson’s labour.

References to ways the labour to transform her body has failed abound in the diary.

This includes the scenes in Reel 1 where she repeatedly tries on a pair of jeans she cannot fit into (noting elsewhere, “like the tides, I came in and out”),32 and in the screening notes that were distributed during early screenings of the film, where she writes, “I have gained and lost weight so many times that I have lost track completely, though I measure myself constantly through the film.”33 This failure is also evidenced in her choice of attire in the scenes where she presents us with her measurements, where both unitard and bikini accentuate where she carries extra weight, and renders her failure at maintaining an ideal body weight very visible. The ongoing nature of Robertson’s weight loss labour, and also the most visible indication of her weight, and her success or failure in losing that weight, was further emphasised by her actual body, present at screenings and incorporated to be part of every performance.

From the earliest screenings of the film Robertson conceptualised “performance” as an explicit part of the project,34 and she narrated events on-screen, read from the

32 Notes for a potential short film titled Greed, date unknown [Folder 2, #155}. 33 Screening notes for Five Year Diary, 1987 [Folder 3, #22]. 34 Project description, 1987 [Folder 3, #18].

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many biographies that she wrote over the course of her life,35 and indicated what she had weighed during the time each reel was shot. Robertson was putting her body on display not only on-screen, but also in real time, in front of a live audience.

Reminiscent of the public weigh-ins that diet programs like Weight Watchers had brought into public consciousness in the 1970s,36 Robertson’s audience could assess for themselves whether she had lost any weight: they had the site of failure right before their eyes. The immediacy of Robertson’s presence casts the weight loss diary in a conclusively different light than other weight loss projects that preceded hers.

Neither Antin, Piper or Wilke’s offered direct access to a view of the artist’s body not mediated by her own camera. Although failure was also an implicit aspect of Carving, as Antin wryly notes: “The work was originally intended to include a regimen of exercise also, but this proved unacceptable, in practice, to the artist who appears to have lost her skills at this technique,”37 it carried a very different valence than in Five

Year Diary. Antin’s deft deflection of her shortcomings here spares her the embarrassment of being present as a room full of people watch as your plump body contorts on-screen, and as your ever-untransformed body performs failure live, as it is happening.

35 Project description, 1987 [Folder 3, #18]. 36 The link between the public weigh-in, which to some extent operates on the perceived embarrassment and shame participants experience during these sessions and that thus motivate them to lose weight, and these weight loss diaries of second-wave feminism, is made by Emily L Newman: “Dieting for the Sake of Art: Eleanor Antin, Rachel Rosenthal, and Faith Ringgold,” in American Shame: Stigma and the Body Politic, edited by Myra Mendible. Unlike Piper and Antin, whose work did not include an in-person dimension, Faith Ringold’s work Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Story Quilt, which she worked on between 1986 and 1987, did. In addition to the narrative quilt that documents her weight loss over the course of a year, Change also included an in-person performance as part of the piece. Newman, ‘Dieting’, 255; 262–63. 37 Newman, 256.

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Yet it is not only in the form of public performance that failure haunts the diary from its very inception. In Reel 1, Robertson’s abstinent labour of good food choices, of nuts and fruit and wholegrains packed away and decanted before the audience, is betrayed by the refrain of dessert counters that punctuate the reel. Not shot in time- lapse, in these sequences the camera slowly tracks along a number of display cases in various Boston bakeries. What we are shown is the antithesis of the modest bulk wholegrains in recycled glass bottles Robertson just offered us: gaudily decorated, mass produced cakes, devoid of any nutritional value. The frames offer a languorous but repetitive gaze at the Christmas cookies, Boston cream pies and elaborately frosted cakes Robertson desires but is not permitted to eat. We are offered display case after display case of black and white cookies, angels and snowmen and Santa

Claus biscuits, the camera tracking past each chocolate cupcake, each slice of cheesecake. The aesthetics of display are important here: a keen analogy for the way in which her labours at weight loss are always already those that permit her body visibility in a patriarchal environment, the labour she needs to perform in order to be seen, to be desirable. The slow tracking of the camera emphasises the obsessional gaze that Robertson’s labour tries to keep in check, an obsession that is emphasised by the repetitive rhythm of these shots, tracking from left to right, through an entire display case, then cutting to the next case, and the next, trying to capture as much of it as possible. Here, repetition is again compulsion. Eventually she slightly tilts the camera sideways to cram as many types of baker’s confectionary as she can into each frame, cakes topped with buttercream, or Italian meringue; fruit cakes, paper-thin sfoglia. Robertson crowds the frame to such an extent that we eventually lose the ability to distinguish all the different types of cake in the shot, a visual gorging of the illicit, a cinematic binge.

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The failure of Robertson’s labour includes her failure to labour, most prominent in scenes of the film where cinematic bingeing becomes actual bingeing. In notes to the film she describes this experience as being “trapped with a saliva filled mouth + grasping stomach … you and a stomach that begs.”38 In Reel 24: Christmas and New

Year ’83,39 for instance, Robertson looks into the camera, and calls out “Merry

Christmas! I gained 15 lbs!” as she eats. Compulsive eating is the raison d’etre of this reel, and although there are time-lapse shots of Robertson’s family gathering around

Christmas and New Year, with Christmas lights and airport arrivals and presents being opened, these shots serve only as punctuation to sections that record what

Robertson ate. Over the course of the film we see her eating walnuts, greens, mashed potato, waffles and ice-cream, popcorn, plums, cake, more popcorn, guacamole, cinnamon buns, pizza, peas, tofu, chocolate, sandwiches, jam, and drinking lots of coffee, beer, and eggnog. In these scenes Robertson often offers the viewer a close-up of her mouth as she eats. These shots are overly intimate — we can see her taking too large bites, chewing with a mouth not quite closed, the viewer able to see the food as it’s being chewed, excess margarine smeared over her lips. The close-up on her mouth underscores the obsessive nature of this compulsion, but also clearly registers her failure to stick to a diet, failure that Robertson extends further in the reel by filming herself first-thing she wakes up. In these shots Robertson has the camera positioned on her face as she opens the blinds, most often having slept until late in the day. She greets the viewer with a somewhat dazed “good afternoon,” her sloth emphasised by noting “For four days I’ve died, haven’t gone anywhere.” If the

38 Robertson is here describing an episode of binge-eating that she eventually filmed and recorded in written form: “Time lapse of compulsive eating in kitchen; or, entire day. The miniscule oatmeal, careful measurements. Tea pot. Tea pot. Tea pot. Carrots. Small sandwich. ½ cup yoghurt. MEAL: Gallon of coleslaw. LATE AT NIGHT PIG OUT: sesame seeds by handful. Sunflower seeds + honey. Making cookies. Trips to the corner store.” [Folder 2, #155]. 39 14 December 1982 to 26 January 1983.

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obsessive repetition of bingeing undoes one’s work, Robertson’s inability to get out of bed in the morning is an instance of obsessive repetition that prevents her from actually performing labour of any kind.

Robertson’s failure to labour thus has a knock-on effect that thwarts everything she works (or does not work) toward, a failure she often figures in her face. As is the case in the scenes where she has slept all day and alerts us to that fact, Robertson employs the close-up to foreground this failed state of affairs. For many of these close-up shots she is silent, just looking into the camera, often in a haggard state, hair scraggly or undone, heavy bags under her eyes. The either underexposed or overexposed camera

(a technical mode of failure that also runs throughout the film, and which is a constant point of comment for Robertson, and which I discuss in chapter 3), emphasises her wrinkles and dry skin. At times she speaks during these shots, and addresses the viewer with one of two concerns. Robertson always wants to know the same thing, the two biggest elements she can fail at: Do I look crazy?40 and Have I lost my beauty? In Reel 76: Fall to Spring,41 a reel that is largely concerned with her love for

Tom Baker and insecurity around her appearance, these close-ups are key. They are for instance used to showcase the different ways she can wear her hair: “This is how I

40 In chapter 3 I look at the close-ups in which this first question (“Do I look crazy?”) occurs within the wider context of how close-ups of mentally ill women have been employed in an effort to visualise the madness that is made visible in the woman’s face. Here I specifically refer to the intervention Giuliana Bruno outlines in her thinking of this technique in Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: "The cinematic close- up offers the possibility to penetrate, reveal, and record the very essence of physiognomy: 'Facing an isolated face takes us out of space, our consciousness of space is cut out, and we find ourselves in another dimension: that of physiognomy.' The establishment of a genre of facial expression in early cinema also testifies to an overlapping of scientific and artistic discourses, bridging the gap between the medical and filmic representations of the body." Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 72. 41 30 October 1991 to 28 March 1992.

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look when my hair's washed the night before,” “Left profile, hair up,” and the question always returns to Tom: “This is my hair tied up — see, see — and does Tom love me?” But Tom is married, Robertson later notes, and in a bout of depression she started to drink heavily, fell down the stairs in a state of drunkenness, and ends the reel by announcing that she’s gained nine pounds. There is labour, labour that never ends, and that inevitably fails. In a diary entry Robertson writes,

it is a battle against the food a battle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the oatmeal cookies invade my brain …………… i beat them off with all my strength if i succeed, i feel empty but victorious Later she adds, after the inevitable failure: “chocolate won.”42

Here Robertson’s failure also becomes a failure of the diary project itself — the teleology of the weight loss diary is rendered moot because she is not losing weight, and the cinematic trousseau is thus also being recorded in vain: if she is not thin the man will not come. The opening frames from Reel 81 which were discussed earlier are an interesting example in this regard. Apart from the irony that Robertson, on the schizoaffective spectrum all of her adult life, engages in exercises named “the

Insanity Fat-Burning Workout,” we should take note of the fact that all of these exercises occur on and around Robertson’s bed, a bed not shared with anyone. This placement is not accidental: throughout Five Year Diary weight loss is implicitly framed as a prerequisite for falling in love. As Robertson writes in a diary entry on 5

January 1979, “My resolutions were: lose weight (to ideal), find lover (of life) ... ”

42 Written diary entry, 23 March 1985 [Folder 1, #56].

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This coupling of beautiful body and “one true love” is also emphasised in instances where Robertson records herself in time-lapse as she runs and exercises next to the gazebo in the backyard, as seen in Reel 25: Getting Fat Again.43 The reel oscillates between Robertson’s attempts at labour (exercising, cooking, composting, and working on her diaries), and a making apparent of all the spheres in which her labour has failed (she started smoking again, was hospitalised, has slept too much instead of doing work). The reel ends with a number of scenes where Robertson is seen engaged in exercises, all of them next to the gazebo in her mother’s garden. The gazebo is an important space for thinking about Robertson’s gendered labour. Throughout her work the gazebo is conceptualised as the space where she would get married to Tom

Baker, in a ceremony Robertson modelled as a “less sexist” version of the wedding in

Song of Songs. The gazebo is the space where Tom Baker would proclaim his love for

Robertson, and declare his desire for her body. As she maps out in one of the versions of the ceremony included in her diaries, Baker would say: “How graceful are your feet … Your legs are like jewels. You are encircled with lilies, your eyes are pools by the gate. Your head crowns you; I am captured by your hair … delectable maiden, you are stately as a palm tree.”44 In a reel already marked by scenes that compulsively return to the image of Doctor Who on Robertson’s television set, her repetitive exercise becomes obsessive too. Shot in winter, the viewer sees Robertson return to the gazebo again and again, engaged in exercises as the weather becomes increasingly foul.

Donning just her thin yellow unitard, Robertson’s persistence to discipline her body eventually entails exercising in the snow. Even this is not enough. In a later scene, one of the very few of its kind that remain in the current version of the diary,45

43 27 January to 27 February 1983. 44 Diary entry, 1990 [Folder 1, #63]. 45 Earlier versions of Five Year Diary contained a fairly large amount of footage in which Robertson was naked. Throughout different iterations of the project, Robertson edited out these scenes, only to later edit them back in. This back and forth continued for decades.

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Robertson has stripped off the unitard and continues her exercises naked, amidst the thick snow around the gazebo. For the beloved to come, for him to say to her “You are all fair, my love, there is no flaw in you,”46 Robertson can never stop working.

Throughout the diary project as a whole, Robertson foregrounds her failure in various spheres — her failure as a woman, her failure as a filmmaker, and her failure to function as a sane, healthy individual. If recording labour is rendering it visible, the recording of failed labour increases this visibility — Robertson’s body is the

Heideggerian hammer we only become aware of once it breaks. As is clearly seen in the case of the food diaries, her obsessive recording of what is essentially useless information (what one ate, what one weighed, ad infinitum) — becomes a way of labouring when one is clearly failing at the actual project of losing weight. In the case of Robertson’s cinematic diary of failures, a similar strategy is followed. Five Year

Diary becomes the means in which to capture the work that went into something that, at least for Robertson, never comes to pass: the thin body, the husband, the sane mind. It uses the form of the diary in one of its historical uses, as a way for women to write when other modes of literature were not available to them, of making do with what one has (in Robertson’s case, one’s days, the work that goes into those days), even when what one has is only an endless litany of failed attempts at working toward a future that never arrives. In early screening notes to the film Robertson states that her initial weight loss diary was a means to “understand the analogies my body of work has to my body,”47 and perhaps that understanding is thus: the work of that body is the work itself, recording the failure of the body’s labour to transform itself the corpus we are left with.

46 Written diary entry, 1990 [Folder 1, #64]. 47 Written diary entry, 1981 [Folder 1, #72].

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A Million Tiny Stitches Gendered Labour and the Avant-garde

Robertson’s focus on the gendered labour of weight loss comes as no surprise when considered within the backdrop of second-wave feminism’s project, both predating and concurrent with the production of Five Year Diary, of highlighting the ways in which representation of the female body and the ideal of feminine identity is at odds with the lived reality of women’s lives. If one traces the history of feminist thought at that time, the particular moment at which the movement is often chronicled as cohering unto itself is the radical feminist protest of the Miss America pageant in

1968. With posters that sported slogans like CAN MAKEUP COVER THE WOUNDS

OF OUR OPPRESSION? and a ceremonial Freedom Trash Can into which the protestors deposited falsies, high heels and tubes of mascara while shouting “No more girdles, no more pain! No more trying to hold the fat in vain!”48 the protest addressed the construction of the female body. This construction included the types of labour required to both maintain that body and perform the femininity so central to its surface appearance, thin and glossy and vapid and perfumed. This strand of concern would remain central to the movement’s larger project, and a central theme in the work of women artists at the time. Taking up, or in Robertson’s case, taking stock, of one’s own body in an attempt at feminist subversion was by no means a new strategy,49 and as discussed, featured prominently in the works of, amongst others, Antin, Wilke and Piper. In fact, the very inspiration for the 1968 Miss America protest derived from a piece of feminist art: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s

48 In In Our Time, Susan Brownmiller speaks of the events of 1968 as a time when “a movement was being born.” The details of the Miss American protest above are drawn from the same text. Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Random House, 1999), 7, 39. 49 Art historian Lynda Nead terms this turn toward the body in the 1960s and 1970s, also prominent in the work of feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Yvonne Rainer, as “woman’s body art.” Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 64.

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1965 film Schmeerguntz. In her “What can be Learned, A Critique of the Miss America

Protest,” Carol Hanich outlines the inspiration for the event as being born from a session of consciousness-raising:

The idea came out of our group method of analysing women’s oppression by recalling our own experiences. We were watching Schmearguntz, a feminist movie, one night at our meeting. The movie had flashes of the Miss America contest in it. I found myself sitting there remembering how I had felt at home with my family watching the pageant as a child, an adolescent, and a college student. I knew it had evoked powerful feelings.50

Hanich’s evocation of Schmeerguntz in this context is important because the text dealt with not only the gendered labour of maintaining the body, but with another form of gendered labour that the second-wave pinned a lot of protest onto, and one imperative to Robertson’s diary project: the labour that belongs to the realm of the domestic. In an interview, Nelson describes her and Wiley’s inspiration for the collage film: “… we wanted to make a 16mm movie … but we had no subject. And one day I was looking at all the gunk in the sink and thought of the contrast between what we do, and what we see that we ‘should’ be — in ads and things …”51 The film thus presents the viewer with a combination of glamour shots from magazine advertisements for cosmetics, cleaning products and household appliances; and found footage of the Miss America pageant, with contestants in evening gowns and in swimwear, strutting and smiling on stage. Women painstakingly apply make-up to their faces, legions of women exercise in various scenarios. This gendered labour is presented in a tone very reminiscent of the register of drudgery that marks

50 Carol Hanich, ‘What Can Be Learned, A Critique of the Miss America Protest’, in Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Leslie B Tanner (New York: New American Library, 1971), 133. 51 Gunvor Nelson quoted in Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism, Film and 1968 — A Curious Documentary’, Science & Society 65, no. 1 (2001): 92.

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Robertson’s rendition. The drudgery is evoked not only in the film’s use of repetition

(the exercising women never come to rest, when one group stops another group begins, a few shots later), but also in the sense of freneticism that is suggested through the rapid, repetitive cuts between the different gleaming faces on-screen, preened and poised, and exacerbated by the punchy rock ‘n roll music of the sequence.

The drudgery and exhaustion of gendered labour involved in maintaining the female body is also highlighted in the way Nelson couples it with reproductive labour.

Interjected into these glamorous, frenetic assemblages are moments of pause, where two unnamed women appear. The film begins with the first woman, heavily pregnant and struggling to shave in the bathtub, as Nelson and Wiley’s camera presents different parts of her body to us in close-up: her breasts bobbing in the water, the extended belly with its stretch marks, her legs as she contorts them while shaving. Meanwhile, a second woman removes a tampon from her vagina in a grimy bathroom she will later have to scrub. These women — in other instances seen as they wipe the dirty bottom of a baby, or vomit into a toilet — are interjected into the legions of women exercising, gleefully cleaning with their new vacuum cleaners, or answering questions on the Miss America stage. Nelson and Wiley cut back and forth between advertisements of gleaming kitchens and smiling women, and close-ups of crying babies and endless sinks of dirty dishes and piles of laundry. Their juxtaposition renders these images in equivalence, as if to say, all labour the female performs, on or through her body, is the same labour. It does not end, and it comes to nothing.

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In this way the exhaustion that is central to this drudgerous register permeates the film from its very beginning, where the audience watches a sluggish, obviously tired pregnant woman as she struggles to get dressed. Exhaustion extends to the experience of looking at the very many crying children and dirty houses in the film, where Nelson and Wiley’s camera lingers in close-up on grimy bathtubs, on endless laundry: the viewer feels depleted just watching the work that awaits. The smiling women in the advertisements or on stage elide the labour that they are actively involved in, but Nelson and Wiley close in on every dirty cup, on every bout of morning sickness, on the particular way a women’s head is framed as she scrubs the toilet after, all presented in close-up. Although women are told the story of Sleeping

Beauty, incorporated into the film through being read by a man and presented as a voice-over soundtrack, the effortless bounty and kingdom of the titular character remains elusive: for these women there is no sleep, no rest: the work continues, endless drudgery is all that remains.

Nelson and Wiley’s consideration of domestic labour squares well with prevailing second-wave feminist thought on women and their reproductive work. In fact, many women, both in consciousness-raising groups and in feminist texts of the time, would outline the experience of the relentless demands of domestic labour as one of the first sparks of an awakening to feminist concerns. It is in the midst of dishes and laundry and lunches that second-wave feminism starts to articulate itself, perhaps most famously in the words of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique:

As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured

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Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night — she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’52 The domestic labour to which women were resigned was boring, and it was drudgerous. Simone de Beauvoir explains this drudgery in The Second Sex by noting,

“What makes the lot of the wife-servant ungrateful is the division of labour which dooms her completely to the general and the inessential; home and food are useful for life but do not confer any meaning on it: the housekeeper’s immediate goals are only means, not real ends, and they reflect no more than anonymous projects.53 This sentiment is echoed by Adrienne Rich who, in “Conditions for Work,” quotes a lengthy passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition about the nature of work women tend to engage in:

The protection and preservation of the world against natural process are among the toils which need the monotonous performance of daily repeated chores … In old tales and mythological stories it has often assumed the grandeur of heroic fights against overwhelming odds, as in the account of Hercules, whose cleansing of the Augean stables is among the twelve heroic ‘labors.’ … However, the daily fight in which the human body is engaged to keep the world clean and prevents its decay bears little resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition.54 Rich takes up Arendt’s line of thought, and positions this female labour as the

“activity of world-protection, world-preservation, world-repair — the million tiny stitches, the friction of the scrubbing brush, the scouring cloth …”55 What renders this labour drudgerous is the fact that it is not recognized, and that it is always undone — to labour in the female sphere is to always labour in vain.

52 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 1. 53 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 481. 54 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 205. 55 Rich, 205.

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In stark contrast to both the foregrounding of female labour, and the concomitant drudgery associated with reproductive labour that second-wave feminism is attuned to and that comes to bud in feminist avant-garde films of the time,56 we find the complex interplay of elision and exploitation of the gendered labour of two wives — both named Jane — in two avant-garde texts of around the same period: Stan

Brakhage’s Star Garden, released in 1974, and Ed Pincus’s Diaries (1971-1976), released in 1981. These texts are relevant to the larger discussion of labour in Robertson’s work for two reasons. The work of both filmmakers was hugely influential to

Robertson — she corresponded with Brakhage for most of her career, particularly interested in his rendering of the everyday; and her own film took its title from the five-year span of Pincus’s diaries,57 and early reels of Five Year Diary were screened for him in the beginning stages of her project. But Five Year Diary also shares a kindred form with these films, in its autobiographical attempts at capturing the ordinary details of one’s own life, and of recording one’s days in diary format.

The respective films are quite different — Brakhage’s film, a silent meditation of sorts, chronicles an ordinary day in the life of his family in their rural Colorado cottage, and operates in what P Adams Sitney defines as the mode of the lyrical film,58 of presenting the events of the everyday in poetic terms. In turn, Pincus’s film is centred around conversation, particularly those concerned with the various relationships he engages in as he and his wife pursue a non-monogamous relationship, in the midst of raising two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the

56 In addition to Schmeerguntz can be added any number of other films from this period, including Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, both released in 1975. 57 Written diary entry, 1981 [Folder 1, #71]. 58 P Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 160.

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early 1970s. Despite their formal and stylistic differences, gendered labour is central to both films. To deal with the everyday is to deal with the labour inherent to its creation and maintenance which, particularly because of the respective filmmakers’ focus on the life of their families, is rooted in the gendered nature of reproductive labour. In both cases the labour of the (male) filmmaker behind the camera elides the reproductive labour of the women whose labour has built the world his films focus upon, further rendering invisible what Federici terms “… this peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services that are involved in the role women must perform for capital that creates the specific character of that servant which is the house wife…”59 In this way both Brakhage and Pincus replicate the capitalist hierarchy that the independent, artisanal avant-garde cinema has always been seen to resist.60

In Star Garden, Brakhage’s largely handheld camera tracks a day in the life of his family, from waking through breakfast to playtime to lunch, what David E James has called a mode of “domestic filmmaking.”61 The progression of the day is registered in time-lapse through the way light changes in the two main rooms shown throughout the film, the bedroom of Stan and Jane, and the kitchen, mostly populated with a number of children who eat and play around the kitchen table. Brakhage punctuates the scenes of domestic rough and tumble with scenes of the empty bedroom and

59 Federici, Revolution, 17. 60 As Steve Dillon outlines: “More than any other filmmaking tradition, with the possible exception of the home movie, the American avant-garde is thought to be personal cinema. Avant-garde filmmakers generally shoot and edit their own films; quite often they perform in them as well. And historically at least, filmmakers have financed their films out of their own pockets.” Steven Dillon, Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 31. 61 David E James, ‘Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden’, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David E James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 175.

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kitchen, at first appearing in various states of disarray — bed unmade, clothes scattered around, the kitchen full of dirty dishes and the sticky remnants of a toast and jam breakfast we saw the children having. In later sequences Brakhage returns to these rooms, now all tidied up: the bed’s been made, the clothes packed away.

Kitchen counters wiped down, dishes washed. None of the actual cleaning of these rooms makes it into Brakhage’s recording, the film itself seemingly solely interested in the play of light on the various surfaces in the now clean rooms his camera is focused on. These sequences play a large role in establishing the tone of the film as one of idyllic domesticity, of a day passing quietly, peacefully, indeed: lyrically.

While the lyrical film is known for being “a genre overloaded with male filmmakers’ subjective romanticizations of the women in their lives,”62 Jane Brakhage’s domestic labour remains largely invisible throughout the film. In fact, she does not appear on- screen except for a short scene where her hands make it into the frame as she puts away dishes that have just been washed, and starts cooking a meal. It is largely the result of domestic labour already performed that Brakhage records, the pleasure one finds in looking at a line of freshly laundered clothing drying in the sun, or at children who sleepily try to spread a piece of toast with jam. This cinematic pleasure does not have to account for the drudgery of labour involved in actually washing the clothes or preparing breakfast.63 In Brakhage’s “domestic, personal cinema”64 — what

James has called “the blankest rejection of the history of the medium, he made home

62 B Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 124. 63 In perhaps the most extreme example of this, Jane Brakhage’s gendered labour in Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) actually involves her going into labour, giving birth, on camera. 64 Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 93.

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movies the essential practice of film”65 — making a movie of the home is actually just a means of centring the home as the site of aesthetic pleasure, not as that which actually captures the work of making that home.

Although Brakhage himself never articulates his “domestic cinema” in the terms I’ve just indicated, his description of the film supports this reading. In an interview

Brakhage describes Star Garden as about “being very involved in the particularities of daily living,” yet what exactly “the particularities of daily living” mean to him becomes clear when he continues with a description in purely aesthetic terms:

The kitchen table, and the bathroom, and the sunlight moving across certain plants in one way at one time of year and a different way in another, and so forth. Slight movements — movements that would be regarded as boring were it not for the intensity of the need to see them as adventuresome, as being really the major center of any living.66 Where the tradition of lyrical film in which Brakhage works has traditionally been seen as that which takes the ordinary and the everyday as its focus, the mode’s affinity for kitchen tables and bathrooms and beds remains in the realm of the aesthetic, with very little interest in the practicality involved in the maintenance of that realm. What the lyrical filmmaker is interested in is subjective experience, emotion, mood, as Sitney explains: “Brakhage invented a form in which the film- maker could compress his thoughts and feelings while recording his direct confrontation with intense experiences of birth, death, sexuality, and the terror of nature.”67 Yet the thoughts and feelings that arise from the domestic realm are always dependent on the actions that make that realm possible, of a home in which these

65 As cited in James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avante-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 32. 66 As cited in P Adams Sitney, ed., The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 208. 67 Sitney, Visionary Film, 168.

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“direct confrontations” can take place: you cannot have the emotional pleasure of playing with your children, or the aesthetic pleasure of filming them, if someone isn’t feeding and cleaning them and putting them to bed. The lyricism or poetic quality of the mode is heavily dependent on the capturing of this mood,68 yet the mood is always dependent on a context, a context which needs to be constructed, which requires work.

This work is in part elided through exactly the formal elements that theorists — like

Sitney —argue render it avant-garde. As he argues about Window Water Baby Moving,

“In no other film does Brakhage make as much of the reorganization of chronological time; for the most part, his lyrical films exist outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of isolated events.”69 In Star Garden it is exactly the lack of sequential time that allows Brakhage to leave periods of Jane’s labour out of his frame, ironically employing the same device that Robertson relies on to render visible her labour — that of time-lapse — to elide the very duration of Jane’s labour, how long it takes to make the home at the centre of the home movie. A move away from linear time is a luxury not afforded to a home in which things have to get done in a particular sequence of steps — before the children can eat their pieces of toast the table needs to be cleared from the previous meal, dishes have to have been washed to ensure a clean plate, bread had to be baked to replace the loaf the children finished yesterday. By negating sequential time Brakhage thus also elides the

68 As James explains the mode of autobiographical avant-garde film that comes to be known as lyrical film: “Despite a continuing abstract, plastic tradition, the postwar American avant-garde film was most commonly understood in the fifties and early sixties through analogies with poetry.” He goes on to quote Hans Richter’s “terminal equivalence” of considering these films an “exploration into the realm of mood, the lyrical sensation as ‘poetry.’” David E James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 27. 69 Sitney, Visionary Film, 169.

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fundamental repetition that is central to the maintenance of the home he is trying to capture — this is labour that is never just done once, but is continuous and continuously undone.

Invisible domestic labour is thus crucial to the lyrical mode’s existence — there can be no home movie without a home, and Brakhage’s “mature filmic mode”70 is often directly linked by theorists, such as James, to his starting a family, to the establishment of a family home. As more children were born the Brakhages moved to the Colorado countryside, the site of the home so many of these instances of domestic cinema focus on, and were made in. The couple’s children are ever-present throughout Star Garden, with the exception of the scenes of empty bedroom and kitchen, where they are presumably being looked after by Jane, elsewhere in the house. Here the fact that the film is silent is key. The lack of sound renders silent the chaotic soundscape of a household of children, thus reinforcing the idyllic view being presented by Brakhage, so central to the lyrical film. But perhaps more importantly,

Star Garden’s silence elides the labour that is associated with the care of children.

Brakhage’s children are seen happily eating, reading comics from the newspaper in a living room dappled in sunlight, going on walks in the forest. They are never heard asking for anything, they never require assistance of any kind, they do not cry, or get hurt, or get hungry. A lack of sound is a formal choice that often marks the mode of the lyrical film, and most of Brakhage’s domestic cinema is reliant on its ability to render poetic and beautiful what would otherwise be jarring, or grating, or traumatic.

Perhaps the best and best-known example of this in Brakhage’s oeuvre is Jane

Brakhage’s silent screams as she gives birth to their first child in Window Water Baby

Moving. As Anne Friedberg rightly notes about the film, “… Brakhage’s silence

70 Sitney, 35.

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censors Jane’s cries during birth. He provides us only with images of Jane’s face stretched in an agony which seems, in their silence, to be ecstacy in the throes of labour.”71

Brakhage’s decision to largely work without sound is, Friedberg notes earlier, on account of sound’s “tendency to distract from the spectator’s attention to the images.”72 These images are central to how the mode of lyrical film is theorised in the work of Sitney, where they are a product of a filmmaker who sees differently, who shows what doesn’t tend to get focused on, like the way the light falls on a bed, or a baby’s head crowns in labour.73 Writing about the mode, Steven Dillon goes so far as to say that Brakhage’s other birth film, Thigh Line Lyre Triangular (1961), “might be read as a lyric poem that renders the invisible visible.”74 It is the primacy of the filmmaker’s visionary vision that undergirds the lyrical film, yet this rendering

“visible” always exacts a certain violence, a violence that renders the very classification of his films as “domestic cinema” a questionable enterprise. Sitney argues that Brakhage “calls for these home-made modifications in the name of the eye, demanding of the film-maker (actually of himself) a dedication to what he actually sees, not what he has been taught to see or thinks he should see.”75 But what

Brakhage sees is never the work of others that makes his work possible, and the

”home-made modifications”76 — like the lack of sound, the discarding of linear time, and the lack of repetition— actively elide the labour that builds the home his camera

71 Anne Friedberg, ‘“Misconception”=The Division of Labor in The Childbirth Film’, Millennium Film Journal, no. 4 (Summer 1979): 68. 72 Friedberg, 65. 73 Sitney, Visionary Film, 168. 74 Dillon, Derek Jarman, 30. 75 Sitney, Visionary Film, 168. 76 Sitney, 168.

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is focused on, gendered labour largely performed by the individual not wielding the camera.77

If only the results of Jane Brakhage’s domestic labour are caught on-screen in Star

Garden and not Jane Brakhage herself, Pincus’s Diaries (1971-1976) is reliant on Jane

Pincus’s emotional labour, a film centred on the couple’s attempt at having an open marriage. Jane’s labour is the dramatic axis around which the film, described by Paul

Arthur as “a dissection of marital inequality,”78 revolves. Which is not to say that

Jane’s domestic labour is absent: already in the first few frames of the film the viewer is introduced to Jane, by Ed, in the role of labouring mother, as he films the family’s reflection in the bathroom mirror as Pincus gets ready to go out of town. Jane stays behind and looks after the children, something which becomes a recurrent motif in the film, Ed’s ability to film away from home (often filming his dalliances with a

77 Jane Brakhage herself seemed to not be oblivious to her elided labour. In a conversation recorded between her, Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, she tells Frampton that Brakhage has never made a portrait of her, largely because he only “uses me.” She notes: “I’ve just been doing something like having a baby, or minding the kids, or standing around or something. And he just photographs a woman having a baby, sweeping the floor, or making a bed.” The extent of her work is also supported by other films, not made by Brakhage, that feature the Brakhage family: Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage (1975) and Jonas Mekas’s Walden (1969). Barbara Hammer notes that she observed Jane labouring in all the “housework, family-rearing, man serving duties of a 'housewife' that she was proud to call herself … She takes the work label housewife and expands it to mean anything and everything she wanted to do. Throughout the film she is crocheting, making yogurt, hanging laundry, walking the donkey.” A similar situation is found in Mekas’s film, shot during a visit to the Brakhage home. While Stan is reading or writing over the course of reel 4, the part of Mekas’s diary that was shot in Colorado, there are two people engaged in the work related to the family — Jane and Stan’s young daughter, who is washing dishes, and Jane herself, cooking large stacks of pancakes, watching the children while they eat, later fixing a water pump and climbing on the roof of the cabin so she can shovel off the snow that’s gathered upon it. Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, ‘Stan and Jane Brakhage (and Hollis Frampton) Talking’, in Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings, 1964-1980, ed. Robert A Haller (New Paltz: Documentext, 1982), 180–81. Barbara Hammer, from private email exchange with author. 78 Paul Arthur, ‘The Moving Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries’, The Psychoanalytic Review 94, no. 6 (1 December 2007): 869.

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number of women he has some romantic fascination with) reliant upon Jane’s invisible labour. When Ed is around, Jane still seems to be the one responsible for home and children — we see Jane who intervenes when the children are fighting,

Jane who keeps the children busy with finger paint, Jane who cooks. Although Pincus is present in these domestic scenes, he films but does not parent, as Jane mentions to a friend during the course of the film, “He mostly films them [the children], doesn’t do the actual caring.”

If Star Garden negates the performance of reproductive labour, the different types of labour that feature in Diaries (1971-1976) seem to seamlessly blend into one another, their common denominator the fact that they are all the responsibility of the same person. In this way domestic, sexual and emotional labour all crop up in the same conversations, conversations where Jane actively tries to highlight the labour she is expected to perform. In a scene where Pincus never appears on-screen, his handheld camera focused on Jane in a longshot, as she’s sitting on the couch, their discussion is centred on Ed’s need for “space.” Jane quietly cries for most of the conversation, and notes that she wants him to consider her the most important person in the world, and not sleep with other women.

Jane: I just know that last week there were times that I sounded like your child. You had a tone, you wouldn’t even talk to your kids that way. Like you’re right and you know better, and I’m wrong, I don’t know any better. Ed: I don’t feel that way. Jane: Then why do I hear it? Ed: I don’t know. Jane: Well anyway, the laundry’s folded.

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The conversation circles back to the presence of external partners in the marriage.

Then back to domestic matters.

Jane: I still feel like things are not defined in the household clearly enough for me. Like, you know, cleaning, we don’t share the work ... Ed: Well, I do a whole lot, right? Jane: You do the laundry, and every once in a while cleaning up the kitchen, as far as I can see. Ed: And you know I make dinner. Jane: You make dinner maybe once a week, and you take care of the kids a fair amount, right. Ed: I’m also the breadwinner. Jane, sighs: Okay, alright, I mean this is like a typical female subservient role with the man winning the bread and the woman working at home, I mean you always bring that up, right? Ed: You always bring up how much I do around the house!

What seems like Ed’s obliviousness to the accusations levelled by Jane are reflected by how seamlessly, without comment, her domestic labour is presented in the film, happening in the background. Jane’s work maintaining the house is not paid particular attention to, a normalised, invisible backdrop that just happens to coincide with what Pincus is actually interested in — the excruciating emotional labour she performs that seems to be at the heart of the film. This labour, which I understand, following Arlie Hochschild, as “emotion work that affirms, enhances, and celebrates the well-being and status of others,”79 and as that which is generally most often performed

79 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 165. Italisation in original.

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by women,80 appears on two levels. The first is nestled in Jane’s obvious struggle with the open nature of their marriage, and discussions around this issue, over the course of the five years the diary is recorded, punctuate the film at regular intervals. In true non-monogamous style, these conversations also seep into wider conversations between them and friends in the film. On a visit to friends in California, Jane explains the Diaries project to the dinner table. Ed is largely silent during the entire conversation, just filming.

Friend: Is his lover in the movie? Jane, laughs: Yes, she’s a very nice girl. Friend: He has just one? Jane: One at a time! Friend: It’s going to be a spicy movie! Jane: A lot of agony for the wife. A lot of agony for the wife could be an apt subtitle for the film, agony which Pincus’s camera seems to relish in. The recorded conversations between him and Jane almost always feature just Jane in the frame. She often cries. Pincus’s camera never blinks, never looks away, and very, very rarely does Pincus submit himself to the camera’s scrutiny in these conversations — he remains fixated on Jane. In emotionally-loaded conversations Pincus’s means of capturing Jane on camera is in fact downright exploitative: partial to zooming in on Jane as she gets upset, Pincus tightly frames her affective push-back against his need for “space.”81

80 As Hochschild explains: “Especially in the American middle class, women tend to manage feeling more because in general they depend on men for money, and one of the various ways of repaying their debt is to do extra emotion work …” Hochschild, 165. 81 It should be noted that although Jane’s emotional labour is what gets most screen time in the film, she is not the only woman Pincus’s camera addresses in this way. A number of conversations Pincus engages in with women he has slept with over the course of the film have the same tone, and present the women in similarly vulnerable and fragile affective states as they discuss their relationship with him. After a scene where Ed and Ann, the woman he dates most seriously over the course of the film,

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Pincus’s need for “space” to date other women, which he often mentions in their conversations, is one through line of the film. Another, voiced by both him and Jane, is Jane’s need to spend more time in therapy, to further “work through” issues she’s experiencing, where working through of course always already entails more work, mostly for her. The relationship is not all that Jane has to work at — her starring role in Pincus’s film becomes another form of drudgerous labour she is subjected to.

Throughout the film it is clear that Jane resents being filmed. In an early scene of a film so reliant on the symbolic bedroom of the marriage, Pincus’s camera settles on their actual bedroom, where he films Jane in bed. Throughout the conversation Jane notes how uncomfortable she is with being in front of the camera, physically shirking away under the blankets on the bed. Pincus’s steady camera again does not look away, remains on Jane for the entirety of the scene. Meanwhile he coaxes her.

Ed: You’ve very beautiful. Jane. I’m trying to be beautiful! So the camera won’t think I’m ugly … I feel like I’m being judged.82 These claims are never taken seriously by Pincus, who defensively responds: “Well, you’re not.” Yet the camera remains on Jane, keeps zooming in. In a later scene, where Jane is again filmed in bed, she refuses to look at the camera, at times using her hands to obscure her face. Speaking about the film, she says,

I get angry, and I become self-conscious …there’s just a layer of self- consciousness, and it hurts me somehow. I feel invaded, I feel my get drunk and have sex in his office at the film lab at MIT, Ed turns on the camera and films Ann who, clearly used to this routine by now, just ends up noting, “We can now dissect the evening, if you’d like.” 82 To constantly appear beautiful to the ever-present camera within the home was not only a concern for Jane Pincus, but is clearly also an expectation of the other women caught in this autobiographical bind. In the conversation with Hollis Frampton mentioned earlier, Frampton says to Jane Brakhage: “Jane, you have to realize, from the outside, you are presumably the most profoundly differentiated and individuated woman in the history of film — and, probably, one of the most completely differentiated persons in the history of art … Then you cut your long hair off and fucked it up.” Brakhage and Frampton, ‘Stan and Jane’, 180–81.

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privacy is invaded, I feel I have to act, when I’ve tried my whole life not to act … I feel a little like I’m sacrificing myself for your film — I don’t consider it my film.83 It is not Jane’s film, yet the film is largely Jane’s work.84

If “domestic cinema,” in the way it is practised by Brakhage and Pincus, is contingent upon the elision of labour that renders their view of the domestic realm possible, it is but another chapter in philosophy and aesthetics’ long history of focusing on ideas at the expense of the practical context that enable the space of thinking. This is perhaps best articulated by Ahmed in her Queer Phenomenology, where she takes Edmund

Husserl and the writing table in his study as an example of how the sphere of philosophy obliterates (but is still dependent on) the domestic. Imagining Husserl at work, she sees him sitting behind a cleared table, and notes: “The desk that is clear is one that is ready for writing. One might even consider the domestic work that must have taken place for Husserl to turn to the writing table, and to be writing on the table, and to keep that table as the object of his attention.”85 Having the table as object of attention entails not focusing on what lies outside of this room: “What is behind

Husserl's back, what he does not face, might be the back of the house — the feminine space dedicated to the work of care, cleaning, and reproduction,”86 what Ahmed calls

83 The conversation ends with Jane promising to “work through” her issues about being on camera. The work indeed never ends. 84 What is perhaps most peculiar about Pincus’s diary is the way in which Jane’s gendered labour is the only labour of hers he registers in the film, despite the fact that she was, as one of the founding members of the healthcare collective that published Our Bodies, Ourselves, heavily involved in the writing and publishing of the landmark book. Although Pincus’s own work outside the home is, apart from the very material fact of the Diaries project as such, featured in a variety of instances throughout the film, including footage of him in meetings at work, references to his film Black Natchez (1967), and conversations around other projects he was working on, Diaries features one sole reference to Jane’s work. An offhand remark in a conversation, no part of the diary acknowledges Jane’s non-gendered labour. 85 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 30–31. 86 Ahmed, 31.

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“the work required to keep such spaces available for men and the work they do …”87

The domestic must be in the background for the work of philosophy to take place, as she notes:

We can think, in other words, of the background not simply in terms of what is around what we face, as the 'dimly perceived,' but as produced by acts of relegation: some things are relegated to the background in order to sustain a certain direction; in other words, in order to keep attention on what is faced.88

In the case of the avant-garde, this relationship to the domestic as invisible (and consciously elided) background, is central to what we understand by the very term itself, something second-wave feminist art caught onto early. In her 1969 piece

Manifesto for Maintenance Art, Mierle Laderman Ukeles outlines what she calls “Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance,” a gendered system of work that also extends to the arts. Calling her line of questioning, “The sourball of every revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday Morning?” she describes these two systems as such:

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement, flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.89 By its very definition the avant-garde is that which continually breaks new ground, which advances, never needs to return, or to re-work. Working within a rhetoric of development, the avant-garde can leave the repetitive work of maintenance, which it

87 Ahmed, 31. 88 Ahmed, 31. 89 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969’, Arnolfini Art House, accessed 24 July 2019, https://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969.

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still needs to have performed, to others. In the larger work which the manifesto forms part of, Ukeles attempts to shift the stakes of the avant-garde from that of development to maintenance by taking up residence in a museum, in an exhibition she titles Care (1969). There she engages in a series of maintenance activities, like washing the floors dirtied by visitors, or dusting art works. In the manifesto she explains that “I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now, I separately ‘do’ Art). Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things and …exhibit them, as Art.” “The exhibition area might look ‘empty’ of art,” she notes in the manifesto, “but it will be maintained in full public view. MY WORKING WILL BE THE WORK.”90

While Ukeles’s maintenance work does indeed acknowledge that gendered labour is the condition of possibility for all other kinds of intellectual and artistic labour, her maintenance work, which takes place outside of the home, means that she still returns from a day at the museum to face “a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking,” maintenance labour that is now not designated as Art.91 In this perhaps lies one of Robertson’s greatest interventions. By dovetailing her gendered and cinematic labour, Five Year Diary foregrounds the various forms of gendered labour that make her world and her cinematic labour possible, gendered labour that is her own work and not — as in the case of Brakhage and Pincus, and an entire history of male artists

90 Laderman Ukeles. 91 Helen Molesworth points out how irritated curators at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, which hosted Ukeles’s performance, were by the work. She comments on the irony that a work on maintenance labour was thus rendered as invisible as its subject matter: the museum did not document any aspect of the Maintenance Art Performance while it was hosted there. As Molesworth notes in “House Work and Art Work,” “… perhaps most telling of all, the Wadsworth Athenaeum kept no records of Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Performances, recalling Miwon Kwon’s observation that when the work of maintenance is well accomplished it goes unseen.” Helen Molesworth, ‘House Work and Art Work’, October 92 (2000): 11.

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and philosophers — relegated to a wife. This recording of her own labour, is, in the end

— unlike the unfortunate cases of the two Janes — what makes it Anne’s film.

I’m washing my dishes and making a movie Domestic Labour as World-making

Recording her own labour, rendering that labour into a text, is what allows the results of Robertson’s labour to remain, to not be undone, and it is this which allows her to cast her domestic labour in a register decidedly different from that associated with the making and maintaining of her body. This is also the point where Robertson splits off from the dominant strain in second-wave feminism, of largely casting the domestic sphere as one to which women are enslaved in a cycle of never-ending work. De Beauvoir, speaking of “the lot of the wife-servant,”92 acknowledges that in the absence of having access to the public sphere, the energy women expend in the domestic realm in the hope of rendering a sphere set apart for themselves, has “the home become … the center of the world and even its own reality.”93 But implicit in her descriptions of these worlds is a judgement. Indeed, de Beauvoir paints these worlds women make for themselves as insular, inferior attempts to compensate for their lack of legitimate space in the world outside the home: theirs is wasted labour.

In what follows I argue that, finding a means to reify her labour, Robertson is able to recast the repetition of the domestic in a register that is not drudgerous, or futile, but is rooted in in joy, in pleasure. Following Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism, I see the joy and pleasure of this register as being directly linked to “the pleasure that is bound-up in the activity of world-making.”94 Here it is not only the performance of

92 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 481. 93 de Beauvoir, 457. 94 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 14.

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labour related to Robertson’s home and garden, of her experience of the ordinary and the everyday, that is what allows for the creation of a world, but the recording of that labour that, contrary to the insulating domestic sphere de Beauvoir proposes, allows

Robertson a way into the world proper. Through Robertson’s recording the home does indeed become “the center of the world and even its own reality.”95

Robertson’s approach to the gendered labour of the domestic realm could again be better thought through in line with the feminist strategy outlined by Irigaray in An

Ethics of Sexual Difference, mentioned earlier in this chapter, “one which takes historically given forms and materials of knowledges, of concepts and languages, and attempts to present and use them differently.”96 The prime “given form” that

Robertson employs here is that of the everyday, or the ordinary. While I draw from

Berlant’s notion of the pleasure of world-making in an attempt to define the register of repetition at work in the record of Robertson’s domestic labour, one rooted in joy, I also draw from Stanley Cavell’s outline of repetition as a constitutive marker of the diurnal, and of the domestic.97 Cavell considers repetition as an ontological category of human experience itself, and notes, repetition is “what we are, what we have to offer.”98 This understanding of repetition is one that requires finding pleasure in the ordinary, as it is the repetition of the ordinary that makes our world in the first place.

The world of the ordinary or the everyday is central to Robertson’s project; and is here understood as the material of our everyday lives, that which one does over and over again over the course of days and weeks and months and years, both the

95 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 457. 96 Grosz, Time Travels, 165. 97 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82. 98 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 241.

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repetitive actions that make it possible for us to live (eat, sleep) and to live in society

(work, clean, talk to others). If the everyday is often articulated as what Jonathan

Crary succinctly describes as “the vague constellation of spaces and times outside what was organized and institutionalized around work, conformity and consumerism,”99 a scenario that already assumes that the sphere of the domestic requires no work at all, Robertson makes no such distinction. For Robertson, the realm of the everyday and of the ordinary includes both the work of the home and the work of the cinematic, as she explains in Reel 3: “I’m washing my dishes and making a movie.”100 Indeed, Robertson employs film, as Kracauer notes, as “huge images of small material phenomena,” to “lead … us through the thicket of material life” from which the rest of our world “emerge[s]” and in which it is “embedded.”101

This focus on the material life of the everyday is central to the larger project of existential fixity that derives from making and paying attention to this world of the ordinary, as Hannah Arendt notes: “… the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever- changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”102 I thus understand the register of repetition in Robertson’s diary — invoked in her capture of domestic labour — as one concerned with the ways in which labour can be pleasurable, an embrace of the everyday’s potential for making and remaking the world. In this way an embrace of the home, of “the same chair and the same table,”103 and an embrace of

99 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), 70. 100 Reel 3: Christmas and New Year ’82 (22 December 1981 to 9 January 1982). 101 Kracauer originally speaks of DW Griffith in this case. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 48. 102 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 137. 103 Arendt, 137.

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the everyday labour that constitutes it — the labour that occurs in and around that same table and chair — establishes a way to be at home in the world proper.

Nowhere is this embrace clearer than scenes that populate the early reels of the diary, where Robertson films herself while she cooks. In these instances, Robertson employs certain medium-specific elements of film to stress how repetition is linked to a sense of sublime transformation. In Reel 2: The Definitions of Fat and Thin, we watch

Robertson as she cooks a meal of tofu and vegetables. Presented to the camera in an overhead shot focused on the kitchen table and recorded in time-lapse, the scene takes us through the various steps of preparing the dish: she skins and chops garlic and shallots, slices tofu, dices green pepper, adds ginger and garlic to some soy sauce for a dressing. The shot then shifts to the same overhead perspective, but now with the stovetop in view, as Robertson’s hands deftly move across the screen. We never see her face,104 only some scallions and shallots placed in a pot, steam that quickly rises toward the camera, the dressing spooned over the vegetables, bubbling ferociously. Slabs of tofu are added to the pot, the sauce swells over it, in time-lapse the cubes of tofu continue to expand, they rise in the glistening sauce that bubbles underneath.

The scenes in which Robertson cooks are always presented to the viewer in time- lapse, an important formal choice for this register of repetition. The accelerated speed inherent to the use of time-lapse emphasises the repetitive nature of the labour being

104 Although Robertson here makes the same formal choice as Brakhage’s capture of Jane’s labour in Star Garden, by including only her hands in the frame, this choice carries a completely different valence in Robertson’s instance. Since she is not only the one cooking on-screen but also the one behind the camera, this becomes another instance of the collapse between domestic and cinematic work, or the domestication of cinema.

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performed: the specific ways in which a spoon scrapes a pan, over and over again; the processes of chopping, stirring, mixing. This is what our eye is drawn to in these scenes, the sense in which these repetitive actions are the process of something being made, of ingredients changing their shape and cohering into something other. The accelerated speed foregrounds this change: the instantaneous swelling of tofu and the thickening of sauce, or as Germaine Dulac notes, speaking about the accelerated speed rendered possible by time-lapse: “Movement is not merely displacement, but also, and above all, evolution and transformation.”105 The aesthetic choice of presenting these scenes in accelerated motion is key here: the speed intensifies our experience of a process that is much less transformative in real time, but when sped up provokes pleasure in the viewer, the making visible of the process of creation, what Kracauer has called cinema’s predilection for “the least permanent components of our environment.”106 It is also a particularly cinematic pleasure: if speed is, as

Aldous Huxley notes, “the single new pleasure invented by modernity,”107 it is the cinematic apparatus, both a product of modernity and a device through which the slow act of becoming is sped up, which allows us to see things taking shape.

Yet this notion of things taking shape that Robertson’s experimental use of time-lapse enables, is always presented to us in the context of the labour required in their making, and a focus on the repetitive nature of this labour. Drawing attention to the repetitive underpinning of especially domestic labour is a trope that marks feminist experimental work from the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps best exemplified by the

105 Germaine Dulac, ‘From Sentiment to Line’, in Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, ed. Antonia Lant and Ingrid Periz (London: Verso, 2006), 190. 106 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 52. 107 Aldous Huxley quoted by Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 1.

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seminal cleaning-cooking-fucking-cleaning-cooking-fucking that Jeanne Dielman is involved in in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman Quie de Commerce,

Bruxelles. In Akerman’s film the various activities that make up the routine of domestic work the housewife is responsible for is presented to the viewer in real time, a technique that underscores the monotonous and menial nature of this labour.

It is largely the durational quality of the labour that has this effect, of not just having to watch the various parts involved in, for instance, washing dirty dishes or cleaning the bath, but of seeing that work be undone, of the clean dishes being dirtied once again, of the bath needing another wash, being subjected to the endless repetition of tasks involved in the task of making a home. Jeanne Dielman’s rigid schedule (tasks happen at the same time, and in a certain way, every time) and blank affect are paired with Babette Mangolte’s stationary camera, offering the viewer no respite from the Sisyphean labour in which its protagonist finds her being. The static camera and the drawn-out, real-time durational quality of the film casts domestic labour as drudgery, as that which comes to nothing — Jeanne has little to show for her incessant, repetitive labour. As soon as something is done, it is undone again.

Nothing remains.

In the traditional register of repetition, as used by earlier feminist work, repetition empties the repeated action or gesture of any meaning, as Ivone Margulies writes,

“Repetition is seen, then, as creating a pragmatic amnesia — the lack of personal and historical awareness that is necessary to keep women functioning. The only way to keep repeating is to forget.”108 Yet in the register of repetition that Robertson invokes it is repetition that inversely makes the world, that imbues it with significance. The

108 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 141.

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repetition of time-lapse, as opposed to the extended duration of a text like Jeanne

Dielman, stresses the transformative potential of domestic labour: for instance, how flour and water becomes bread. As Dulac points out about the choice of time-lapse as a means to make visible the process of sprouting wheat grain: “it gives greater significance to the mechanical movement of logical transformation,”109 an element that gets lost in extended duration. What time-lapse makes visible, I would then argue, to borrow a term from Margulies, is “the utopian dimension of the everyday.”110 The notion of utopia, of a new world, is possible because of time-lapse’s ability to bring forth “animation that emerges as a form of modelling.”111 Modelling nestled in the magic and the joy of showing what a pair of hands can do.

What a pair of hands can do, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky points out in her discussion of what she calls “artisanal cinema,”112 cinema focused on the processes of making particular objects by hand, is be at the centre of “an aesthetics of labor.”113 Such an aesthetics, she argues, is “attentive to the process,” of what is being made, which is what “distinguishes it from just any depiction of work.” 114 As part of her discussion of a set of 26 shots in a short film about the making of ceramics by a political collective in Brazil in the late 1950s, Skvirsky focuses on the framing, lighting and montage to explain how an aesthetics of labour “transform[s]… artisanal labor into something sublime.”115 This is done, she argues, through “the use of the cinema to

109 Dulac, ‘From Sentiment’, 190. 110 Margulies, Nothing, 26. 111 Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 77. 112 Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, ‘Quilombo and Utopia: The Aesthetic of Labor in Linduarte Noronha’s Aruanda (1960)’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 20, no. 3 (2011): 239. 113 Skvirsky, 244. 114 Skvirsky, 244. 115 Skvirsky, 245.

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make it look, not so much like a means to an end of survival, but as an end in itself.”116 In Robertson’s work, one of the best examples of such a register of pleasurable repetition is wrought by time-lapse, that of bread-baking as world- making. In Reel 2: The Definitions of Fat and Thin, Robertson records herself as she bakes bread, again in time-lapse. The camera is again focused on the kitchen table, and offers the viewer an overhead shot of the action. The first object that enters the frame is a watch. Then a bag of flour, another bag of flour, some yeast, some oil, sugar. In quick succession: A jug, a bowl, two spatulas, a bag of seeds. Another bowl, a teaspoon, a measuring spoon. Robertson shows the cover of Edward Espe Brown’s

Tassajara Bread Book (1970) to the camera, then opens it to a specific recipe and presents that to the camera as well. Meanwhile the watch ticks, in some instances the only moving element on-screen. The bread baking begins. Yeast is sprinkled in different bowls, water is added, in time-lapse it froths into a waking state. Flour is added, mixed in, the bowls a stormy sea of dough. The bowls are covered with a tea towel, removed from the frame. Then things happen really fast: some of the ingredients are cleared away to make space for the bowls in which the dough will rise, and which need to be greased. First bowl, second bowl, third bowl, the excess oil poured from one to the other, Robertson’s hands dart swiftly from dish to dish, across the table.

She turns to the next page of the recipe, shows that to the camera, and then we’re back to a still life of ingredients on the table, with only the moving clock face. This is labour that is fundamentally repetitive, not just in its process (add ingredient, mix it in, add ingredient, mix it in, knead, knead again, continue kneading), but also in its ontological status: every day one must eat, every day this labour must be repeated.

116 Skvirsky, 247.

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There is no respite, this is the work of building the world as if from nothing, every day, and again, this is the nature of domestic labour, what Federici terms

“reproduction … the complex of activities and relations by which our life and labor are daily reconstituted.”117 Robertson’s bread-baking is an apt choice in this regard — as perhaps the most elemental foodstuff, the history of the world is also the history of how we learn to bake bread, a form of labour that is always bound to the home. This tension between the home and the world is reiterated in Robertson’s choice of stop motion in these sequences. The handmade quality of the technique emphasises the everyday, an emphasis continuously echoed in other obviously handmade elements of the diary, like Robertson’s hand-cut lettering of intertitles, or the cardboard stock

“Five Year Diary” title card with which each new reel opens. But stop motion’s function of imbuing inanimate objects with movement, giving them a life of their own through the power of the filmmaker-bread-baker, explodes the enclosed world of the home into that of the world proper.

Above all, this register of repetition is the site of joy, of pleasure: the bowls of dough are brought back, and as they’re uncovered they appear all risen, almost breathing beneath the white tea towel. Much of this cinematic pleasure is again linked to time- lapse. Speaking about the technique in Hidden in Plain Sight, Colin Williamson notes the type of vision that “cinema, as a mechanical magician”118 affords us, rendering the objects of the everyday, the bowls of dough and boules of bread, as “both worldly and otherworldly, recognizable and unrecognizable, simultaneously.”119 This magic of transformation is central to Robertson’s account of the repetition of labour, a

117 Federici, Revolution, 5. 118 Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 71. 119 Williamson, 73.

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making visible of what Abel Gance would call “the spectacle of ordinary life.”120 We see her hands add salt, stir it in, turn the page, and within a second the dough blooms to double its size, threateningly close to the edge of the bowl, then slinks back, the surface a shallow crater. More flour is added, and again mixed in, the dough now more stiff, substantial. More pages are turned. The objects on the table move to the edge of the frame, flour is dusted on the surface. Again, things happen quickly:

Robertson empties the bowls and the dough lands on the swirls of flour, and then she kneads, one of the most repetitive of tasks. It is a lot of dough, filling almost half the frame, but the accelerated motion that the time-lapse affords Robertson makes the drudgerous task appear deft, swift: she swoops the dough from side to side as it is pulled apart, brought together. In the moments Robertson’s hands leave the dough it relaxes in front of our eyes, spreads over the table. Then it is worked again, both hands in the frame, rolled back and forth and back and forth, pulled apart, brought together. Again. Again. We see how the dough becomes more elastic, how it starts cohering into a solid shape.

The kneading continues, swooping, pulling, repeating. Then it is done, a smooth ball in the middle of the table. It grows, and grows, and then Robertson’s hands appear again, with a knife, and slices the ball in two, shapes a half circle back into a smaller ball, places it in a greased bowl, repeats this with the second half. Bowls are covered, taken away. Clean up. Scrape the flour off the table, wipe it down. More empty bowls appear, so does the next page of the recipe, the clock face continues to travel. The bowls of dough are brought back into the frame, the different objects jostle for space on the table. In stop-motion the bowls cluster together, start moving around in unison, in a circle, anti-clockwise, skirting the edge of the frame. As they move some

120 Cited in Williamson, 79.

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bowls drop off, only three remain, these keep moving, faster and faster. The dough is cut into wedges, a wedge is formed into a ball, then a next wedge is taken up, then the next. Some wedges are not destined to be balls but elongated snakes of dough instead, and by the end of the scene the screen is filled with different plates of resting boules and snakes of dough, stop motion allowing them to dance around the screen in unison, festive, abundant. This is, mouthing Cavell, both “something to sing about and a world to sing in.”121

Yet this festivity does not mean that Robertson’s register of repetition elides the labour she is engaged in in the home: akin to Brakhage’s work, Robertson’s relies on a poetic register. But in contrast to Brakhage, she always frames the transformation of foodstuffs that occurs through her labour as occurring through her own hands: despite the magical quality of these scenes objects do not magically appear out of thin air but are always guided by her hands, we are always reminded of her labour in staging the otherworldly tableau. In addition to this her labour is further emphasised by the sequential nature of events that time-lapse renders visible. Capturing the processes of cooking or baking in time-lapse allows Robertson a focus on the different steps and stages involved. It thus allows her to visualise the labour that goes into the making of the home by breaking it down into its endless number of sub- steps, a making visible of the “process” that, according to Marx, usually “disappears in the product.”122 Time-lapse allows for the erasure of time between steps, in a medium which, as Kracauer argues, “in its preoccupation with the small … breaks down material phenomena into tiny particles,”123 rendering articulate each separate

121 Cavell, Pursuits, 248. 122 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1904), 191. 123 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 50.

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step. Breaking things down into smaller parts is a trope Robertson returns to throughout Five Year Diary. This includes the recurrent view of her compost bucket from day to day, where things are literally decomposing; the detailed description of her composting process in Reel 9: April Fool, Happy Birthday ’33;124 or the different steps of a project captured, like sanding the floor in Reel 21: Still Berrypicking,125 where the accelerated motion captures the very physical steps of sanding the floor, then washing it, then sanding it again, washing, staining.

Again, Robertson is not alone in this endeavour: listing the various small acts of labour hidden within the simple tasks of “clean the house” or “cook a meal” is a staple strategy of feminist texts in rendering this labour visible. These texts range from Pat Mainardi’s list of chores in “The Politics of Housework” (“Here’s my list of dirty chores: buying groceries, carting them home and putting them away; cooking meals and washing dishes and pots; doing the laundry, digging out the place when it gets out of control; washing floors. The list could go on but the sheer necessities are bad enough”);126 to Laura Mulvey’s voice-over in The Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which also includes women’s emotional labour (“mealtime, storytime, desultory, keeping it going, keeping looking, reading like a book, things to cook, keeping in the background, domestic labour, disheartened, burdened, keeping calm, keeping clean

…”); to Karen Finley’s Living It Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity (1996), where the sheer lack of punctuation suggests a register of frenetic drudgery

(“sweeping buffing dusting polishing waxing vacuuming baking beating blending chopping grating slicing dicing mixing making cleaning cooking freezing squeezing

124 17 to 27 March, 1982. 125 12 to 23 August 1982. 126 Pat Mainardi, ‘The Politics of Housework’, in Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Leslie B Tanner (New York: New American Library, 1971), 337.

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peeling blanching boiling …”).127 Here the lists are used with a type of cumulative effect, each next entry building upon and strengthening those that come before, so that the list becomes more and more unbearable to read as we move along, as these labours slowly erect the house which is the condition for the work that takes place in the world proper.

What Robertson’s strategy of breaking labour down into its steps and sub-steps gives her is both this cumulative effect, and the sense of linearity and causality that is inherent to this labour. In More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues for the use of the term “work process” instead of mere “housework,” and notes:

The concept of work process reminds us that housework (indeed, all work), is a series not simply of definable tasks but of definable tasks that are necessarily linked to one another: you cannot cook without an energy source, and you cannot launder without water.128 Thus we find Robertson often focusing on all the preceding steps of labour that are necessary before one gets to doing the work. In Reel 2,129 discussed earlier, we see

Robertson’s capture of all the different steps of labour that precedes the actual cooking, steps of invisible labour without which the labour of cooking cannot take place. First Robertson sets up the camera to capture her return home from the store with bags of groceries, then the camera is shifted to first capture fruits and vegetables being packed into the fridge, before again changing the camera setup, mounting it just above counter height, as she sets about decanting the different grains and pulses and dried fruit into glass bottles, already washed and dried earlier, another step that precedes the labour she is involved in now. The decanting scene is recorded in time-

127 Cited in Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 216–17. 128 Cowan, More Work, 12. 129 The Definitions of Fat and Thin (13 to 22 December 1983).

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lapse, further breaking down one step of the process into multiple sub-steps. Again, we do not see Robertson’s face or body in this scene, but only her hands as they deftly and repetitively move across the counter. First packing out the different glass bottles recycled from earlier use, the bottles are then uncapped, and the contents of each plastic bag poured into it. Again, and again. Another bottle. Again. Once all the bags are empty the bottles that were filled are placed off-screen. More bags are placed on the counter, these too are deposited. Next the paper bags which held the dried foodstuffs are neatly folded up and placed aside. Then it is time to clean: faced with a counter of debris of all the various bags, Robertson’s hands are seen moving the stray bits together into a central pile. She quickly scoops it all up. Wipes the counter. Then packs out all the bottles she’s just filled, a proud parade of mason jars. They are left there for a second or two, allowing us a moment to relish in the product of labour performed. Then Robertson packs them away, and the counter is left open for the work that later awaits.

When Kracauer asks, “What are films likely to discover?” he points out three things:

“They tend to reveal things normally unseen; phenomena overwhelming consciousness; and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality.’”130 For Robertson, this “special mode … of reality” that is revealed by film is a world of women, of the dictates of their labour, of the temporal linearity of steps and processes they are bound to. Time-lapse is crucial to this project of rendering visible a world of gendered labour in Five Year Diary, but it is joined by another technique that Robertson consistently employs: conjuring up a world in sound. Robertson often recorded conversations and activities and used them as additional soundtracks to her reels, where we are not shown the labour that is taking

130 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 46.

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place, but are presented with the means to listen to it. In their sense of both practicality (what needs to happen, and when), but also of festivity, these soundtracks are a prime example of the register of repetition that is rooted in joy. In this way we for instance listen to Robertson’s mother June singing along to the radio as the two of them cook a celebratory meal for Robertson’s 33rd birthday in Reel 9.131

Amidst the sounds of pots clunking and food frying the tone of this recording is one of joy, and of utter abundance. Cooking from the Moosewood Cookbook, we listen to them make egg rolls and tempura and doughnuts for dessert, joking about making so much food that they won’t be able to serve the guests before 11pm. At some point

Robertson says, “I think we’re going to be up all night, frying doughnuts!” and her mother responds, “That sounds like a fun thing to do!” and we are wont to agree.

Amid this kitchen banter we are constantly still reminded of the work they’re involved in, of the specificity of the material thicket of this labour: looking for the correct measuring tools (“a two-cup cup”); or what exactly certain actions mean

(“Now let’s see — shred it. I never exactly know what shredded means, you know?”); or what the best types of vegetables from Robertson’s garden are to use for the tempura. Again, the process of the labour is foregrounded, in the different steps of the recipes they are preparing. Recipes are of course linear by design, and temporally progress in a certain way. Thus we hear Robertson explain to her mother how to make egg rolls, and later reminds her that for tempura, “Your one hand is supposed to be filled with corn starch, and the other hand is supposed to be wet.” They figure out the order in which the stove will be utilised to cook the different dishes (first doughnuts, then egg rolls, then tempura), and in the midst of cupboards opening and packages scrunching we also, like them, listen to the radio. Even here we are

131 Happy Birthday ’33 (17 to 27 March 1982).

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reminded of the gendered labour of care and the preservation of kinship. Tuned into a request program, we hear someone dedicate a song to a patient convalescing in

Ann Arbor, and Suzie in Tucson dedicates a song “to Dick and Dorothy who are getting married this spring, after a three-year long distance courtship, between San

Francisco and Boston.”

Throughout Five Year Diary Robertson employs sound as a means to conjure worlds, and in these early diary reels the project of world-making that is evidenced in her time-lapse scenes of cooking and baking are extended into this realm. These recorded conversations (not only in Reel 9, but also in Reel 1, and in Reel 31)132 offer us a world as it is being made, and being made largely by women. Even when men are present, the labour that is recorded in these soundtracks is only that of women.133 It is also labour that provides a space for women to relate to one another, is the means through which bonding takes place. This can take the form of the joking banter between

Robertson and her mother in Reel 9, or the more serious conversations about acceptable attire and the 1968 feminist revolution that take place between Robertson and other female family members while they watch the children in Reel 31. These recorded conversations operate in what Carla Kaplan terms the “ethics of listening”134

132 Reel 31: Niagara Falls (19 to 28 August 1983). 133 This is not confined to only the soundtracks of work performed: throughout Five Year Diary we see very few instances of men at work, and Robertson’s camera instead focuses on the child-rearing her female family and friends engage in, or the many instances of labour her mother is responsible for in and around the house. Across the diary we see June Robertson often assisting Anne at work in the garden, or digging a hole to bury a cat that has died, or pitching tents on holiday. Robertson also alerts us of her mother’s labour when she herself has failed to work: in Reel 41: California, Home and Wyoming (27 August to 25 December 1984), Robertson films her mother from inside the house, as she washes the other side of the window on which the camera is focused, and notes, dejectedly: “My mother got up early, I got up at three.” 134 Carla Kaplan, The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12.

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on which consciousness-raising is based.135 While not consciousness-raising in the traditional sense, Robertson utilises the conversations that take place between women in the same spirit as that founding practice of second-wave feminism, of what Kaplan articulates as “its efforts to construct spaces of conversation free of coercion and inherited conventions, its rendering of women’s responsibility to one another as an exchange of personal narrative, its assumption that women can and should identify with one another and with each other’s stories.”136

These stories are all shared around Robertson’s kitchen table, a table we spend much time looking at over the course of the film. Indeed, the material Robertson chooses as visual track to the conversations that take place in Reel 9 are all of Robertson working in time-lapse, at the table, on the diary. While we hear the sounds of chopping, of doughnuts being fried and of Robertson’s mother drinking wine and singing along to the radio, we watch Robertson, all rendered in accelerated motion, as she watches footage, edits, writes her diary. All of this occurs on the same kitchen table that earlier had been used to measure out the perfect ratio of ingredients for the tempura batter (“one cup of water, one egg yolk, some flour, salt”). The coupling of cinematic and domestic labour as that which creates a world is crystallised in the form of

Robertson’s kitchen table. That her cinematic work occurs on this table, and not on another, is important. The choice of table, Ahmed reminds us, is already a gendered consideration: Robertson’s work does not take place on a desk in the “masculine domain” of “the study, the room dedicated to writing or other forms of

135 As Adrienne Rich notes in Of Woman Born: “I believe increasingly that only the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will be truly ours.” Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), 16. 136 Kaplan, Erotics, 26.

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contemplation …”137 where it is set apart from the other labour that occurs in the house, or set apart from other family members. Instead her work table is located in the heart of where domestic labour takes place, where food is cooked and people gather round, Robertson’s time-lapse camera often capturing how papers and typewriters and tape recorders on the kitchen table are pushed aside to make space for people and bottles of wine and plates of birthday cake. The coupling of cinematic and domestic labour that the kitchen table represents shifts women’s work from ephemeral matter that is constantly undone, to what Arendt calls “a worldly thing.”138 This shift occurs through a process of the domestic work of this table being

“seen, heard, and remembered, and then transformed,”139 a piece of cinematic labour that Robertson performs at this very same kitchen table. In doing so domestic labour does not remain a “worldly thing,” but is a constitutive part of making a world, aligned with the type of world that Irigaray envisions when she notes:

This creation would be our opportunity, from the humblest detail of everyday life to the ‘grandest,’ by means of the opening of a sensible transcendental that comes into being through us, of which we would be the mediators and bridges … through a language and an ethics that is ours.140

Conclusion

In “Medium Uncool,” Paula Rabinowitz reminds us of the larger project feminist artists and filmmakers engaged in during the efforts of second-wave feminism. As she writes,

137 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 30. 138 Arendt, Human Condition, 95. 139 Arendt, 95. 140 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 129.

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Women’s work in film … located woman’s body — its private spaces and its public consumption — as the site of a new kind of politics — a politics of the image and of the personal. Fighting censorship meant bringing into view the vomiting pregnant woman, the sink full of dirty dishes, the shitty diapers … refuting the culture of images that depended upon the female body and documenting the long history of women’s presence yet invisibility in politics.141 Five Year Diary forms part of this lineage of feminist protest on film in its foregrounding of gendered labour. There is the labour of transforming the body, of shaping it into something a potential husband could recognise as a wife. This labour,

Robertson’s diaries remind us, never ends. In the earliest diary that forms part of the project, written when she was between the ages of 10 and 12, Robertson already notes: “I’d like to have a thin figure, but it’s so hard to stay on a diet. Easier now though, mom says.” In the final reel of the film, recorded 35 years later, Robertson is still preoccupied with her weight, repeatedly presenting herself to the audience next to the placard indicating how much she weighs, as she gains more and more weight as the reel progresses. Looking into the camera, tightly framed in close-up, Robertson mentions that she is still living with her mother, who has agreed to look after her and her cat as long as Robertson no longer drinks alcohol. “I am not married,” she ruefully notes, markedly exhausted, with scraggly hair and rings under her eyes.

“This is not part of the agreement, but it is the sadness of my mother’s life. I’ve lost all my beauty.” The labour of transforming her body occurs in a register of repetition that is drudgerous, exhausting and ultimately futile.

On the one hand, Five Year Diary is a record of Robertson’s failed labour, where, in the absence of results, the work of her body is the work itself. In this regard she snugly fits into established second-wave rhetoric around gendered labour. But Robertson’s

141 Rabinowitz, ‘Medium Uncool’, 95.

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project expands further, allowing for a thinking of domestic labour as a form of world-making that is largely missing from earlier feminist thought. In addition to the register of repetition that is rooted in drudgery and failure, Robertson also presents another type of gendered labour in this project. Her rendition of the repetition of the domestic lies in stark contrast to how it tends to be presented in feminist works that precede hers. Again utilising time-lapse as a means to record her work, here

Robertson employs accelerated speed to turn the repetition into a tableau that speaks of what Cavell, drawing from Kierkegaard, calls “the sublime in the everyday.”142 If, as Adrienne Rich notes in The Dream of a Common Language, published just three years before Robertson started the diary, that

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world143 this project of gendered labour is taken up by Robertson in a spirit decidedly different from that displayed by Rich. In “Is there a Feminine Aesthetic,” Silvia

Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller write about the objects of women’s household labour, and note that “… they remained bound to everyday life, feeble attempts to make this sphere more aesthetically pleasing … The object could never leave the realm in which it came into being, it remained tied to the household, it could never

142 Cavell, Pursuits, 15. 143 Adrienne Rich, ‘Natural Resources’, in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (New York: Norton, 1978), 67.

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break loose and initiate communication.”144 Robertson’s recording of the everyday labour she is engaged in moves these actions from the sphere of that which is always unmade, always undone, to that which remains, to that which speaks not only of the home but always already also of the world, because they are recorded, because the domestic is rendered into text. The bread will be eaten, the clean kitchen dirtied again, but the diary as record of labour remains: it is not undone. It is what has made a world, a world of a woman’s own making.

144 Silvia Bovenschen and Beth Weckmueller, ‘Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?’, New German Critique, no. 10 (Winter 1977): 132–33.

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Chapter 2 The Cinematic Trousseau

In the opening voice-over of Five Year Diary’s Reel 71: ON PROBATION ETC.,1 Anne

Charlotte Robertson explains to the viewer that they are listening to two layered audio tracks. The first, that of her voice-over, the second, one of the hundreds of audio letters she recorded and sent to Tom Baker over the course of her life. As

Robertson films the gazebo outside her bedroom window covered in snow; or a cake with birthday candles set alight, being carried into a dark room, children excitedly crowding the camera; the second audio track is continually heard. Within it she addresses Baker, and engages in different iterations of imagining a conversation between the two of them:

Today, I imagined two things, two nice things. I can always imagine not just impossible things, but nice things. But the two nice things were, I would go to England and you would show me around your apartment, this is after the first nice thing, I’ll tell you that last. And you would point at things and give me the translation, you would point for instance to the stove, and say, “Cooker!” You would point to the toilet and say, “WC!!” and I don’t know any other words, so you’d have to go on from there, but there’s a translation, that is a foreign language, and yet it is one I could understand, and so I am looking forward to it. These imagined conversations are key to understanding how Robertson conceives of

Five Year Diary, not only as a weight loss document, as a recording that would show her become “more beautiful and more sane,”2 but over time starting to think of it as a document with a very specific purported intention, as a recording of her life, in its entirety, to present to her “one true love” when they finally meet. In her screening

1 3 February to 6 June 1990.

2 Written diary entry, 1990. [Folder 4, #50]. 115

notes to the film, and in the reels themselves, Robertson repeatedly refers to Five Year

Diary as her “trousseau,” mentioning in Reel 23: A Breakdown and After the Mental

Hospital3 that this “is the small details of my life, and also some major ones. But it is true, so — someday the guy would say, what have you been doing all your life? And

I'd say, well — here's something.”

Traditionally a trousseau consisted of all the household goods a woman would need to furnish a new household when she got married.4 The trousseau took the form of a chest filled with these materials, many of them made by the bride herself: it is a work of her labour.5 The trousseau was alternatively termed “the hope chest,” as it was prepared with the expectation that its maker would fall in love. The fact that

Robertson positions the diary as trousseau is not strange considering the form’s long connotation with love, especially in the case of diaries written by women. Diaries express the hope for and trials of love. As Elizabeth Podnieks argues, diaries with female authors often reflect that “Women’s lives have been, and arguably still are, largely focused on and around men. This focus is manifested in women’s preoccupation with things domestic, with their appearance … and with love.”6

Despite this coupling, diaries are also embraced within second-wave discourse as not only a “profoundly female,” but indeed, “feminist” form,7 insofar as it is a space in which women record the specificity of their lived reality, a profound act given how often this reality is elided in official records. In Robertson’s case, this seeming contradiction, this sense of political impurity — where feminist world-making is

3 1 September to 13 December 1982. 4 Marion A. Kaplan, ed., The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (New York: Haworth Press, 1985), 6. 5 Kaplan, 83. 6 Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 58. 7 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 217. 116

never divorced from her romantic obsession with a man — is bound up with the manner in which she understands the diary as trousseau. The trousseau functions as

Robertson’s attempt at recasting motherhood and domesticity within feminist terms, a feminism that is always predicated on the relationality inherent to a marriage, and of film as a means of negotiating that relation.

To explore how Robertson takes up these terms within the diary, this chapter thus considers the conditions of possibility of the trousseau. It does so by firstly outlining the radical way in which Robertson transforms the gendered labour of waiting — central to the very premise of the trousseau as that which one is engaged in as one waits for marriage — not as a passive endeavour to which women are resigned, but as active agency, as a form of work. This work takes the form of watching for clues that speak to the coming of Robertson’s beloved, a vigilant lying in wait. Just as the diary becomes a record of these clues, so the act of recording and editing the clues becomes a way for Robertson to try and foreshorten the distance between her and what she is waiting for, between the clue and the man himself. This chapter is thus concerned with the techniques Robertson employs in her consistent attempts to conjure or invoke this future husband, of which the zoom, as a means of contraction, is most significant. But it also traces how Robertson registers these techniques as a form of language that she and Baker are learning, “a foreign language, yet … one I could understand” a language that is required in order to contract the conversation of the conjugal, or what we could call marriage.

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Love Waits

A trousseau is fundamentally relational; it relies on the hope of a marriage. At first the idea of a diary, in its form as personal recording, might seem contrary to this communal world to which the trousseau belongs. Yet in her study of the literary diaries of a range of well-known female diarists, Podnieks makes a convincing case for how often the diary has historically functioned as a type of letter, with explicit addressees within the family circle.8 The diary-as-letter underscores the complexity lurking beneath the deceptively simple form, rooted in a constitutive focus on personal subjectivity, but where this sense of individual identity is always framed in the context of a being-with-others, of the relationships that form their world. Much of

Robertson’s diary entries appear in the form of letters (“Dear hubby, again writing to you … let’s grow blueberries and kids”),9 just as many of her letters resemble diary entries (“went to garden, squash for pickling, tomatos for sauce”),10 and these letters were exhibited, along with the diaries, during screenings of the film. The letters tend to be addressed to men, many whom she hoped might be her “one true love.” Over the course of her life these diary entries are addressed to Kip, John, Ed, and others; doctors and nurses at the hospitals she was interned at and whom she developed crushes on; and toward the last two decades of her life, to author Tom Wolfe and magician David Copperfield.

These men notwithstanding, Robertson’s main, and enduring romantic obsession, and addressee of the vast majority of her diary entries, is Tom Baker, the fourth doctor and titular character of the BBC series Doctor Who. A science fiction series that

8 Podnieks, Daily Modernism, 23, 26, 286. 9 Diary entry, 3 January 1983 [Folder 1, #378]. 10 Letter addressed to Tom Baker, 10 September, year unknown [Folder 5, #201].

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had originally premiered in England in 1963, the show first gained wide appeal in the

United States in 1978.11 The show’s protagonist, Doctor Who, is a Time Lord who originates from the planet Gallifrey. The Time Lords are able to travel through time and space, and take on a different guise with each regeneration.12 Within Robertson’s larger personal mythology, where she saw herself as another entry in a long line of reincarnated mystical figures, including The White Goddess, Aphrodite, and Mary

Magdalene,13 this coupling made sense: Tom Baker as Doctor Who was, she believed, in turn part of a longer reincarnated line that included Quetzalcoatl, Apollo, and

Jesus Christ. Robertson writes the diary that is also a letter, makes the diary that is also a trousseau, while she waits for Baker. Understanding the ontology of the letter prepares us for thinking about the specificity of the trousseau. Letters imply distance: the beloved is not there. But they also imply invocation: the act of writing a letter functions as a way of conjuring up the beloved when they are missing, what Mary

Ann Doane has called the form’s status as “presence-in-absence.”14

Robertson’s cinematic trousseau relies on three similar elements of temporal disconnect: waiting, hope, and conjuring. A trousseau is made by a woman as she waits for marriage. She waits because there is the hope of a husband, even if the husband is not yet. Trousseaus are thus objects steeped in teleology: they prepare

11 Doctor Who first ran in the United States in 1972, with John Pertwee playing the third doctor. It received a lukewarm reception, and the show was taken off the air. It returned in 1978, with Tom Baker as the fourth doctor, and was broadcast on PBS. Robertson started watching the show in 1978. Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 6, #202]. 12 Each incarnation of Doctor Who has a slightly different personality. Tom Baker is known as perhaps the most eccentric incarnation of the doctors, mirrored by his uniform, which includes a waistcoat and an iconic multi-coloured, very long scarf, knitted for him by Mrs. Nostradamus. 13 Discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. 14 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 113.

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goods for a home that does not exist, an action which in itself could seems to function as a type of invocation, calling that which is not as if it is. That Robertson employs the form of the diary in this endeavour is again not incidental. Although diaries tend to often be seen as relating within particular temporal parameters — either a recording of the present, or, in re-reading them, a remembering or reviewing of the past — the form, speaking about what is hoped for but which has not yet come to pass, can also embody what Lauren Berlant calls “hope’s temporal projection.”15 It is in this temporal projection that the particulars of waiting as a gendered form of time become clear.

In her “Women’s Time,” Julia Kristeva notes that women tend to be associated with either cyclical time, in its “cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm,” or with monumental time, an “all-encompassing and infinite-like imaginary space.”16 Both cyclical and monumental time belong to the body that can give birth; the practical regularity of menstrual rhythms that mark the cyclical, and the fixed, eternal status of the womb as a monumental temporality that does not pass. The temporalities of the cyclical and monumental are thus seemingly incompatible with historical time, with the time of the world proper, the world of men, which Kristeva refers to as linear time. Linear time is the world of language, where language is,

Kristeva argues, “considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb; topic- comment; beginning-ending);”17 and thus linear time constitutes a temporality, a language, and a world to which women do not have access.18

15 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 13. 16 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 16. 17 Kristeva, 17. 18 Genevieve Lloyd draws these connotations back to their early Greek roots, when she notes that “Maleness was aligned with active, determinate form, femaleness with passive, indeterminate matter.” Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984), 3. 120

Drawing from Kristeva’s delineation, Doane considers the particular implications these gendered temporal states have on the heterosexual romantic relationship:

The 'already-written' relation of women to time is the passive 'activity' of waiting — waiting at windows, at train stations, in isolated apartments, or waiting for phone calls or letters … The eventlessness and duration of such temporality are at odds with what we think of as narrative temporality or with what Kristeva refers to as 'obsessional time': 'time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival — in other words, the time of history.’19

Here Doane seems to suggest that the power differential inherent to heterosexual coupling is also expressed in the woman’s position of temporal stasis. This view is already inscribed in second-wave discourse from its inception, when de Beauvoir notes, in The Second Sex, that “The woman in love … waits.”20 While she waits, she writes. But not, Susan Brownmiller reminds us, literature, which belongs to the world of linear time, but the diary: a space where “a woman’s emotional history is preserved … Men are busy; they move forward. A woman looks back.”21 Even when she does not look back, as Faith Wilding exemplifies in her seminal second-wave monologue, performed during Womanhouse,22 she is stuck in place, too paralysed to

19 Doane, Desire, 106–7. 20 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 700. 21 Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (Linden Press, 1984), 216. 22 Womanhouse was what Helen Molesworth has called a “radical experiment” of second-wave art- making, headed up by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Over a period of seven-months in 1970 and 1971, Chicago and Schapiro, along with their students from the Feminist Art Program at the California Institute of the Arts, constructed an installation, exhibition and performance space in an empty former barracks space. Dividing it into different rooms of a house, the collective relied on consciousness- raising to come up with themes for each room that spoke to “the relationship between biology and social roles,” like Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom or Vicki Hodgett’s kitchen, titled Eggs to Breasts. Helen Molesworth, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 10. Arlene Raven, ‘Womanhouse’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 51.

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move. In the piece, which Wilding notes “condenses a woman's entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of waiting for life to begin while she is serving and maintaining the lives of others,”23 this passivity is repetitively phrased in terms of her relationship to a man:

Waiting for him to notice me, to call me Waiting for him to ask me out Waiting for him to pay attention to me Waiting for him to fall in love with me Waiting for him to kiss me, touch me, touch my breasts

In Robertson’s consideration of heterosexual marriage these second-wave distinctions are troubled. She recasts the form of the diary as something that does indeed look back, but which also, and most importantly, operates as an active teleological thrust in the direction of a man in the flesh. This recasting relies on a very different consideration of waiting. Where waiting is traditionally seen as a passive endeavour, a suspension of agency, this is not the case in Five Year Diary. Instead the paralysis that waiting tends to entail is replaced by the project of recording her life, of making the diary, the hope chest, the trousseau, one where instead of time being “thin[ned] out,”24 as Doane argues, it is enriched, it is solidified. Film itself performs the movement of linear temporality in this case, successively running through a projector, frame after frame, what Bliss Cua Lim calls “the cinema as clockwork apparatus,”25 articulating a cinematic language which will allow her to converse with

23 Faith Wilding, ‘Performances: Waiting’, Faith Wilding, accessed 26 July 2019, http://faithwilding.refugia.net/waiting.html. 24 Doane, Desire, 106. 25 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 11.

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Baker. Through cinematic capture Robertson’s time becomes, in Kristeva’s words, a

“project.”26 Here I understand a project as that which has a particular form articulated to move toward a particular aim. This involves action, a sense of a somewhat violent forward thrust. The root word of project, the Latin proiectum, means “something thrown forth,”27 and which sees its practical implementation in the manner an image is thrown upon the screen. A project thus has particular teleological parameters: the direction and temporality of a project is thus related to the future, to that which is before the one embarking on it. Robertson’s project, which is also a cinematic projection, is that of invoking the man, a “linear and prospective unfolding”28 of the world she wishes them to inhabit, a world that is a marriage, a marriage which is a home to the children she hopes they will have. The making of the trousseau that occurs in the spacing of the wait is one which actively, repetitively, conjures the man of whom it speaks, and the home which it anticipates.

Love Conjures

In chapter 1 I outlined how, within the purview of Five Year Diary as a weight loss document, Robertson’s capture of the labour of her body relies on repetition to specifically designate certain activities as work. Within the diary’s status as trousseau, repetition is again employed, this time as a vital part of the movement of invocation or incantation, a practice of repetitive rhythm. Such incantation or conjuring is written into the fabric of all the different diaries that make up Robertson’s larger project. In the audio letter of Reel 71, Robertson’s voice itself invokes the presence of

26 Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, 17. 27 ‘Project | Origin and Meaning of Project by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 8 October 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/project. 28 Doane, Desire, 106. 123

the man she addresses, as if to speak him into existence. This happens in a number of ways. It can come in the form of a repetitive mantra-like incantation, which, as in the case of Reel 71, starts with Robertson urging Baker to come to her before she is old, so their “children can see me with this colour hair,” followed by

I love you. inordinately, it means without number, I love you. Sweet Tom. Do something. I love you, I love you, I love you. Come on, hurry up. I love you. To-o-o-o-o-m. I love you, hurry up. Do something. I love you. I keep going, and I keep going, do something do something, that’s what I say to you, and to myself I say, keep going, and to you I say, do something, do something, and when were you born? Right here, this absolute very second, it’s good I love you I love you. I thought I should make an endless tape for you and say nothing but I love you, do something. I love you. Do something. I love you. Do something. I would say it over and over again … Robertson continues to say “Do something. I love you. Do something. I love you” over and over again for a few minutes, as if the repetition of the words themselves may materialise Baker if she says it enough.

Robertson also tries to materialise Baker in more subtle ways, like using the audio tape to constantly imagine how he’s longing for her in her absence: “The other thing I thought of, is every time you pass over the threshold of your door, you walk over the sill of your door, you say, ‘Aah! I wish I was carrying her over the threshold.’ That’s a nice thought, and it’s quite plausible.” In not only imagining his desire for her but also imagining what it is that he is saying, Robertson manages to circumvent the fact that we are only privy to one side of a conversation in this letter. If, as Ivone

Margulies argues in Nothing Happens, “Letters … tend to imply a person who is absent and … can be associated with a temporal or spatial obstruction. The letter, for example, like the telephone conversation, signifies communication at a distance,

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communication hindered,”29 Robertson manages to conjure Baker because she speaks for both of them. In the audio letter of Reel 71 she even goes so far as to imagine the vows Baker makes to her on their wedding day:

With my body I do worship thee, I will cherish and honor you in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, beyond death, I’m a student of the esoteric, I love you, I can hear you, you are with me, you are predicted, I know your name, I want to see everywhere you have lived and been. I will not sue you. I’m a vegan … you can depend on my body, trust, integrity, I will never leave you, you are a marvellous mystery.

Here the invocation also fulfils another function: it becomes for Robertson a way to name the man she awaits. In Contesting Tears Cavell returns to the ur-tale of Adam and Eve, of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, an act immediately preceded by

Adam’s first use of language, in the process of naming the animals in the garden of

Eden:

But what happens more immediately in the ‘detour’ is Adam’s invention of names; said otherwise, his discovery of language. Then an understanding of the necessity for delaying the appearance of the woman is that in order that something be a helpmeet, namely stand in that relation of other to a human being, that being must have equally the capacity to name …30 There can be no equality, no true relationality, Cavell argues, outside of language, outside of the ability to speak with another. That Cavell singles out the process of naming is significant here: to name is not only to address, but also to articulate, to describe, a practice Robertson engages in throughout these instances. In imagining

29 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 150. 30 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 28. 125

what Baker says, she builds him from the ground up — he is designed to adhere to every one of her desires, as she imagines him saying to her:

I want to have children with you and adopt even more … I will heal you, I can help you finance your projects, I am glad to share your work … your body is perfect, the world will improve. Out of all the letters it is yours I have expected. No one will be jealous, I will not hurt you. I want a bit of farm, we will build our house, I will see you, you will see me, face to face, long before we are old.

In the written diaries, this invocation takes the form of a detailed, repetitive scripting of the man she imagines. This invocation is also delineated in the shape of lists of attributes that are scattered throughout its pages. In a diary entry from early 1983,

Robertson for instance addresses the diary and asks,

- does he smoke marijuana? - would he ever like to try tripping cocaine with me? - is he glad/surprised about compost heap? - do my gardens give him joy (the many snowdrop bulbs) - does my refrigerator intrigue him? - do my films please him? - will my fat make no difference? The way in which Robertson phrases these questions is of interest here: she already incorporates the desired answer in the question itself. These leading questions are central to understanding her project of invocation: an ordinary man will not do. What she is waiting for is a man of her own creation. In a diary entry in November 1982, titled “Scenario for Finding a Boyfriend,” Robertson sketches out the man she is trying to imagine into existence. He is “vegetarian,” “loves my food,” he “doesn’t mind [the] kitchen camera” and “likes my movies,” and is “turned on by me

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unbuttoning many buttons.”31 In their ubiquity these lists become a form of incantation that conjure up the beloved as they proliferate throughout the pages of her diary, list after list after list. But their powers of invocation also lie in the level of detail Robertson includes. Detail has a long history of being associated with women: in the aesthetic tradition, Naomi Schor has argued, detail is often associated with the indeterminate matter that is the feminine, where “woman is seen as more embedded in the concrete and the particular than man.”32 Details are also, Doane reminds us, the province of the love story, where “The unimposing detail, the infinitesimal event reverberate[s]”33 in the space of the wait.

But while details are crucial to Robertson’s project, where she again and again stresses that her dairies are “detailed;” and that the trousseau in particular is a collection of “the small details of my life, and some major ones;” they do not, as in

Doane’s telling, feature as moments of action in an otherwise passive durational wasteland. Instead, in Robertson’s case, the details are tools of articulation, and allow

Robertson to render her form of a man and the form of a marriage as closely as possible, a textual equivalent of a zoom. She notes that she will wear white lace on their wedding night and spend the rest of their honeymoon in harem pants, while also mapping out the particulars of their cosmic task: “he + I piece the history together;” “he + I cleaned up the universe.”34 She imagines that Baker picks her up from work, that they visit museums, but also that “all speaks through us and is

31 Written diary entry, November 1982. [Folder 6, #80]. 32 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2016), 10. 33 Doane, Desire, 116. 34 Written diary entry, 18 September 1982 [Folder 6, #71].

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taught by us,” and that “we will keep the records of all worlds, we are the spokespersons of the universe.”35

If Robertson uses the time of waiting to conjure up the man through repetitive and detailed list-making, she also extends this practice into the repetitive and detailed watching for clues she engages in throughout the different diaries that comprise the larger project. The French waitier, from which our wait is originally derived, already hints at this concealed labour. Meaning “to watch,” it positions waiting as an act that requires “remaining in readiness of a purpose.”36 If Robertson is to wait, she has to remain vigilant, she has to keep watch. What she is watching for is the man, and in his absence, she watches for clues, or signs, in the sense of that which is given as a means of identification when one waits for another, a word or gesture given according to prior arrangement. The written portion of the work is peppered with recordings of clues she has noticed. He left a key in her kitchen.37 Or: he came into the house — “When I take a shower, I hear you overhead.”38 Or the clues come in the form of letters, from Baker, and in his performances at Doctor Who conventions in

Boston that Robertson attended: “… clues again … his kneeling on the stage with arms outstretched to me, under his breath saying ‘c’est daguerre’ (reference to joan d’arc39 and photography …) … his quoting from my letters.”40 Robertson consistently frames herself as one with her eye on the horizon for the man of whom this object

35 Written diary entry, 3 January 1982 [Folder 6, #83]. Written diary entry, 10 May (year unknown) [Folder 6, #22b]. Written diary entry, 18 September 1982, [Folder 6, #377]. 36 Oxford Dictionary definition of wait. This notion of “remain[ing] in readiness” already starts to undo the perceived passivity of waiting, as it involves active engagement. 37 Written diary entry, 1 March 1982. [Folder 6, #80]. 38 Written diary entry, 1 March 1982. [Folder 6, #80]. 39 Robertson believed that Jeanne d’Arc was one of her earlier incarnations. 40 Written diary entry, 29 January 1990 [Folder 1, #203]. 128

speaks. As she notes in an audio diary entry layered onto Reel 23, a reel that is intimately concerned with her search for clues:

Wait for him until you least expect him, and you don’t need him — he’ll come. At the least expected time, he’ll come. When? When? When? When? When is he going to come? Here? When am I going to meet him? In the street? In what town?

Reel 23, which covers the events between September 1st and December 13th 1982, largely becomes a record of these clues. It was an eventful year for Robertson. As she explains at the beginning of the reel, titled After the Breakdown and the Mental Hospital:

My father had died in January; I was laid off from the first good job I ever had. I was living alone in a poor neighbourhood. I had registered for courses for my graduate degree. However, the loan had been refused. The camera tech threatened to call the cops to take away the camera I had borrowed. I had film shows at school and at home, and had met a wonderful artist, I had a one night relationship, discovered he was a bi-sexual, and he was leaving town the next week. During the period she shot this material Robertson also suffered a nervous breakdown. The beginning and end of the breakdown forms part of the reel, the hospitalisation seemingly the only period and space where she was not recording the events of her everyday life, as she notes, “The day after I got out of the hospital I

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borrowed a camera again.” Recording clues required a camera; she had to stay vigilant. As remained the case throughout her life, Robertson seemed to always be convinced that Baker’s arrival in her life was imminent:

I have been writing this diary for years, ever expecting the next day that I will be very much in love with a stranger from the day before …. that I will discover a lover, and then all this will be preparation WHAT WILL BE WRITTEN THE DAY BEFORE I MEET HIM? … what will be the book I am reading then? … what will be the first few words he says to me? I to him? … what will he say to me as we are making love that first time? … does he keep a diary? can he handle a camera?41

By September 1982, the point at which the events covered in Reel 23 commence,

Robertson sent weekly packages to Tom Baker, packages that consisted of written42 and tape-recorded letters. The tape-recorded diary entries/letters were kept as a separate set of audio diaries within Five Year Diary proper, others were used as secondary audio tracks on the diary reels. In these secondary audio tracks that form part of Reel 23, Robertson not only records clues that speak of Baker’s attempts to speak to her, but also presents it in a form that mimics this labour of her waiting. In an audio track substantially lower in volume than the main voice-over of Reel 23, we are privy to a long, extended conversation between Robertson and her mother.

Robertson recorded the conversation the women were having during the intermission of a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in Boston they were attending. From the conversation it becomes clear that Robertson had, earlier that day, admitted to her mother that she was in love with Tom Baker, a television star. Now, during the play, minutes earlier, Robertson claims to have seen Baker

41 Written diary entry, 14 September 1984 [Folder 1, #87]. 42 Some of the written letters form part of the written portion of Five Year Diary, and were exhibited along with the film. 130

appear on stage. Robertson relays this information to her mother, and then attempts to convince her of the significance of this appearance occurring on the same day as having admitted her love for him. This is indeed a sign, Robertson seems to suggest in their uncomfortable conversation — Robertson’s mother sceptic, suspicious of the entire scenario — a sign that Baker wants to make contact. The distinguishing factor of this conversation is its audio level, significantly lower than that of the main audio track. The viewer needs to vigilantly, carefully listen to piece together what is said by

Robertson and her mother, this vigilant, careful piecing together a mimicking of the labour the maker of the trousseau engages in. She is waiting for a particular man, and this process of waiting entails always being on the lookout for him, to actively watch for clues that speak of his coming.

Love Contracts

If signs pointing to her one true love were all around Robertson, written into the fabric of her everyday life, recognizing these signs acts as a form of conjuring, too.

But for Robertson, conjuring is always linked to contraction, of foreshortening the distance between the sign and what it is pointing at, and between her, and him. This is already apparent in the lists Robertson keeps in the diary, to map out the desired man. The contents of the lists perform this movement, but so also does the form of the list itself. The list can, as Elaine Scarry notes, function in “contraction and rapid iteration”43 — it can draw together, shorten a distance. But this tension between waiting, conjuring and contraction also extends into the cinematic portion of the work. Later in Reel 23, after Robertson has modelled the vigilance required for

43 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 187. 131

searching out these clues, we see her driving into Boston with her mother to pick up her unemployment compensation. In this sequence, shots are all taken from the passenger seat and through various windows of the car. The women pass through a toll booth, Robertson’s camera focused on the cars driving ahead of them on the highway, as she tests her exposures as the distance between their car and the cars ahead expands and contracts. Along the way Robertson seems to constantly get distracted by signs along the road, her focus on them punctuating the sequence. At first these are actual material objects, signs that indicate a particular message: construction warnings, Exxon advertisements, a graffitied wall that denounces

Reaganomics. The congestion on the road allows Robertson’s camera to briefly settle on each one as her mother slowly drives along. Robertson zooms in and out on each sign as they approach, and over time the actual signs are supplemented by other signs, “signs” of objects that all have “great significance,” as she explains in voice- over: men on the street, public sculptures, cars. Her strategy in this sequence is consistent, one of contraction through the extensive use of the zoom, a practice that maintains a rhythm to the somewhat disparate set of images strung together through the relatively brief duration of her shots, and of the voice-over track that decodes the images as they appear in front of the viewer. Through the car window Robertson’s gaze settles on a man crossing the street in front of their car. She zooms in on him, and notes: “This is called mania — everything has significance, everything’s heightened, everything’s wonderful, I’m going to fall in love with a god, I’ll see the man I love somewhere around,” before she abruptly cuts to a close-up of a sculpted lion’s head a few feet away from the man in the previous shot: “Maybe he’s like a lion!” She quickly zooms out to show the larger fountain of which it forms part, then tilts up to a sculpted eagle on top of the fountain, and zooms in: “No, no — he’s like an eagle!” A sudden cut to a close-up of a Mazda sign on the car driving ahead of

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them: “He’s like Ahura Mazda!”44 Then a sign with an electronic display, noting the number 83: “He’s 83, he’ll be 83 years old.”

Robertson’s recording of signs here fulfils two functions — they are, firstly, portents that allow her to recognize (and remember) the man she awaits, and that she needs to keep track of. She has, after all, as she notes in the secondary audio track of Reel 23, often been in the position, due to her schizoaffective symptoms, of being “not sure … what exactly has happened in my lifetime, I know several times I have lost time …” so she needs to remember that he may be like a lion, or an eagle, or like Ahura

Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism, in which case he would be much older than 83.

But her recording of the signs is also done with its intended viewer in mind — when

Baker finally meets Robertson and she presents him with the diary, she notes, he would see her attempts at reading the signs that point to his coming, would know that he was expected. He would “put it together,” he would be able to read the signs as she does. If within linguistic terms, a sign is something that represents something else, and which has an agreed upon meaning, Robertson’s capture of the clues can be read as an attempt to formulate a shared cinematic language, one understood by

Baker, and one that would allow them to engage in conversation. This language is one that imbues Robertson’s diary with traces of the one true love long before his arrival — if Robertson cannot physically include Baker in her film she can include all the signs that point to him, signs whose very existence highlight the absence of the signified, yet remain tied to him.

44 Robertson believed that Ahura Mazda, the God of Zoroastrianism, also formed part of Tom Baker/Doctor Who’s larger line of reincarnated identities. Written diary entry/letter to Tom Baker, 11 September 1982 [Folder 1, #281]. 133

This shared language is one steeped in the temporal disjunction inherent to

Robertson’s diary, a recording of the present rooted in signs that speak of a future that has not yet arrived: signs are what exist if one is still waiting for the signified. Yet

Robertson’s cinematic language in this regard also constantly plays with the lag between these two temporal spheres through her use of the zoom, as she actively conjures the man. Each sign (of which the Latin root signum also speaks of sealing, of that which is seeking to attach) she films is subjected to a zoom, which contracts the distance between herself and what she looks at. She thus uses the camera as a means to establish an intimate arrangement between herself and that which is still far-off, these stand-ins for the one true love. The zoom enacts the conjuring Robertson is engaged in: it contracts the space between two objects, it “produces an ellipsis of space by both traversing and not traversing it.”45 Robertson conjures Baker by enacting a movement that minimizes their separation. The zoom also gives Robertson a better look at what she is waiting for, these signs that point to the “one true love,” that only truly come into focus as this invocation takes place. Like the image of the ocean that only slowly, painfully becomes visible as the camera continues to zoom in closer and closer over time, in Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) — a filmmaker that

Robertson studied during her time at MassArt, reminding herself in her diary to watch more of his work — the beloved himself, and the promise of marriage, slowly comes into view as Robertson keeps on contracting the space between them.

Robertson’s active invocation, her attempts at formulating a shared cinematic language through not only the capturing of signs but also her utilisation of the zoom, also extend to another constitutive focus of the trousseau in general, and of Reel 23 in

45 John Belton, ‘The Bionic Eye: Zoom Esthetics’, Cinéaste 11, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 21. 134

particular: the clues she leaves for him, the signs that point to her coming. Throughout

Reel 23 Robertson is concerned with shooting the most banal parts of everyday life, as it would be invested with significance for the one she desires. Moving through the house she records object after object, heavily employing the zoom: the cat, the empty cup, the shower curtain, the onion on the kitchen counter. As she carefully films a bag of carrots on the kitchen table, she first presents it in a medium shot and then zooms closer and closer to the bag, to the point of being able to slowly survey the writing on the packaging, and notes in voice-over: ”In this scene, and in all these scenes, I am trying to take pictures of deep significance: This bag is not a toy.

Everything would have significance later for my true love …”

Throughout these scenes Robertson foregrounds her active role in articulating this language, in registering these clues, clueing him into her identity. The reel opens with a shot of the inside of a fridge, the viewer’s attention drawn not only to the contents of the fridge but also to the technical adjustments Robertson makes in the first few seconds, as she adjusts the exposure, then reframes to include the technical apparatus in the shot itself, the lights Robertson has set up all around the fridge coming into view: this is not happenstance; this is organised, framed, intentional. Next the viewer is shown close-ups of the different types of vegetables she takes out of the fridge and places in a plastic bucket, before she positions herself in front of the fridge, and starts to sign to the camera in a type of ad-hoc sign language. She systematically films every part of her house, as she explains later in the reel, as these elements are all clues that

Tom Baker can understand, and will decipher when he watches her film. The shots of the fridge are accompanied by Robertson’s voice-over, as she notes:

I had accumulated about 900 rolls of film to date, in my refrigerator, I couldn’t afford to get it processed, and one night decided I was not 135

going to eat anymore, anything that would cause pain. This included root vegetables, which had to be replanted, so they could grow their own seeds. This is sign language, I am in a fever of what is called a nervous breakdown, and you are supposed to know what this means. For Robertson the diary is a means to not only register the clues that point to Baker’s coming, but to also leave clues of her own, secret signs that only the one true love can understand. Her purposeful presentation of the apparatus at the beginning of this scene is a means to foreground her involvement, to leave a signature. There is a language that she is articulating, and he is supposed to know what this means. He is soon supposed to join the conversation.

Words for a Conversation

Robertson’s development of a shared language, of articulating the terms for a conversation, are predicated on the distance between herself and her one true love, and attempts to contract that distance. This occurs most notably through her incessant zoom, both zooming in to particular objects while she films, or zooming out from a close-up to establish the larger relation in which an object exists, and indicate its relation to other objects around it. This sense of contraction and expansion is a key technique in a set of images that Robertson uses throughout the diary, often employed in a cluster, where she cuts back and forth between the different images that make up the set: a gazebo in her mother’s garden, shot from her bedroom window; the opening titles of Doctor Who, as well as clips from the show; the moon in the night sky; and shots of Robertson as she sits working at her kitchen table. If the signs Robertson notices in the world at large become a shorthand for signifying the one true love in a language he too would be able to decode, this cluster is also

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reflective of the tension between conjuring and conversation that marks Robertson’s work.

In Reel 71: ON PROBATION, ETC. Robertson offers a rigorous use of this cluster of images that illustrates the way it is employed in the rest of the diary. The reel, which covers the events of 3 February to 6 May 1990, starts with a voice-over in which she explains that she had just been released from mental hospital, and was on probation for assault and battery.46 Although the reel shows her exercising, planting seedlings, and playing with a baby, different configurations of the cluster is what makes up most of the reel. The cluster appears repeatedly throughout the reel, the different elements separated by straight cuts. She for instance flits between a shot through her bedroom window of the gazebo below, zooms in to remove the window from the cinematic frame, to the Doctor Who titles, back to the gazebo. We return to a shot of

Doctor Who on television, then cut to a shot where Robertson zooms in so as to remove the television frame from our view. She cuts back to the gazebo, zooms in even closer than the preceding shots, then cuts to herself seated at the kitchen table, as she edits in fast motion. Back to the gazebo, now covered in snow and filmed in time lapse, so that we briefly see the way light moves across it over the course of the winter day, cut back to Robertson as she points the camera at herself, her face in close-up, then back to her editing at the table, still in fast motion. Doctor Who titles

46 From Robertson’s medical records we know that she spent much of 1989 in and out of hospital, and had again been committed in 1990 after she had assaulted her mother, an outburst which Robertson at some point attributed to being caused by the stress of working on the diary. Notes to Reel 69: Guess Who, Breakdowns (4 October to 21 November 1989) [Folder 8, #204]. Discharge form, Westborough State Hospital, 4 October 1989 [Folder 9, #265].

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again, Robertson in her unitard, with a sign that indicates her weight, the gazebo from the bedroom window, zooming in closer, back to Doctor Who.

We always come back to Doctor Who. If, as Judith Mayne states in “The Woman at the

Keyhole,” that “As film viewers, we have spent more time than we realize … watching men watching women,”47 Five Year Diary offers us a striking alternative. For much of the film, we watch Robertson watch Doctor Who. Regardless of what the camera captures as it stands in the corner of the room, recording in time lapse, it also often includes within its purview this other frame, the television that seems to always be on, a machine for generating and transmitting signs. Robertson consistently returns to the opening titles, cutting them into this cluster at regular intervals, and they make hundreds of appearances over the course of the diary film as a whole. In the title sequence the viewer is confronted with images that simulate the sensation of traveling through space. It starts with a black screen demarcated by two strips of coloured light on each side of the frame, creating a black corridor. The appearance of the corridor is strengthened by the illusion of movement in the coloured bars themselves, which takes over the entire screen as the bars swell into the black, obliterating it. A police telephone box, which Doctor Who uses as his vehicle for traveling through space, moves through this coloured light toward the viewer in the centre of the frame, before a constantly roving vortex obliterates the box and expands to fill the frame entirely. The centre of the vortex reveals the face of Doctor Who, starting in a blur and becoming increasingly clearer as we continue to travel through space, the doctor remaining stationery in the centre of a frame where everything moves around him. Robertson takes from this sequence a number of elements — the

47 Judith Mayne, ‘The Woman at the Keyhole’, in Re-Vision: Essays, in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1984), 51. 138

notion of the one true love as initially hidden, slowly illuminated, of coming from afar but slowly moving closer, of the obliteration of distance. That he is brought by the television is no accident. Lynn Spigel and others have pointed out how the post- war positioning of the television was as an object that “had its eye on women,”48 and the first few decades of Robertson’s life saw television as a device that “offered the possibility of an intellectual neighborhood”49 in the new suburban landscape impacted by the “changing structure of social relationships.”50 In that it allows us to see that which is not physically with us, Rhona J Berenstein points out, it is a device that traverses time and space. If “television renders presence present by ostensibly overcoming spatial distance and time lags … ” it is what simulates for Robertson the intimate experience that television has been argued to capture, of feeling “as if those persons who appear in a program … actually step into their homes and communicate directly with them.”51 But the television is also vital to Robertson’s mythical project of invocation and contraction. If the television allows us to see at a distance, Samuel

Weber notes, it is what renders us farsighted. In describing what it means to be farsighted, Weber could have been describing Robertson: “to be farsighted is to anticipate what is likely to happen in the more or less distant future and to take appropriate actions in advance.”52 This is, of course, not a passive engagement, a notion underscored, Weber argues, by the fact that we “watch” television instead of

48 Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, ‘Introduction’, in Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, ed. Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), vii. 49 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 36. 50 Spigel, 36. 51 Rhona J Berenstein, ‘Acting Live: TV Performance, Intimacy and Immediacy’, in Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real, ed. James Friedman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 31. 52 Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 113.

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looking at it. Watching requires vigilance: “To watch is very close to watching out for or looking out for, that is, being sensorially alert for something that may happen.”53

What may happen, of course, is Baker’s arrival in her life, and in filming the television Robertson is trying to do what the television does: bring him closer. For if the televisual is that which, in being transmitted, not only makes visible that which was once invisible, but also “transports vision as such and sets it immediately before the viewer,”54 it is engaging in the conjuring Robertson works so hard at.55

In the opening titles Robertson returns to again and again, Doctor Who is brought by the television, but he is also brought by the Tardis, the time and space craft with which he travels, and which takes the form of a British police box. A constitutive focus of the show’s title sequence, the traditional police box appeared in public space, and carried a telephone with which members of the British police force could call back to their nearest police station. Utilising the same prefix tele as the television, the apparatus of the telephone is crucial to understanding the form that Robertson’s labour of conjuring takes; that it is not only the “effort” of watching that is at issue here,56 but also the attempt to speak across that distance, of establishing a cinematic language between her and Baker. How to perform the movement of the telephone and the television is thus a core problem for Robertson’s cluster of images. In fact,

53 Weber, 118. 54 Weber, 116. 55 I should note that the link to the concept of conjuring is my own reading and not one Weber employs. Instead he is interested in how the television makes possible a mode of vision that would otherwise be impossible: “It [telematic vision] entails not merely a heightening of the naturally limited powers of sight with respect to certain distant objects; it involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself. The televisual spectator can see things from places — and hence, from perspectives and points of view … where his or her body is not (and often never can be) situated.” Weber, 116. 56 Weber, 119. 140

this cluster becomes a catalogue of the different ways in which one can watch Doctor

Who, where to watch is always already to wait, and a thinking of ways in which the process of waiting can be utilised to initiate a conversation Robertson is desperate to have.

Central to this catalogue is Robertson’s use of framing devices to negotiate the relationship between herself and what she is waiting for. One such device is the frame of the television screen: when Doctor Who appears on television, Robertson contracts the space between her and him, zooming in so closely that the frame of the television disappears, until it seems as if Baker is actually in her film, as if he physically shares her diegetic space. When she moves her camera to her bedroom window, a position she adopts for these cluster sequences to record everything captured outside of her immediate domestic sphere, the zoom again is key. These shots are integral to the larger iconography of waiting that is employed in the work.

The window frame delineates, singles out that which is desired, a disclosing echoed in the framing of the camera, but also in screens in general. Yet the translucence of the window itself also means that the camera eye can penetrate closer to the object outside the immediate sphere.57 That Robertson pairs the window with the television screen is significant here: when the television set was first introduced to homes,

Spigel notes, post-war interior design of the domestic space saw an increased focus on large windows that were “used to create an illusion of the outside world.”58 At the

57 As Scott MacDonald reminds us through a reading of Ernie Gehr’s work, the camera is also “a ‘room’ into which light is admitted through the ‘window,’ of the aperture.” Scott MacDonald, ‘Ernie Gehr: Camera Obscura/Lens/Filmstrip’, Film Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1990): 11. 58 Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 102.

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same juncture this post-war rhetoric would position television as another type of window, one that allows the wider world into the intimate space of the home. In this way television “often figured as the ultimate expression of progress in utopian statements concerning ‘man’s’ ability to domesticate space.”59 Central to this domestication is the overcoming of distance; Spigel notes that the television set was

“often placed in rooms with panoramic window views, or else installed next to globes and colourful maps.”60 As a media technology it joined the “telegraph, telephone and radio” as what could bring what was outside the window inside the home.61

Robertson’s shots of and through the windows of her bedroom interrogate the dual functions of the window, of both delineation and contraction, particularly through her repetitive use of the Super 8 camera’s zoom. Shots either start with the window frame in the cinematic frame, which disappears as she tilts the camera up or down or sideways to capture the sky, the garden or the gazebo, while she zooms in on the object or area focused upon, or with the object in close-up, after which Robertson zooms out to again reveal the window frame, and the parameters of her position behind it. That Robertson always zooms out again is important: she brings us back to where she stands, she reminds us that she is the one doing the looking. After all, to frame something in a particular way is to take action, to take charge. Derived from the Old Norse word frami, which suggested advancement,62 Robertson’s framing is an intentional teleological thrust toward the man.

59 Spigel, 102, 117. 60 Spigel, 104. 61 Spigel, 103. 62 ‘Frame | Origin and Meaning of Frame by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 8 October 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/frame. 142

This active invocation thus recasts how women waiting at windows has traditionally figured in iconographic terms. As Doane writes,

Within the women's film as a whole, images of women looking through windows or waiting at windows abound. The window has special import in terms of the social and symbolic positioning of the woman — the window is the interface between inside and outside, the feminine space of the family and reproduction and the masculine space of production. It facilitates a communication by means of the look between the two sexually differentiated spaces.63 Doane’s woman at the window form part of a larger tradition of women at windows, where often, in the most iconographic images that come to mind (Johannes Vermeer,

Caspar Friedrich), the woman is framed by the window she is looking out of, the viewer looking at her as she looks out. In contrast to these women we find the written accounts of figures such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Simone de Beauvoir. In these cases, the experience of the woman looking out of the window is at issue, and this is also echoed in Robertson’s work: we are not looking at a woman at a window, but are in the position of that woman, where all we have to look out of is that window. In the work of Gilman and de Beauvoir the woman at the window is always situated in terms of the conditions of her entrapment within the domestic sphere, with the window her only access to a world outside, as de Beauvoir picks up from the writing of Virginia Woolf, in The Second Sex:

Her attitude to her home is dictated by this same dialectic that generally defines her condition: she takes by becoming prey, she liberates herself by abdicating; by renouncing the world, she means to conquer a world. She regrets closing the doors of her home behind herself; as a young girl, the whole world was her kingdom; the forests belonged to her. Now she is confined to a restricted space; nature is reduced to the size of a geranium pot; walls block out the horizon. One of Virginia Woolf’s heroines murmurs: ‘Whether it is summer, whether it is winter, I no longer know by the moor grass, and the heath

63 Doane, Desire, 138.

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flower; only by the steam on the window-pane, or the frost on the window-pane … ‘64 Women have certain things to look at: the condensation on the window; or in the case of Gilman’s protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman who has escaped from the wallpaper in her room, and creeps around the shrubs, but this type of looking is not only the wistful gaze that Vermeer or Friedrich or Woolf imagines. It is a vigilant wait, as Gilman’s protagonist at the window reminds us: “I keep watch of it

… There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will,”65 and it is this anxious vigilance that is Robertson’s as well.66

What Robertson watches through the window depends on the time of day. While the sun shines Robertson vigilantly watches the gazebo, a structure which in itself,

William Sayers reminds us, often functions as a “watch tower,” the word originally derived from the word gaze.67 A little wooden structure in her mother’s garden, it is there where she envisioned herself marrying Tom Baker, a space with very particular teleological coordinates for the diary-as-trousseau, the fruition of what she was waiting for. In screening notes to the film Robertson writes, “Behind my house is a gazebo, a little house that is waiting through all the seasons and years for our

64 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 456. 65 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, in Herland: And Selected Stories, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: Signet Classic, 1992), 172. 66 Of course, to look out of the window also means standing in it, to be framed in a way that could make you be seen from the outside. If, as Anne Friedberg argues about shop windows, that they are “the proscenium of visual intoxication, the site of seduction for consumer desire,” Robertson employs her own windows in a similar manner, but with only one customer in purview. Keeping watch in her window is also a way for Robertson to be seen by her one true love. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 65. 67 William Sayers, ‘Eastern Prospects: Kiosks, Belvederes, Gazebos’, Neophilologus 87, no. 2 (2003): 300.

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wedding ceremony there … ”68 During the night, she watches the moon. The moon occupies a rather complex space in Robertson’s iconography, a shifting signifier of sorts. Its first significance is temporal — the moon is an indication of time passing. In this way the moon, like the traditional diary, is a time piece, a diurnal marker, and

Robertson employs it as such, filming it every night for large periods of the seventeen years she spends shooting Five Year Diary. Within this temporal dimension the moon is also, like the window, an object that crystallises the act of waiting, as she also uses it as a stand-in for Doctor Who, sometimes superimposing his face onto an image of the moon. She can keep watch over the moon as if over the one true love, whom she can see, but cannot touch, who is as far away from her as Doctor Who is. In Reel 28:

Leaving the Apartment and Moving Home,69 Robertson for instance intercuts repetitive shots of the gazebo with shots of her face as she looks into the camera, and meets the future gaze of the one true love watching the trousseau that has been carefully recorded for him. The gazebo and Robertson’s gaze are further intercut with shots of

Doctor Who, and of the moon, Robertson cutting between the gazebo, Doctor Who on television, and one of the very few remaining shots of her naked self that remains in the diary, looking at the camera, meeting Doctor Who’s imagined future gaze, before cutting back to the moon, then superimposing the face of Doctor Who upon it. In these instances, the editing has a strong rhythmic quality, with brief shot durations —

Robertson never lingers on anything for very long, invoking him by cutting as if to establish links, relations. Her invocation also takes place through her recording of the moon in time lapse, and presented in fast motion, which allows the viewer to see its movement across the sky. This movement, which is too slow for us to see as it occurs in real time, is crucial to her linking of the moon to Doctor Who, as the making visible of the moon’s progress across the sky is also a making visible of the one true love’s

68 Screening notes, 1987. [Folder 3, #21]. 69 25 May to 28 June 1983. 145

journey toward her, moving closer and closer. What Robertson requires for this task is vigilance, but it also betrays the powers of invocation she sees in the diary document as such, how it garners her the power to speed up this journey, to foreshorten the distance between them.

Within her own larger mythology this power is partly derived from her adoption of the moniker The White Goddess, which she believed was an identity of one of her aleatory selves.70 Most famously articulated by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The

White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, the White Goddess is the deity responsible for all true poetry:

The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spin when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust — the female spider or the queen- bee whose embrace is death.71 The symbol of the White Goddess is the moon. As Graves explains, “Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun.”72 The poetry the White Goddess inspires also reflects Robertson’s moon-watching: “the main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman.”73 When

Robertson thus supplicates the moon in Reel 47: I Thought the Film Would End,74 in which she returns to the moon repeatedly, and films it every night, begging, “Let me

70 Written diary entry, April-May 1982 [Folder 1, #185]. 71 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 24. 72 Graves, 448. 73 Graves, 447. 74 21 October to 2 November 1986.

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sleep with him. Let me dream of him. Oh moon, moon, look at him. Look at him,” she is, in fact, addressing herself.75

The cinematic conjuring that Robertson as the White Goddess engages in all begins with her, or more precisely, in this cluster she anchors herself in a very particular way: at work on the film. Throughout the cluster, Robertson always cuts back to scenes that feature her sitting at the kitchen table, editing her film. In these shots, Robertson has set up the camera to record the space of her living and dining area, in time lapse. In the film this footage is sped up, presented in fast motion: sometimes she sits down and eats at the table while she works; at other times she moves her equipment to the side, and has a meal while she reads or watches television. The television is often prominently flickering in the background as

Robertson works, where she forms part of a decades-old conflation of televisual spectatorship and women’s work in the home,76 where advertisements from the introduction of domestic television sets routinely “instructed women how to watch television while doing household chores.”77 Setting up the domestic space so that

Robertson’s table, upon which she chops and writes and edits, faces the television is a remnant of this post-war order: “household labor and television were continually

75 Her power as a creative deity of desire also stretches beyond the fundamental relationality of the couple, drawing the significance of the moon back to its original function as time piece, its cyclical movement conjuring up the fecundity responsible for that which springs forth from the earth – gardens, and that which springs forth from desire – children. For if Robertson’s signification of the moon is complex, her recording of it is very consistent: her constant use of it is also another instance of repetition, but a repetition that is rooted in the cyclical, the waxing and waning of the moon another way for her to invoke the cyclic temporality at play in her gardens, in the very notion of a five-year diary, in the children she still hopes to birth. 76 Spigel, Make Room, 75. 77 Spigel, 85.

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condensed into one space designed to accommodate both activities.”78 Here the fact that she films herself specifically while she edits is of central concern: a traditional form of women’s cinematic work, editing was considered especially suited to women, used to honing their fine motor skills on domestic work like sewing.79 But for

Robertson editing fulfils a further range of discursive functions in Five Year Diary as a whole, which includes her practice of cutting and re-cutting the film over the course of twenty years, one of the primary methods with which she continually re-wrote the story of her life and the conditions of the diary text as such.80 The discursive function of editing also extends to how it is employed not as cut but as suture: a means to establish a relation between herself and her one true love by creating a set of images that rhythmically contracts back and forth, playing with the distance, in time and space, between subject and object of desire. What Robertson, sitting at the table, doing the work, makes visible here is waiting itself, and the enormous amount of labour this seemingly passive activity entails. But she also foregrounds her own position as the one who wrought this relation: she is the author of this engagement between her and her one true love.81

78 Spigel, 89. 79 Melanie Bell, ‘Rebuilding Britain: Women, Work, and Nonfiction Film, 1945–1970’, Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 4 (1 October 2018): 44. 80 Robertson’s continuous editing and re-editing offers a provocative point of interest for David E James’s distinction between the film diary and the diary film in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground. This distinction is located in the act of editing, as James argues, "Where the pure visual practice of the film diary privileged a single sense and a single textual system, the diary film subjects the original images to sounds and disjunct visual material.” I take up this issue in chapter 3. David E James, ‘Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden’, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David E James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 147. 81 It is not known whether Robertson was aware of Poppy Johnson’s Writing About This Work is This Work – This Work is Writing About This Work, first performed in 1976, where the artist installed a desk and chair in a gallery and worked at the desk, typing on a typewriter. A camera on a tripod filmed Johnson as she worked, and this was transmitted to a monitor in the gallery space. Yet the scenes of Robertson at her kitchen table bear a striking resemblance to Johnson at work at her desk, engaged in autobiographical, stream of consciousness writing while an audience looks on.

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The Fact of Marriage

Throughout the different diaries that comprise Five Year Diary, Robertson scripts the partner for whom she is preparing the trousseau. Through delineating him in lists, or through his part in conversations Robertson imagines them having, or by registering the clues that point to his coming, Robertson attempts to conjure Baker. But this conjuring is also an attempt at contraction, of foreshortening the distance between them. This contraction is negotiated through the cinematic apparatus, through

Robertson’s rhythmic use of the zoom and of intensive clusters of associative editing, an attempt to establish a type of cinematic language that Baker, when he finally meets Robertson, would be able to decode. If within a discussion of Robertson’s trousseau we continually arrive back at the question of conversation, it is because conversation and marriage are so closely linked in this project. The relation between conversation and marriage is already hinted at in the original etymology of the word, employed as a synonym for intercourse from the 16th century onwards,82 where speaking together is literally a form of carnal knowledge of another, a means of consummating a marriage. This accords well with how Cavell defines marriage in his

Contesting Tears, drawing from John Milton, and asserts that “the willingness for conversation ... [is] the basis of marriage, even making conversation what I might call the fact of marriage.”83 As he discusses the comedies of remarriage that are at the centre of Pursuits of Happiness, he notes that “talking together is fully and plainly

Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 104–5. 82 ‘Conversation | Origin and Meaning of Conversation by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 8 October 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/conversation. 83 Cavell, Contesting, 5.

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being together, a mode of association, a form of life, and I would like to say that in these films the central pair are learning to speak the same language.”84

The process of learning to speak the same language is rehearsed in different scenarios in Robertson’s diaries, often within the context of sex, recalling the etymological roots of conversation. In an undated diary entry, titled “A film I’d like to make with you,” she envisions her and Baker having “a dialogue naked in bed,” where the dialogue involves them getting used to saying certain words out loud:

Fuck. Tremble. Cunt. Deep. No.

Now.85 In a diary entry from 1982, Robertson writes: “Did I tell you, I love going down? I love worshipping it with all my orifices and body. I love yours. You’ll initiate me into tantra, into talking dirty …”86 But the terms of conversation that Robertson imagines as integral to her re-conception of marriage is perhaps most clearly seen in the

Biblical text Song of Songs, a key intertext to Robertson’s diary, and one which tells us much about the type of marriage Robertson tries to sketch. A re-written version of the Biblical book was read aloud by her during screenings of the film, in anticipation of the day she would get married in the gazebo, with her version, which removed

84 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 88. 85 Notes for “a film I’d like to make with you,” 1982 [Folder 6, #88b]. 86 Written diary entry, 1 March 1982 [Folder 6, #83].

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“the war and the sexism” 87 as the text used to conduct the ceremony. Her choice of structure here is important: the gazebo, Sayers reminds us, is a structure that we can both look toward, and look from.88 If, as I argued earlier, Robertson’s obsessive filming of the gazebo is a vigilant form of waiting, the wedding day is the point of fruition where she has moved from looking at the gazebo to standing in it and looking from it, that is, the move from conjuring to conversation, from the hope of the man to him in the flesh.

The form of this conversation, and thus of this marriage, becomes clear through the changes Robertson makes to the original Biblical text. Song of Songs is purportedly written by King Solomon, and takes the form of a chorus with the two main protagonists, the Beloved and the Shulamite, as the main speaking parts. The text’s main theme is the desire the Beloved and Shulamite share, although it is also haunted by the interplay between absence and presence — the lovers mostly admire one another from afar. As the Shulamite notes in Song of Songs 2:8-9:

The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes Leaping upon the mountains, Skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Behold, he stands behind our wall; He is looking through the windows, Gazing through the lattice.

87 Robertson mentions this in the voice-over track of Reel 23: After the Breakdown and the Mental Hospital. 88 Sayers, ‘Eastern Prospects’, 300. 151

In her version Robertson retains the form of the original, which suits the form of wedding vows, and which provide both man and woman with certain phrases that need to be uttered in order to contract the marriage. She also retains Solomon’s original wording, but with two important changes. In a number of instances

Solomon’s Shulamite imagines her beloved speaking to her, and recounts his words, as in Song of Songs 2:10 –

My beloved spoke, and said to me: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, And come away.” In Robertson’s version, these statements are made by the beloved and not by the

Shulamite, the imagined man brought to life. In this way Robertson’s version shares the tension between absence and presence that marks the original, but is also constantly trying to shift the imagined into the province of the real, shift absence into presence, and speed up this process through condensing, contraction, editing the original down to less than half its size. The second change Robertson makes to Song of Songs involves who is speaking. She breaks up long monologues that each part engages in and splits it between both speaking parties, so that it becomes less of a speaking at the other and more of a speaking together, a conversation:

He: Behold, you are beautiful my love, behold you are beautiful! She: Your eyes are doves. He: Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes. She: Your mouth is lovely. He: You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you. Come with me, my bride. You have taken my heart, my bride, you have taken my heart with a glance of your eyes. How sweet is your love, my bride! She: How much better is your love than wine! He: Your lips are nectar, my bride. You are a garden fountain, a well of living water, and flowing streams.

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This change, from monologue to dialogue, is also reflected in the fact that Robertson’s version affords the beloved, the man, a more prominent speaking role, which means, most importantly, that he shares many concerns that is only the province of the woman in the original. Robertson thus amends a number of statements made by the woman in the original Scripture, changing it into statements made by both man and woman together, a speaking arrangement entirely missing from the original. The ceremony starts with such a statement of erotic reciprocity between the couple:

She and He: Oh, that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth! For your love is better than wine.

But it is not only such declarations that are now spoken together, but also that which leads up to this consummation: the period they have waited to be together. In the original Scripture, it is the Shulamite who is consistently speaking about how she waits for the Beloved, waits for the right time for them to be together. This is illustrated in metaphoric terms through the Shulamite’s visits to the garden, to see if any blossoms have yet appeared, a token of the arrival of the beloved’s appointed time. In Robertson’s version, these visits are now made by both man and woman, both labouring in wait for the other. In the original it is the Shulamite who is constantly warning others to not indulge love before this appointed time; in

Robertson’s version this is a concern voiced by both:

She and He: We tell you, that you stir not up nor awaken love until it pleases. Both wait, and both are responsible for making the home of this marriage. In a statement again reserved only for the woman in the original, Robertson’s version has the couple speak, thus shifting the realm of the domestic from the purview of only the woman to that of them both:

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She and He: Our couch [bed] is green; the beams of our house are cedar; our rafters are pine. Within Robertson’s context this statement has particular valence if one considers the importance of the garden within her iconography, her actual garden the space in which this imagined wedding ceremony takes place. The implied fertility that the space of the garden evokes (in the New International Version-translation that verse reads as “our bed is verdant”; a literal flower bed) is returned to in a speaking part

Robertson’s version affords to a group entirely missing from the original: the couple’s children. These as yet un-born children join Robertson and Baker as they sing lines that are the only ones Robertson adds to the original Scripture,

He and She and Children: For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds has come, the time of the singing has come. Their children, born from the conversation of the conjugal, now become part of the continuation of that very conversation.

What becomes clear from Robertson’s rewritten Song of Songs is that, having scripted the man she wants, Robertson can focus on scripting a marriage. Her recasting of heterosexual marriage is founded on an equal division of labour on two fronts, the first of which is that both of them are responsible for the realm of the domestic. For conversation is not only rooted in marriage: it is also rooted in the domestic — the

Latin conversationem from which it is derived is articulated as the act of living with.

Robertson scripts marriage as having a very specific engagement with the domestic, which is already seen in the cluster of images of invocation discussed earlier. The scenes in which Robertson films herself editing the film, working hard on developing a cinematic language she can share with Baker, are all filmed at her kitchen table. But

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she not only cuts in these sequences: she reads, writes, prepares meals, cleans up after, the camera in time lapse capturing the way she moves between these activities, now sped up. The table, so often used by Robertson in other instances of the diary as a type of stand-in for a frame, where she employs an overhead angle to film the different dishes she prepares against the backdrop of the table,89 is here shot from a different angle, one which offers us the table in profile. Robertson sits at the table, edits on her Goko Recording Editor, then moves the apparatus away and replaces it with a stack of books and papers and diaries. She reads, writes and sometimes types

(a typewriter now stands where the editing apparatus was, seconds ago), then moves all of this to the side so that she can cook. The table now becomes the place where a meal is prepared: Robertson chops and mixes, then clears the table and sets it up for a meal, which she eats while still seated at the table, watching Doctor Who on the television in the background.

In chapter 1 I laid out an argument for how Robertson employs the political valence of the kitchen table in her project of feminist world-making. Again drawing from

Sara Ahmed’s delineation in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, I want to extend that argument to pertain to a specific part of Robertson’s project, that of reimagining heterosexual marriage. Ahmed devotes a substantial amount of space to thinking about the role of the table in the writing of philosophy, specifically in terms of how the table demands a certain gendered orientation. This orientation, Ahmed argues, is one that is suited to the bodies of men: the writing table, as we find it facing philosophers (like Husserl, or Heidegger, two of the examples she draws from) is one that is firstly a table specifically designated for the labour of writing: “… he is sitting

89 I extensively discuss these instances in chapter 1, of Robertson as she bakes bread in Reel 2: Definitions of Fat and Thin, and Reel 9: April Fool/ Happy Birthday ’33. 155

at the desk, the writing table, and not at another kind of table, such as the kitchen table. Such other tables would not, perhaps, be the 'right' kind of tables for the making of philosophy.”90 Secondly, this table is usually located in a room that is set apart for that purpose, like a study. More importantly, the study is that which is set apart from, and often elides, the rest of the house, just as the work of writing negates the domestic labour which sets the table for its emergence.91

As I’ve argued about the world-making possibilities of Robertson’s recording of domestic labour, it is the distinct lack of a demarcation between the activities usually relegated to different parts of the house, and thus to the labour of different bodies, that is inherent to this work, where making the diary and making the home (where both are a way of making the world, and of preparing the trousseau) all occur on the same table, in the kitchen, in the middle of the house. Here Robertson’s use of the table is thus inherent to the feminist impetus of Five Year Diary — she slots into a larger history of women who come to the table, and uses it as a means to think through all the different acts of labour that occur in and around the house, where a table is used not only for writing but also to cook, to sew, to feed a family, to engage in conversation with those one shares a house with. As I point out in chapter 1, this remains elided and overlooked labour because of, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, the fundamental power imbalance between men and women, where, “In the material realm of production … men function within the mode of production while women, even if they function in production, are, as women, largely located in a mode of

90 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 52. 91 Ahmed, 31.

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reproduction.”92 This mode of reproduction is one that often happens on kitchen tables, where women are engaged in, as Rich notes, “the friction of the scrubbing brush … the iron across the shirt … the invisible weaving of a frayed and threadbare family life … that we have been charged to do ‘for love,’ not merely unpaid, but unacknowledged by the political philosophers.”93 Ahmed notes that

Tables for feminist philosophers might not bracket or put aside the intimacy of familial attachments; such intimacies are at the front; they are 'on the table' rather than behind it. We might even say that feminist tables are shaped by such attachments; such attachments shape the surface of tables …94

Robertson is trying to shape both table and attachment, with a division of labour that not only includes the sphere of the domestic, but also the labour of love. For built into

Robertson’s cosmology is the idea that she is not waiting alone, nor is she the only one preparing a trousseau. Baker, she notes, is making a trousseau of his own, a film for her to watch when they meet, a film that will seamlessly slot into hers.

Robertson’s imagined marriage thus not only relies on film as a means to articulate words for a conjugal conversation, but extends this into the practice of marriage itself. Of course they would watch the trousseaus together, as Robertson lays out in a diary entry in 1982,

We’ll have a private screening. You’ll sit in the audience and see me in my apartment, eating the dinner (and leftovers from it) that I invited you to — oh baby! You’ll see me strip for you + you will know that the other men in the audience are turned-on and you will take me home afterwards.95

92 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 16. 93 Rich, On Lies, 205. 94 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 62. 95 Written diary entry, 1 March 1982 [Folder 6, #83]. 157

But their wedding does not mark the end of the trousseau: instead it continues, now something they make together. They would film the wedding, she notes, and film the birth of and their life with their children. In the diary she auditions possibilities for how to equip their house for this endeavour: “We set the taperecorders on voice- actuation. We have closed-circuit TV in the home.”96

Of course, the notion of film as a means to articulate a relationship was not new.

Robertson was stepping into a tradition pioneered by the likes of Stan and Jane

Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann, a tradition James terms “the domestication of cinema.”97 This tradition, James writes,

allowed an even more radical incorporation of it [film] into life’s most crucial transactions. If in telling its own story the visual tells all others, the exchange of vision between people becomes the means of social interaction; and so film — a means of seeing —becomes not just an instrument of personal documentation, or yet simply the means by which a subjectivity may be documented, but also the mode of a relationship’s practice.98 Thus we find the Brakhages passing the camera back and forth during domestic quarrels, as in Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959); and in the midst of the birth of a child, as in Window Water Baby Moving (1959); or the easy, casual manner in which both Schneemann and her partners film each other during all that daily life entails,99

96 Written diary entry, 5 October (year unknown) (Folder 6, #22b). This also accords with the traditional idea that a trousseau not only contains the objects needed for a home, but also the tools needed to create more of those objects as time passes. Traditional trousseaus would for instance not only include linen for beds, but also a spinning wheel and loom with which to create more cloth in the future, that could in turn be made into new linen. Kaplan, Marriage Bargain, 83. 97 David E James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 37. 98 James, 37. 99 Composer James Tenney in the case of Fuses; Anthony McCall in Kitch’s Last Meal. 158

from picking blueberries outside their home and making jam in Kitch’s Last Meal

(1973-1976), to naked conversations on their bed in Fuses (1965), capturing the process of how a flaccid penis slowly becomes hard.

Just like the Brakhages, or Schneemann and her partners, Robertson is interested in how cinema can become the mode of a relationship’s practice. Yet what separates

Robertson’s domestic cinema from the earlier tradition it forms part of, at least in the way that it tends to be practiced by a woman filmmaker like Schneemann, lies in its particular take on feminist subversion. In Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, Alexandra Juhasz notes that

Schneemann and her American contemporaries, women who managed to make art in the early 60s and before … what Schneemann calls 'women on the edge' … were trying to live outside the crushing confines of the bourgeois-nuclear-family-white-picket-fence- suburban-monogamy even as they remained entrenched in a patriarchy.100 Many did not get married, nor have children. In a diary entry in the 1960s, artist Lee

Lozano writes, “WE MUST BE MORE SELECTIVE ABOUT WHAT MATTER WE

CREATE … WOMEN, RELEASE YOURSELF FROM THE DRAIN OF BEARING

CHILDREN, GIVE YOUR ENERGY TO THE WORLD IN MORE MODERN

WAYS.”101 Given the prevailing second-wave understanding of heterosexual love and children as what Shulamith Firestone would term “the pivot of women’s oppression

100 Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 62. 101 From the notebooks of Lee Lozano, quoted in Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (London: Afterall Books, 2014), 63.

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today,”102 this is not surprising. These were fundamental questions for the movement of women’s liberation: heterosexuality was “a political institution which disempowers women,”103 Adrienne Rich notes in Compulsory Heterosexuality and

Lesbian Existence, with heterosexual marriage a structure that, de Beauvoir argues, makes women “’praying mantises,’ ‘bloodsuckers.’”104 The disempowerment of women that is the result of heterosexual relationships manifests itself even in the sex act itself, as Andrea Dworkin famously stated in Intercourse, a rallying cry for radical feminism:

Therefore, women feel the fuck—when it works, when it overwhelms—as possession; and feel possession as deeply erotic; and value annihilation of the self in sex as proof of the man’s desire or love, its awesome intensity. And therefore, being possessed is phenomenologically real for women; and sex itself is an experience of diminishing self-possession, an erosion of self. That loss of self is a physical reality, not just a psychic vampirism; and as a physical reality it is chilling and extreme, a literal erosion of the body’s integrity and its ability to function and to survive.105

Unlike Dworkin, Robertson wants to indeed feel the fuck, but a fuck that she has scripted: “I hear you come over and over again. I feel you more distinctly, get it into me gradually. I hug you, you fuck me so many ways.”106 Instead of the feminist revolution envisioned by Mary Daly, where women are no longer “psychosexually bound to men;”107 or in more radical terms suggested by Valerie Solanas, where

102 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), 142. 103 Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (Indiana University: Onlywomen Press, 1980). 104 de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 509. 105 Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987), 88. 106 Written diary entry, November 1982. [Folder 6, #80]. 107 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 125.

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“SCUM will couple-bust — barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up;”108 or in the utopian plan of Firestone, where the nuclear family is dismantled and children are born through reproductive technology and not women’s bodies;109 Robertson keeps domesticity, parenthood and heterosexual marriage firmly within her own grand plan. Yet her vision is no less utopian: the man and the marriage she envisions are scripted by her, on her terms, are made in her image. The man Robertson scripts is one who confirms to all aspects of her own identity — he, too, is vegan, a student of the esoteric, but more importantly, he is also labouring in love, working to listen as she speaks, who has looked out for signs of her coming, who has tried to decipher her name from the clues all around, who desires to see everything she has recorded of her life in his absence. This too is a form of world- making. For finally Robertson’s biggest intervention in the recasting of heterosexual marriage may be this: the only way to be with a man is to make him yourself, a fantasy from the planet of Gallifrey.

108 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004), 73. 109 Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, 198. 161

Chapter 3 The World Movie

A year into first starting to record her life on film, as what would eventually become

Five Year Diary, Robertson recorded the details of a mental breakdown she suffered the year before, in a written diary entry:

What’s been happening this year: I borrow camera from school and no one retrieves it. It is taped together, the focus is broken, since it has fallen twice at the end of the summer I lose my job which kept me grounded, though deluded, since my father’s death, I pick blackberries, raspberries + unemployment checks. I begin to get panicky. (Symptom: film everything in short flashes, series of manic audio tapes, very prolific.) I do screening at home + show 5 hours of the Diary. I go bananas, think I can be the ultimate psychic. 1

This was not Robertson’s first breakdown. In therapy since the age of 17, she had, she noted, been given a range of diagnoses over the course of her life: “adult life-crisis adjustment, anxiety, borderline psychotic, manic-depressive, obsessive.”2 Little documentation survives of these diagnoses; from what does survive, it seems that the diagnoses most consistently made were that of bipolar depression, and of schizoaffective disorder. By 1982, when the events the diary entry above refers to took place, she had also been hospitalized every year since 1978, spending an average of three months interned during each stay. The rest of her life would be marked by

1 Written diary entry, April to May 1983. [Folder 5, #12]. 2 Diary document, date unknown. 162

multiple hospitalisations during the course of every year, and therapy with a rotating set of therapists, psychiatrists, social workers and family counsellors each time she was released. This pattern continued up until her death in 2012. At times suffering from debilitating depression, she also had to contend with a host of delusional thought patterns, and both visual and auditory hallucinations.3

From the earliest screenings of Five Year Diary, Robertson emphasized the role her illness plays in the work. In the screening notes of the project she notes that the filmmaker is “diagnosed as manic depressive,”4 and that the work is “trying to make a joyful statement about a melancholic person … I grew stronger by looking at my life.”5

Robertson also consistently framed the diary as not only an anchoring point in her life, but in fact as that which kept her sane. As she wrote in an official grant application in

1991, where she requested funds to process, edit and add a voice-over to a year’s worth of diary tapes: “Making my diary has literally saved my life.”6 In the work of Scott

MacDonald, the critic who has devoted the most focus to Robertson’s oeuvre, her illness is considered in similar terms. In an interview with Robertson he suggests that “When you’re not able to make films, your life seems in crisis,”7 adding later that “For

Robertson … making and showing the diary has become a central means for maintaining psychic balance.”8 Yet the relationship between Robertson’s diary and her

3 As she outlines in a number of instances, for instance in a letter to Pope John Paul II, dated 2 August 1989 [Folder 9, #204]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #205]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #206]. 4 Screening notes, 1987 [Folder 3, #21]. 5 Screening notes, 1985-1986 [Folder 3, #17]. 6 Project description as part of a grant application, 1991 [Folder 3, #280]. 7 Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (University of California Press, 1992), 207. 8 MacDonald, 206. 163

illness is more complex than this would suggest. In certain ways, its practice served the obsessional nature of Robertson’s manic states, whilst the text itself was a locus for her delusional thought to coalesce around. In other ways, the diary functioned as a way for

Robertson to make sense of that which is senseless, to seek ways to impose form on the amorphous mass of delusional thought she experienced. This imposition of form utilised medium-specific elements of cinema to move from nonsense to sense, a process we could also call that of making the personal legible to the collective, or: of moving from speaking to oneself to the ability to speak to others.

To trace this dual movement in Five Year Diary, this chapter thus first explores the conceptual framework of The World Movie, which Robertson saw as her divine calling as The White Goddess. It also considers how both the practice of film and the film itself became imbricated in her states of obsessional delusion. It then moves on to how

Robertson employs the film in an effort to analyse herself, utilising the function of review and revision that cinematic capture enables. This forms the springboard for consideration of how Robertson attempts to make herself legible to others. Here I draw from the work of Stanley Cavell to position how I understand sense, and how the repetitive imposition of form upon the inability to “attend to, abstract, conceptualize, express … coherent thought”9 becomes a way of moving from nonsense to sense. In particular, I focus on three formal techniques Robertson relies on in Five Year Diary to bring about this articulation: the cut, the use of simultaneous audio tracks, and the register of the confessional, which Robertson utilises through direct address of the

9 How Goodwin and Jamison define thought disorder, commonly experienced by people suffering from manic depression or schizoaffective disorder. Frederick K Goodwin and Kay R Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 43. 164

camera framed in close-up of her face. It is through this casting of form that Robertson also engages the history of female pathology on film that is part of the greater lineage of these images, the cinematic capture of how the female body breaks, the very many ways a mind can fail. I thus start this discussion with the body this body of work is rooted in, is made by, which it mercilessly focuses on. In particular I start with the history of that body and its illness, a history rooted in the repetitive movement of illness and recovery and illness again, of successive regimes of therapy and drugs and hospitalisations, over the course of weeks and months and years, a repetition that already anticipates the repetitive imposition of form Robertson employs to recast the failures of her life, and of her film.

EXTREMELY BAD MONOLOGUE IN HEAD A Medical History

Robertson first visited a psychologist at the age of 17, at the Youth Guidance Centre in

Boston in 1966.10 At this point, she mentions later, while in therapy as an adult, she had been “anxious and depressed” since elementary school, but the visit to the psychologist was linked to suicidal thoughts and paranoia.11 For the next fifteen years, up until she starts making Five Year Diary, Robertson saw doctors at Cambridge City Hospital;

Glenside Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts; the Massachusetts

Mental Health Centre; the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy; the Harvard Community

Health Plan; psychological services at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where

10 Noted in a medical history written by Robertson, 1984 [Folder 7, #207]. 11 Recounted in a letter (addressed to experimental filmmaker Marjorie Keller), dated 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #208]. 165

she started her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1976,12 majoring in Art and Psychology; and

McLean Hospital,13 famous for having treated the Confessional Boston poets — Robert

Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath.14 These institutions provided Robertson with various services: psychologists for individual, group and family therapy, which she attended with her parents; psychiatrists; and social workers. For the most part,

Robertson’s experience of her doctors was negative, later describing them as

“threatening,” “verbally abusive,” or “ultimately weird and seductive … ”15 an issue she often refers to in the diary project. Robertson’s sentiments accord with the general attitude adopted by second-wave feminism in this regard, as Vicki Pollard articulates,

“Doctors are always enemies of women … The way we are treated by doctors is symptomatic of the conditioning we get in all aspects of our lives.”16 Much of what second-wave feminism revolted against was how much medication was being prescribed to women in psychiatric settings.17 Robertson was no exception. She was first

12 This was not the first degree Robertson started. After high school she spent one year at Antioch College in Ohio before dropping out. She later attended night school at Boston University, studying sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #209]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #210]. 13 Noted in a medical history written by Robertson, 1984 [Folder 7, #207]. Completed doctor’s questionnaire, hospital unknown, 1977 [Folder 9, #211]. 14 Although I have found no direct reference to Robertson having knowledge of this history of the institution, it is highly unlikely that she was not aware of this. She was certainly familiar with Sylvia Plath’s history, noting in one diary entry: “i should be pleased, i am miserable as so many fine artists have been, think sylvai [sic] plath in her cul-de-sac ………………………… i should be proud of the truth.” Written diary entry, 23 March 1985 [Folder 4, #56]. 15 Recounted in a letter (addressed to Marjorie Keller), dated 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #208]. 16 Vicki Pollard, ‘Producing Society’s Babies*’, in Voices from Women’s Liberation, ed. Leslie B Tanner (New York: New American Library, 1971), 194. 17 Ian Dowbiggin argues that the rejection of prescription drugs in the 1970s was largely fuelled by the women’s movement, who had caught on to the fact that new drugs, such as tranquilisers, were prescribed to “72 percent more women than men.” As he notes in The Quest for Mental Health, “The 1984 edition of the best-selling Our Bodies, Ourselves stated that physicians routinely refused to listen or believe women, withheld knowledge or lied to them, and ‘offered them tranquilizers or moral advice instead of medical care or useful help from community resources.’ Physicians 166

prescribed medication in 1976: Diazepam (Valium), a tranquilizer; Amitriptyline

(Elavil), a tricyclic antidepressant; and Thioridazine (Mellaril), an antipsychotic drug used to treat psychosis and schizophrenia.18 Between 1976 and 1981, other drugs were added to what Robertson would refer to as her “stew”:19 Lithium, prescribed as mood stabilizer, especially in patients on the schizo-affective spectrum; and Haloperidol

(Haldol), Perphenazine (Triavil, Trilafon), and Chlorpromazine (Thorazine), all antipsychotics. Throughout her life Robertson revolted against the medication she was forced to take.20

She was first hospitalized in 1978, when she was involuntarily committed to Glenside

Hospital for a three-month stay.21 In 1979 she spent another three months at Glenside, despite repeated attempts at being discharged from “this so-called hospital,” where she was subjected to “the false intentions of the doctors.”22 In 1980, she was again involuntarily committed for a period of three months, this time at McLean Hospital, by

‘prescribed drugs which hooked [women], sickened them, changed their entire lives,’ Our Bodies, Ourselves declared.” Ian Robert Dowbiggin, The Quest for Mental Health: A Tale of Science, Medicine, Scandal, Sorrow, and Mass Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 162. 18 The oldest of the drugs had reached the market a mere 17 years before — Robertson’s history of mental illness comes at a time of great change in the landscape of medication possibilities. The introduction of antipsychotic Chlorpromazine in the 1950s caused what David Healy refers to as the “critical event in the foundation of psychopharmacology,” allowing patients who would have been confined to hospitals for life to function outside of it. David Healy, The Antidepressant Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 43. 19 In Reel 71: ON PROBATION, ETC. (3 February to 6 May 1990). 20 Letter of complaint to Glenside hospital administration, 26 September 1979 [Folder 9, #212]. Also voiced by Robertson throughout the reels of Five Year Diary. 21 Robertson’s hospitalisations between 1978 and 1980 are the inspiration for the short film Locomotion (1980), which she describes as her “feelings about mental hospitalisations.” Screening notes, date unknown [Folder 9, #213]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #213]. 22 Letter of complaint to Glenside hospital administration, 26 September 1979 [Folder 9, #212]. 167

whom she considered to be “misguided landlords, and my naive, foolish parents.”23

During this time she noted that The Virgin Mary was alive and that she had seen her, that she had been witness to the birth of Jesus, and that “our Lord is hidden well in a more sane land, Canada.”24 Robertson eventually left the hospital against the wishes of her parents, who refused to sign her discharge form. Her father, Richmond Robertson, was appointed as her guardian, and she was released into his custody,25 with a court order dictating that she remain on her medication.26 She was 31 years old.

Richmond Robertson died in 1982, a few months after Robertson first started recording her life in 1981. She saw a private psychiatrist during that year, and attended grief and family therapy, as well as a group for women who overeat.27 Following her father’s death she suffered a major breakdown, documented extensively in Reel 22: A Short

Affair (and) Going Crazy28 and Reel 23: A Breakdown (and) After the Mental Hospital,29 reels that are pivotal to understanding the way Robertson takes up her illness in the diary project. During this time Robertson attended therapy four times a week.30 She eventually spent September, October and November in the Massachusetts Mental

Health Centre, to which she voluntarily admitted herself,31 so that she “can be as loudly

23 Letter to unknown person, written from hospital, date unknown [Folder 9, #215]. 24 Letter to unknown person, written from hospital, date unknown [Folder 9, #216]. 25 McLean Hospital three-day notice to terminate hospitalisation, 21 October 1980 [Folder 9, #217]. Letter outlining commitment to McLean Hospital and guardianship, 17 October 1980 [Folder 9, #218]. Letter from Robertson’s lawyers regarding guardianship, 15 October 1980 [Folder 9, #219]. 26 Written account of hospitalisations, in letter to Marjorie Keller, 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #208b]. 27 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #71]. 28 23 August to 1 September 1982. 29 1 September to 13 December 1982. 30 Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 1, #12]. 31 Screening notes, 1986 [Folder 3, #25]. 168

crazy as I want,”32 but which she later described, as all the other hospitals she had attended up until that point, as a “hell-hole.”33 During this hospital stay she actively anticipated the coming of Tom Baker, and outlined this in the diaries she kept while interned, some of which are explored in chapter 2.34 Robertson remained in therapy at the same institution up until 1989, with various short, voluntary and involuntary hospital stays in 1984,35 1985 and 1986,36 and as part of various outpatient programs, which allowed her to spend her mornings at the institution, and afternoons taking classes as a graduate student at the Massachusetts College of Art.37 One of her breakdowns, in either 1984 or 1985, purportedly found her walking toward Boston naked. Robertson later mentioned that she had suffered from an “EXTREMELY BAD

MONOLOGUE IN HEAD,”38 in addition to “hearing voices again.”39 Throughout this period she remained dubious of the doctors in whose care she found herself, and accused one of being “actively, physically seductive.”40 As the reels of her life recording

32 Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 1, #4]. 33 Written account of hospitalisations, in letter to Marjorie Keller, 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #208b]. 34 Written diary entry, 18 September 1982 [Folder 6, #90]. 35 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #212]. 36 Screening notes, date unknown [Folder 9, #213]. 37 Daily schedule while day patient (specific hospital unknown), 1984 [Folder 9, #214]. Daily schedule while day patient (specific hospital unknown), 1982 [Folder 9, #215]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #216]. 38 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #212b]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #217]. 39 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #205]. Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #206]. 40 Throughout her life Robertson accuses doctors (in the context of both mental hospitals and other instances of medical care) of unethical behaviour, particularly involving sexual harassment. In a diary entry from 1985, she writes:

(My shrink won’t see me since I think he loves me!) (So what was it, some clod witha problem in transference and body language flirting with the poor crazy?)

Who thinks the therapist is the rapist? All crazies please share their dirt.

169

increased, so did her record of medications. In addition to the lithium and antipsychotics already mentioned, she was prescribed Imipramine, Desipramine, and

Amoxapine, all tricyclic depressants, and Benzatropine (Cogentin), an anticholinergic.41

She continued to see psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers during this time, and remained in family therapy with her mother. 1989 seems to be a particularly stressful year for Robertson: her contract for data entry at Minuteman Library Network came to an end, the grant she had received for working on the diary ran out,42 and she decided to “QUIT LITHIUM FOREVER.”43 She ended up being hospitalised at the

Westborough State Hospital multiple times that year. These stays occurred after

Robertson slammed her body into the furniture and walls of her house, “trying to get voices out my head.”44 She was eventually arrested, then committed. Robertson was home less than six weeks before being committed again, after having violated her

You slipped your wedding ring off and on. You weren’t like the last guy who stuck out his crotch and put his arms behind his neck or gestured like an ant wildly gesticulating, let’s talk about your sexual fantasies about me. Please talk about my crotch. No, you weren’t so crass. You just asked me, after I said I saw you twice in a car in my hometown, what part of the body I’d felt that with, I said forehead and heart. Did you want me to say I throbbed for you? Hey, daddy, no way, you threw me in an isolation cell! And later in the same entry: “I pulled you around to face me, when you refused to look me in the eyes, and you said I’d hit you. You lied. I have seen all your grinning faces as you wrestled me down onto the grey mattress, as you pulled my pants down …” Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #284]. Written account of hospitalisations, part of a letter addressed to Marjorie Keller, dated 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #208c]. 41 Written account of hospitalisations, 1984 [Folder 7, #207]. 42 Notes to Reel 67: So Much Doctor Who (7 March to 4 June 1989) and Reel 68: Plenty of Doctor Who (10 June to 15 September 1989) [Folder 3, #219]. 43 Written account of hospitalisations, part of a letter addressed to Marjorie Keller, dated 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #1]. 44 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #220]. 170

probation45 by refusing to take her medication,46 and being accused of “verbal threats against family” and “delusional thinking.”47

Robertson produced an entire reel of the diary, Reel 70: Christmas – New Year ’90

Resolutions,48 during the breaks she was allowed to take from the hospital over the holidays, seeing and filming her family’s holiday events. By now Robertson was a veteran of the hospital stay, and even envisioned a hospital-themed party she could throw:

All these people who have ever had psychoses should get together for a reunion to swap stories of hallucinations, to laugh over the embarrassment of admitting those fancy stories. Oh man, the tapes!! Psychotics’ World, a new DiskAroma smell of saltine crackers and disinfectant — I always know when I am about to head in again for another few days or months, I get a wave of nasal nostalgia.

I’ll serve Zarex and Tang and instant coffee made with tap water. This party ought to happen, it’s more possible than the Wedding I had hoped for, for which I was gonna offer tickets to those who had guessed most correctly the answers here and there, and if you were god and my psychiatrist you would be able to answer. It’s just that I thought my

45 Probation documents, Trial Court in Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 4 October 1989 [Folder 9, #221]. Probation documents, District Court Department of the Trial Court, Framingham Division, 11 December 1989 [Folder 7, #222]. 46 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #223]. 47 When she was eventually released in early January 1990, her probation now included having to see a psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, and attend a day program at the hospital, as well as family therapy. Probation documents, Trial Court in Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 4 October 1989 [Folder 9, #221]. Hospital service plan, hospital unknown, 24 January 1990 [Folder 7, #270]. 48 23 December 1989 to 3 February 1990. 171

psychiatrist was Y’Shua Christ. I wanted to be the bride of christ but forego the chastity, give Jesus his due.49 She remained part of Westborough State Hospital’s outpatient programme for the first few years of the 1990s, although she considered her psychiatrist a “drug-pusher, semi- threatening,” and her social worker as “condescending, stupid.”50 Paranoia impacted every part of her life, from her part-time job as census enumerator (“people in office muttering, ‘I’m crazy,’ and staring at me”),51 to her therapy at Alcoholics Anonymous

(“freaky men staring at me”),52 to reports of “threatened rape” and “Satanism” in the hospital she attended that year. In a diary entry she notes that lace bras, panties, cards and peanuts were left in her home.53 From 1992 onwards the exact details of Robertson’s hospital stays are more murky, although we do know that she spent a period in St

Elizabeth’s Hospital at the beginning of that year,54 and refused to leave her home for six weeks in the fall of 1993, struck by paranoia and hallucinations.55 She continued to struggle with paranoia and delusional thinking, and suffered a breakdown after the death of her niece Emily, which she captured in detail in the penultimate three reels of the diary. By 1998 Robertson seems to have stopped working on the diary, and it is unclear whether she still travelled with the film to screenings. During the fourteen years that remained of her life Robertson would be interned multiple times over the course of each year.56

49 Written diary entry, 10 March 1985 [Folder 1, #225]. 50 Written account of hospitalisations, part of a letter addressed to Marjorie Keller, dated 18 March 1992 [Folder 9, #1]. 51 Written diary entry, 1990 [Folder 1, #226]. 52 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #226]. 53 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #227]. 54 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #228]. 55 Written biography that appears in diary, date unknown [Folder 1, #229]. 56 She spent a lot of time at Charles River Hospital in 1999, where the only remaining official diagnosis of her condition by doctors shifted over the course of the year from Axis 1: bipolar disorder to bipolar disorder mixed vs schizoaffective disorder. This remained her diagnosis throughout multiple hospital stays at each institution. This list includes the University of 172

Closed-circuit TV for God The Dual Movement of Illness in Five Year Diary

For a large part of her life, diarising and Robertson’s illness were closely intertwined.

She had kept diaries as a child, then stopped in early adulthood. In the late 1970s she resumed the practice, in part because she was suicidal. In February 1977 Robertson writes, “To start a journal or not to start a journal. Probably to start would be best: lately

I’ve thought of suicide again, muffled thoughts beneath the anti-depressant drugs I consume.”57 Other diary entries suggest that the decision to resume this practice was part of Robertson’s therapy, as she mentions later: “I wonder about all my ways. I think

I will … look through old journal + copy thoughts + think about them here + maybe I will do an analysis of shoe box high school journal, index cards.”58 For Robertson, the diary was indeed a means of analysis, where analysis here is understood as a way of imposing form on that which is yet unnamed, amorphous, of delineating that which is yet undelineated. But before understanding this movement of the diary as the practice of making sense, it is important to first address its other movement, where the practice of recording gets co-opted into Robertson’s psychosis: the distinction between these two movements is a structuring tension of the work.

Massachusetts Memorial Medical Centre, MetroWest Medical Centre, Arbour Hospital and Pembroke Hospital. She is also on a long roster of medication: antipsychotics Thiothixene (Navane), Olanzapine (Zyprexa), Aripiprazole (Abilify), and Risperidone (Risperdal Consta); antidepressants Fluoxetine (Prozac), and Trazodone; mood stabilizer Oxcarbazepine (Trileptal); and antiparkinsonian medication Trihexyphenidyl (Artane), which was prescribed to counter the side-effects of the various antipsychotics. Service plan, Charles River Hospital, 3 September 1999 [Folder 9, #230]. Discharge plan, Charles River Hospital, 5 December 1999 [Folder 9, #231]. Discharge plan, Charles River Hospital, 5 December 1999 [Folder 9, #232]. Written record of hospitalisations, kept by Robertson, date unknown [Folder 9, #233]. 57 Written diary entry, 16 February 1977 [Folder 7, #234]. Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 7, #235]. 58 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 7, #236]. 173

During manic periods that led up to breakdowns Robertson experienced the obsessive need to record everything around her. She shut herself up in her apartment for days at a time, not venturing outside, and closely filmed all the objects in her house. Some of this footage remains in Reel 23: A Breakdown (and) After the Mental Hospital,59 shot in the wake of her father’s death. The reel sports handheld shots of a television screen blaring out of

Robertson’s kitchen, a wooden figurine on the shelf, a wasp Robertson found in her kitchen, a pamphlet for a screening, overhead shots of Robertson eating tofu with miso, with her hands, while she is heard on the voice-over:

Again, waiting for The Last Judgment to come on TV, and I’d be there with my camera, ready to catch the first word from God. But it appeared very highly unlikely. Everything in my house would need to be photographed, of course, as it would be significant later. I wasn’t going out to the film series I had tickets for, I was staying inside, it was too scary in the world, me and the wasp, we had to hide. That Robertson singles out The Last Judgement, the 1961 Vittoria de Sica film here, is interesting in the light of how Giorgio Agamben positions photography as that which

“captures the Last Judgment; it represents the world as it appears on the last day, the

Day of Wrath.”60 Here Agamben is specifically interested in how photographing something or someone manages to isolate and focus attention on that person or object, akin to the attention one receives on the day when all is judged, when one’s actions are scrutinized by God. More specifically, photography manages to encapsulate a person in an ordinary gesture: at the point of being photographed. Agamben notes,

In the supreme instant, man, each man, is given over forever to his smallest, most everyday gesture. And yet, thanks to the photographic

59 1 September to 13 December 1982. 60 Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Last Judgment’, in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 23. 174

lens, that gesture is now charged with the weight of an entire life; that insignificant or even silly moment collects and condenses in itself the meaning of an entire existence.61 This description of the work of the camera is not only a good approximation of what is happening here in these sequences of Robertson filming everything in the house, but really of the larger project itself. There are instances where Robertson felt that everything would have to be filmed because it had great significance (from a written diary entry: “THIS IS A DIARY I should have the camera every second + show where my eyes go”);62 at other times she thought the practice of obsessive recording could deliver her with the silver bullet that could put an end to this pain. In a diary entry

Robertson writes,

WHEN WILL DESPAIR STOP? ~ When I read, write film every moment63 But obsessive filming also had its drawbacks. It was expensive, and Robertson spent most of her always precariously little finances on buying endless rolls of film stock and having it processed.64 It could also greatly contribute to her anxiety levels: In 1989 she was sectioned after an arrest for assaulting her 72-year old mother, citing “stress due to a film ‘diary’ she is editing”65 for her violent behaviour.66 The diary was not merely therapeutic — it could also be exhausting, infuriating, too much. In another diary entry,

61 Agamben, 24. 62 Written diary entry, 5 October to November 1983. 63 Written diary entry, 5 December 1983 to May 1984 [Folder 1, #261]. 64 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 5, #231]. 65 Discharge referral form, Westborough State Hospital, 4 October 1989 [Folder 9, #265]. 66 In her in-person voice-over during screenings of Reel 69: Guess Who, Breakdowns (4 October to 21 November 1989), shot between her release and her next hospitalisation, Robertson claims that she had not attacked her mother, but had merely acted in self-defence after “she had attacked me in a senile fury.” 175

which largely consists of planning the initial screenings of the diary reels, Robertson laments: “GOD HELP RID ME OF THE DESIRE TO BE DOCUMENTED!!!”67

It was not only the practice of recording which fed into the compulsive avenues open to

Robertson: the cinematic apparatus itself could also be co-opted into delusional thought. The breakdown outlined earlier in her written diary entry eventually led to

Robertson committing herself to the Massachusetts Mental Health Centre in late August

1982, where medical records show she spent much of the remainder of the year. While in hospital she kept very busy:

I shoot a novel against the walls of a white room, I work through the logic of the creation of the universe, I list the names of most important Goddesses, I denounce flesh-eating, I think I am the female Christ twin- reborn, I speak in “old French” and think I am Jeanne D’Arc, I think someone is recording all I say, I bless and curse (and think these instantly change the world), I think “Doctor Who” is Christ reborn and my lover … I repel space invaders by nightlong prayer … I am in a white room and I stand naked at the windows, convinced that the whole world watches me, or selected artists are in windows opposite filming me, my body shifts, becomes pregnant, I am the White Goddess … I was making The World Movie, the diary that extended over all time, and it grew like a lotus in fast motion.68 These two entries highlight many of the core pathological strains that emerge over the course of the diary: Robertson’s belief that she is a reincarnation of a god, part of a long genealogy of female cosmic powers; that she has the power of creation and can warn the world against an impending apocalypse; and that Doctor Who is her divine partner.

67 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #281]. 68 Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 1, #89]. 176

She is watched by the whole world69 but the whole world will also eventually watch the film that she is shooting, the film that she has been making since the dawn of the universe. Robertson’s intimate audience of one thus exponentially expands to include all of humanity.

In the written diary entry that chronicles the breakdown after her father’s death in 1982,

Robertson outlines this important third way in which she conceptualised the diary film project, in addition to its original start as weight loss diary, and of that of the trousseau.

She writes: “I was making The World Movie, the diary that extended over all time, and it grew like a lotus in fast motion.”70 What made the World Movie possible was

Robertson’s capacity as akashic recorder, a term that she most likely became acquainted with in the course of her wide reading in the field of religious and esoteric or mystical thought. It is from the latter school that the term akashic recording develops around the turn of the century, from, amongst others, the occult writing of Alice A Bailey, early

Theosophical writing, and in defining the clairvoyant practices of American mystics like

Edgar Cayce and Levi H Dowling.71 These texts claimed that the term had its roots in early Buddhist thought, which in turn appropriated a term from Hindu philosophy for

69 As is common in individuals suffering from delusions related to bipolar disorder and schizo- affective overlay, Robertson was sometimes convinced that she was being filmed from outside, through the windows of her house. This also forms part of the World Movie, where she refers to it as “The Movie the men make through my dining-room windows …” There are also instances where she notes that God is the one filming her life: “I believe God has worked out a script for history and Revelations. I believe I am part of this ‘plan,’ my artwork an essential part of something grand. I believe there is a 3-D movie of my life and a computer printing all my words — somewhere in heaven.” Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #282]. Written diary entry, 1986 [Folder 7, #231]. 70 Written diary entry, April to May 1983 [Folder 5, #2]. 71 Edgar Cayce’s prophetic gift is to some extent explained by his biographers as his having access to the akashic record. Levi H Dowling’s cult mystic text, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ is, according to the author, similarly a product of his reading of the akashic records. 177

the sky, or the ether, the Sanskrit word akasha. Describing the nature of the akasha, Alice

A Bailey notes in The Light of the Soul that, “The akasha is everywhere. In it we live and move and have our being.”72 It is thus “the ‘Primary Substance’, that out of which all things are formed,”73 but this same substance is simultaneously also able to record the very formation of all things. Dowling refers to it as “sensitised plates on which sounds, even thoughts, were recorded,”74 but perhaps the most encompassing definition is articulated by Bailey: “The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of the planet.”75

It is the experienced mystic, one who has access to the astral plane, that is able to read these records. But Robertson was not a mere reader of the akashic records: she was their recorder. The “immense photographic film” that Bailey describes, and which Robertson believes she is making, “grew like a lotus in fast motion.”76 Robertson’s use of the lotus is an apt analogy here: it is a plant that can live for 1000 years, and is symbolic of the act of creation in Buddhist thought. Similarly, Robertson’s diary would have been present throughout all of history, because she was always there, she had always been making it.

She was, she believed, the Time Lady, wife to Doctor Who, the Time Lord, and thus able to travel through time, but also to have been born, and born again. Over the course of her life Robertson spent a lot of time sketching out this personal lineage of reincarnation: she was the White Goddess, she was Ishtar-Irnini, she was Isis. She was

72 Alice A Bailey, The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: A Paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1927), 338. 73 Levi Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ : The Philosophic and Practical Basis of the Religion of the Aquarian Age of the World (Kempton: Adventure Unlimited Press, 1996), 16. 74 Dowling, 14. 75 Bailey, Light of the Soul, 275–76. 76 Written diary entry, April to May 1983 [Folder 5, #2]. 178

also Eve, Mary Magdalene, Jeanne of Arc,77 noting in a letter she writes from a mental hospital, “Do you still think that all prophets are male and all women are worthless?”78

As the Time Lady, Robertson’s film is not something that exists within creation: it is instead its origin. It was, she notes, “The Movie the Universe was made for.”79 She could record the history of all time, millennia before the advent of the camera, merely by looking — not just the idea of cinema, as André Bazin would have it,80 but cinema itself.

Of a hospital visit she wrote: “When I met my shrink I had a private room. I covered it with signs of the Pentecost and magic marker credits, for the movie god’s been making through my eyes,” later calling it “closed circuit TV for God.”81 The World Movie also encompassed all photographic representation: the film had the power of “expanding to include all home movies, all cinematic history.”82 In the throes of psychosis, Robertson believed the World Movie to be that which explained all of the world. In recovery, however, the project of Five Year Diary is one that explained, through the means of the cinematic apparatus and the specific form of the diary, the experience of the worlds she inhabited. It is to this project that we now turn.

77 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 6, #79]. 78 Letter that forms part of written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 9, #215]. 79 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #282]. 80 As Bazin notes in The Myth of Total Cinema, “Cinema is an idealistic phenomenon. The concept men had of it existed so to speak fully armed in their minds, as if in some platonic heaven …” long before the invention of the actual cinematic apparatus. André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17. 81 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #283]. 82 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #282]. 179

Making Sense to Oneself

There is a dual movement of madness in Five Year Diary: on the one hand, Robertson’s psychotic thought coalesces around the project, in the form of the World Movie, what

Robertson believes is her record of the history of the entire world. But on the other hand, Five Year Diary is also that which Robertson employs in a discursive manner to find her way out of the nonsensical. Her attempts to make sense of her illness similarly take two different shapes: she both tries to make sense of things for herself, but also looks for ways that render her very private experience of delusion legible to others. The practice of recording and its relationship to her experience of time is central to this first endeavour, the project of using the diary film’s possibility of review as a means of working out her mind’s distracted tangents. Her method here runs contrary to popular thinking, as Stanley Cavell reminds us in “Ending the Waiting Game.” Cavell writes about Samuel Beckett's Endgame, and remarks that “An early movie director, René Clair

I believe, remarked that if a person were shown a film of an ordinary whole day in his life, he would go mad.”83 What Cavell points to here is the fundamentally non-dramatic nature of everyday life: how boring it can be, how repetitive, how having to be subjected to normal life on a screen is a frustrating spectatorial experience. He later continues, noting about Beckett’s play: “the biggest fiction is that one's days form a story, that you can capture them by telling them.”84 In Robertson’s case however, this is exactly what occurs: the diary film offers her a means of engaging the ordinary to establish a certain sense of existential fixity amidst the instability of her illness, through the act of recording. What would drive others mad — as Cavell indicates in his reference to René Clair, being forced to watch an ordinary whole day of one’s life — is

83 Stanley Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119. 84 Cavell, 152. 180

exactly the practice Robertson employs to make sense of her madness, to move her out of it, toward sense.

To understand how Robertson employs this practice one needs to understand the role that recording plays in her work: the act of recording acknowledges the inevitable imbrication of madness and time. To be mad is to be outside of time, to find one’s mind temporally displaced from the time in which one’s body is found. Thus, keeping track of time, in a repetitive, continuous manner, is also a way of establishing a sense of existential fixity, being anchored to the present an attempt at extricating oneself from paranoia around the future, or despair over the past. Trying to focus on the present was a continuous struggle for Robertson, the intertitle FOCUS, PLEASE, which opens a number of reels as much an admonishment for herself as for her viewers. In Reel 31:

Niagara Falls,85 Robertson films herself as she engages in an exercise of Gestalt therapy, where she types up everything she is doing at that exact moment:

no w i drink wine here and now i misspel at this moment i have a lit cigarette in my right hand now the water runs somewhere in the house now i puff now i know i typed over and i write what i thought a moment ago now the wine fades in my mouth now it is sweet now the cigarette tastes like old summer barbeques now the camera clicks (i am waiting for it; i mean to say the typewriter table

85 19 to 28 August 1983. 181

sq eaks) now there are harmonics in the struck keys86 Filming things as they happen was its own form of Gestalt therapy, attuning the camera to what was happening right now, doing it again, and again. To keep on doing it, now, and now. Now again. The diary film peddles in the business of the ordinary, the quotidian, it captures the material of our ordinary, everyday lives in a repetitive manner, that which we do over and over again over the course of days and weeks and months and years, both the actions that make it possible for us to live (eat, sleep), and to live in society (work, clean, talk to others). The ordinary is that which is linked to the home, the domestic, yet this does not mean that it is isolated from the world at large; rather the cinematic recording of the ordinary, of the domestic, as was shown in chapter

1, becomes for Robertson a means of world-making, a means of surviving what Cavell calls “this black world,”87 the world proper. In order to survive the world proper

Robertson creates a world of her own through filming her home and her existence within it, and thus finds what Cavell would call a way of being “at home in the world,”88 the recording of her days providing a sense of meaning and value to her life.

Recording thus not only focused Robertson on the present as it occurs, but also granted her the gift of presents she had lost: in the throes of psychotic episodes there would be swathes of time she could not remember once the episode was over. This strategy is for instance seen in Reel 23: A Breakdown (and) After the Mental Hospital89, where Robertson, in the midst of a breakdown, has positioned the camera across from her fridge, the lights set up for the shot visible next to the appliance. She is in the frame too, sitting in

86 The typed pages form part of her written diaries [Folder 1, #51-54]. 87 Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 83. 88 Cavell, 186. 89 1 September to 13 December 1982. 182

front of the fridge, removing the root vegetables and placing them in the compost, and intermittently signing to the camera in made-up sign language. In an audio tape audio track, secondary to the voice-over, she says: “I am not sure … what exactly has happened in my lifetime, I know several times I have lost time …” It is the cinematic recording of these blank spots in Robertson’s memory that allows her to piece together what had occurred during psychosis. Having watched the cinematic recording,

Robertson could then piece together what had happened, and elucidates the on-screen footage through a secondary audio track, a voice-over, that explains what we are watching:

I had accumulated about 900 rolls of film to date, in my refrigerator, I couldn’t afford to get it processed, and one night decided I was not going to eat anymore, anything that would cause pain. This included root vegetables, which had to be replanted, so they could grow their own seeds. This is sign language, I am in a fever of what is called a nervous breakdown, and you are supposed to know what this means. This is great and vast deep sign language, and everyone should know the reason. Robertson is able to make sense of these events because she has recorded them, because cinema affords her the chance of review. This is important for her larger discursive project, of establishing a conversation with the viewer, of speaking in a way that others can understand: for Robertson there is no discourse without the possibility of review.

It is in this position, sitting in front of her Super 8 viewer, watching the footage, and editing it, that Robertson most often appears on-screen throughout the film. This is no coincidence, nor is this restricted to the cinematic portion of the work. The original written diary that Robertson kept in 1960-1961, and which also formed part of the larger project, was a diary that was formatted to span five years. Its structure was cyclical, every page divided into five entries for the same date over five consecutive years. In

183

addition to the diary’s regular function of review, this design of the childhood diary necessitates reviewing the events of the same date in previous years, as you are recording the events of this day. But Robertson goes further than this. Already as a child she actively augmented the entries, commented on them, approximated a type of revision. The opening pages of the diary present a list of New Year’s resolutions, itself a type of revisionist exercise, and include entries like “Spend money carefully,” “Not to yell so much,” and “To make my diary like Anne Franks, only not so famous.”90 Later she returns to the list, and comments on point 1 of her list, “Lose weight down to 140.”

The comment reads: “Quite right! Good ones!” the 140 lbs struck out and replaced by

125. On the next page Robertson wrote, when initially starting the diary: “I hope I will be able to confide in you as I have in nothing or nobody else,” and “My Motto: Let God play with you, and you will want no other playmate.”91 There also appears the following: “Comment: (later) This was made when I was very lonely and did not play with hardly anybody. I’m all okay now. (December 1960).” This happens across the work: Robertson explains herself to herself by means of the diary, reviewing and editing the record of her days. But this is not the only discursive movement she engages in: there is the project of making sense to herself, but there is also the process of making sense to others.

Making Sense to Others

Robertson always envisioned an audience for the diaries. To move the diary from the realm of the personal to that of the public would occur through projection. Here I am drawing from Gilberto Perez's thoughts on scale and the way it affects worlds and the

90 Childhood five year diary entry, 1960-1961 [Folder 10, #40]. 91 Childhood five year diary entry, 1960-1961 [Folder 1, #41]. 184

work of art. As Perez notes in The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium,

the laws of physics are not indifferent to scale: a world twice as large would not be the same world twice as large but quantitatively a different world. In art too scale makes a difference ... It is fitting that photographs are small, for they are small traces of life, residual little bits captured from life by means of optics and chemistry. It is fitting that the movie screen is big, for it proposes to take over from life and put in its place a world of the movie.92 What Perez teases out here is a key medium-specific question: cinema’s scale, and, I would argue, its temporal dimension, allows for a spectatorial experience fundamentally different from that of looking at a photograph. The scale of cinema means it can envelop us in a way photographs cannot. In Robertson’s case, the fact that it is filmed and then projected means her record of the minutiae of everyday life can be blown up to the size of a world. In its status as what Cavell terms a “succession of automatic world projections,”93 a term which he uses to explain the way film mechanically encapsulates all of the world shown to it, and presents us with a world in turn, the world of the film, the projection of Five Year Diary now brings Robertson a community of spectators, an audience with which to speak.

The invocation of Cavell in this regard is not accidental. Although the philosopher writes about madness in only a cursory manner, with fragments scattered throughout his texts, he is able to think about madness in the light of cinematic projection. This point will become important for thinking about the medium-specific elements

Robertson employs throughout the diary as a means of making sense — not to herself

92 Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 27. 93 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 105. 185

this time, but to others. Cavell engages scepticism’s “problem of other minds” — the idea that the individual is unable to definitively know what another is thinking — by discussing the pain of another, and whether it is possible to have knowledge of that pain.94 Our knowledge of the pain, Cavell notes, comes through an acknowledgment of the pain of the other, knowledge upon which relationality is contingent. In “Knowing and Acknowledging” Cavell notes, “… your suffering makes a claim upon me. It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer — I must do or reveal something

(whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what

‘(your or his) being in pain’ means. Is.”95 If we do not acknowledge the knowledge of another’s pain, this estranges us from them, and renders us mad.96 Thus madness becomes something that originates in our relation with an other who does not acknowledge us, our mind, this other mind different from theirs.

In Cavell’s understanding, the isolation that is the result of this lack of acknowledgment, of not being taken seriously, steals one's voice, renders the individual voiceless, “as if before the possession of speech.”97 The individual is voiceless because the lack of acknowledgement by an other means there is no one they can truly speak to, because there is no one who understands, or attempts to understand, their mind. Here madness is, Cavell notes, “a state of utter incommunicability.”98 What Cavell does not include, but which is important in considering Robertson’s case, is the difference between the ability to speak, and the ability to be understood. I would thus amend

94 Stanley Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’, in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 259. 95 Cavell, 263. 96 Cavell, 263. 97 Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16. 98 Cavell, 16. 186

Cavell’s articulation of equating madness with an inability to speak, and instead argue that madness is an inability to speak in a way that others can understand. To thus be sane is to be able to enter into conversation instead of just speaking to oneself. In The

Promise of Politics, Hannah Arendt secures this ability to be comprehended as the ground of any relationality and conversation. If the world opens up to everyone in a different way, the manner in which we understand the world in its fullness is through conversation with one another: “Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as about that which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”99 This is then perhaps a distinction to consider. On the one hand, the world of sense as one that comes about through conversation, through being understood by another, who acknowledges the knowledge that one is in possession of.

The world of madness then is one in which there is no one who understands when one speaks, and which thus comes about in isolation, in conversation only with oneself. In order to initiate a conversation, to move from speaking to herself to speaking to others,

Robertson needed to find ways to make her thought legible to the outside. In the sections that follow, I outline three of her formal strategies to accomplish this, to make sense of the nonsensical: the use of layered audio tracks to communicate her experience of auditory verbal hallucinations, rendering the psychotic impulse in sound; her use of the confessional register, drawing on the close-up and direct address of the camera to catalogue the very many ways her mind breaks down; and the decision to edit. She started with the cut. For Robertson, the cut was rational in a way that madness was not:

The World Movie, the expression of psychosis, could not be edited, but stretched continuously between the beginning of the world and now. It was a never-ending diary, filmed from the eyes and the camera-eye of the divine Robertson: “I repeat myself but

99 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, trans. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 128–29. 187

you don’t have to edit when you’re Jesus Christ.”100 It is thus no surprise that cutting is at the forefront of the conversation the first time Robertson shows reels of the diary to an audience, the first time the home movie leaves the house.

The Rationality of the Cut

Robertson first screened parts of what would become Five Year Diary to her professors, during her first semester of graduate school at Massachusetts College of Art. She did not film the actual event, but she did record the review board conversation that occurred after. This conversation, between Robertson, Saul Levine and another male MassArt professor forms the audio track to Reel 26 of the diary, titled First Semester Grad School.101

The reel shows Robertson going about her days, sleeping, baking bread, eating, gardening, driving around Boston, exercising next to the gazebo, with a temporally dislocated audio track discussing an earlier set of recorded material the professors had been shown. Based on the events of the material the professors refer to, it seems that this material is what would today form part of Reels 22102 and 23, reels that explicitly deal with the breakdown Robertson had suffered in 1982, following the death of her father. The breakdown was precipitated by a manic phase marked by delusional behaviour, which included Robertson removing all animal products from her home. A struggling vegetarian throughout her life, and an avid animal rights and nature protection activist, the lead-up to the eventual hospitalisation had seen Robertson gather all leather, wool, paint brushes made of animal bristle and all the vegetables in her fridge, and return them to the earth, most of it deposited in the community garden.

100 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #283]. 101 February 28 to May 20 1983. 102 Reel 22: A Short Affair (and) Going Crazy (23 August to 1 September 1982). 188

As discussed earlier in this chapter, Robertson set up lights around the apartment and filmed herself as she removed all the objects, interspersed with sections where she faced the camera and engaged in a type of sign language. She spent a lot of time indoors during this reel, too afraid to venture out, instead obsessively filming random elements around the house: a wasp she found in the kitchen, a mirror on which she had written

Rose Garden, which reflected the light as she poured water across its surface, a crystal hanging in the window, catching the light.

This material was not yet edited, largely due to Robertson’s initial strategy to not edit the film at all, and to first look at the material when it was being screened to an audience.103 In this regard Robertson mentions following Ed Pincus’s approach to his

Diaries 1971-1976 (1981), which she mistakenly believed Pincus had not edited, an approach she thought made for a more authentic record of events.104 Instead her approach of not editing fits in better with the formal choices made by diary filmmaker

Jonas Mekas, who edited parts of his Walden (1969) in-camera. Robertson’s decision to only edit in-camera and not splice together footage is a significant formal question for thinking about the manner she approaches the question of form at this point. Crucially, the critique Robertson receives from her professors in fact aligns with how the mode of the diary film will eventually be outlined by David E James in To Free the Cinema.

Drawing from Mekas’s approach, James argues that the mere cinematic recording of the events of one’s days is the purview of the film diary, a form that does not expect to be seen by anyone but its maker, and is thus, like a written diary, made up of

103 Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 5, #275]. 104 Although Pincus did not look at the footage for five years after shooting was completed, he did eventually edit the 27 hours of footage down to 200 minutes before the film was released in 1981. 189

“disarticulate, heterogeneous parts.”105 It is in the form of the diary film that the act of recording is bolstered by the discursive function of editing, of revision, which brings about “an aesthetic whole,” which James defines as a state in which the film exists “in an economy of films,” is a completed artefact, and can be projected and have an audience.106 It is an aesthetic whole that is lacking in the material Robertson’s professors discuss in Reel 26, as we hear them explain to her: “[You need to] consciously … deal with the material as structural material,” and “take responsibility” for the material, or:

“you can’t expect the viewer to make all the connections.” Much of the diary, the professors seem to suggest, makes sense only to Robertson — there is clearly a lot of

“agitation” on-screen, but what is behind the agitation is never clear to them. “Render it more formally sensible,” the professors ask, or: “The biggest fiction is that one's days form a story, that you can capture them by telling them.”107

Robertson came up with a number of strategies to address this criticism. The first was to start editing the film, employing the cut (mostly straight cuts, sometimes employing graphic matches) as a means of rendering things legible. Again, as outlined in chapter 2,

Robertson’s procedure of cutting is additive, a means of making meaning, of adding, not taking away. Once Robertson starts to edit the project she continues for decades of her life, engaged in the repetitive, discursive practice of editing and re-editing what would eventually become 83 reels of screenable material. Like the labour of making sense, this labour never ends. She explains this in Reel 53: CinnamonAmy Cat Died,108

105 David E James, ‘Film Diary/Diary Film: Practice and Product in Walden’, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground, ed. David E James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 147. 106 James, 147. 107 Cavell, ‘Ending the Waiting Game’, 152. 108 30 March to 30 June 1987. 190

which also opens with FOCUS, PLEASE, where she addresses the camera in what this chapter will later define as the confessional register, her face framed in close-up, while she is holding the camera. Robertson speaks into it, listing a number of changes she needs to make to the film, because “people are saying my film is boring.” These changes, she notes, include

I shall start a job. I shall take a few classes. I shall take less photographs of apples. I shall use my body in purely aesthetic terms. I shall put my film on video and I shall EDIT. IT. … I have seen all my films and they ALL. NEED. EDITING.

Editing was one solution to the criticism offered by Robertson’s professors, but she also devised others. This included her decision to appear in person at her screenings, and narrate the events as they unfold on-screen, as a device that could function as a means of clarification for the audience, her performance a means of writing and rewriting the narrative of delusion into a coherent whole. Over time she recorded this narration into a voice-over for some of the reels that today form part of the diary.109 Here the project of making sense is very much foregrounded: what is today the eventual final form of Reels

22 and 23, the same material shown to the review board, consists of tightly edited footage Robertson shot while in the psychotic state that precipitated the breakdown.

But it is overlaid with a voice-over that explains what appears on-screen, and that runs throughout the reel. Thus, in Reel 23 Robertson presents the viewer with close-up shots of a wasp as it walks along a pamphlet, and notes in voice-over: “Everything in my

109 This is an unfinished project: the money ran out while she was still well enough to see the transition through. 191

house would need to be photographed, of course, as it would be significant later, I wasn’t going out to the film series I had tickets for, I was staying inside, it was too scary in the world, me and the wasp, we had to hide.” She cuts to an overhead shot of bowls of tofu placed on her kitchen table. A moment later, her body enters the frame as she picks up the tofu with her hands, and places some in her mouth. Her voice-over explains: “And I don’t know why I did this, but probably I thought God told me to eat the tofu, with the miso sauce, with my hands.” She cuts to a compost bucket in which goods are deposited, the lights set up to film visible around it, and continues: “I was trying to be a complete vegetarian, I thought at the very least I could, you know, show my compost heap and all the fruit and vegetables I ever grew in my garden, to a bunch of vegetarians at some sort of restaurant at the end of time.” Now Robertson cuts to a series of shots of buckets and bowls of water, pouring water from one container into the next, dribbling it onto a mirror on which Rose Garden has been written in lipstick, catching the light reflected by the moisture on the mirror. Again, Robertson is heard in voice-over: “I’d make a film called Lamps from Outer Space, I’d exorcise Richard Nixon, and all the war-making that came out of the White House, all the drug-running. I thought there would be snow the day the cocaine cartels were exorcised, snow and cocaine on the Rose Garden. I’d do magic.”110

In addition to employing the cut and the voice-over, Robertson increasingly relied on additional audio tracks layered onto reels as a strategy for making sense. In Reel 23, where Robertson explains the exorcism of the White House, her surface-level measure of explaining the on-screen events to the viewer are complicated by the presence of

110 Robertson believed that the spirit of Nixon had been living in her house since the death of her father. Written diary entry, April-May 1983 [Folder 6, #89]. 192

another audio track that runs concurrently to the main audio track. It is slightly lower in volume, and is also edited from various different recorded tracks; over the course of the entire reel we hear snatches of conversations between Robertson and her mother and her psychiatrist, and parts of different recorded audio tapes. The conversations we are privy to explicitly deal with Robertson’s illness — she speaks with her mother about

Doctor Who appearing in Boston for a few minutes, where she saw him,111 and with her therapist about her treatment process and the diaries she writes. The audio tape sections seem to capture Robertson in manic states, in a stream-of-consciousness type monologue that frantically continues without ever running out of steam. Thus, while

Robertson’s main audio track explains about the wasp and the tofu and the exorcism of

Richard Nixon, on the secondary audio track we first hear Robertson gently speaking to the wasp, and then she launches into less clear territory:

[speaking to the wasp] Have a soybean? Won’t you enjoy a soybean? Didn’t do any harm. Never did any harm. It’s okay. It’s alright. Take it easy. Rest, and enjoy, relax. Don’t worry. Take care of yourself. And be happy. Take a light. Take a minute. Take a second. Wait a minute. Wait an hour. Wait a week, wait a month, wait a year, two years, three years four years, five years, twenty-five years, fifty years, hundred years, thousand years, a million years, a billion years, a trillion years, a bajillion years, a rillion rillion of years, and then you can deal with this again. Never do this again. Continuingggg. Continuinggg. When you have to do this again it will be never. Is never possible? Think about the implications of never. Guess what? It goes on. This superimposition of audio tracks, yet another type of cutting, is found in a number of other reels, most notably Reels 22, 47, 80 and 81,112 where Robertson pairs her official voice-over with edited audio tracks that feature her substantially less coherent speech,

111 This scene is discussed in chapter 2. 112 Reel 47: I Thought the Film Would End (21 October to 2 November 1986); Reel 80: Emily Died (14 May to 26 September 1994); and Reel 81: Mourning Emily (27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995). 193

in various affective states — aggressive, crying, or so subdued it sounds like she might be sedated. I want to suggest that this strategy allows Robertson the means of making clear to an audience a particular symptom that formed part of her illness, that of auditory verbal hallucinations, or then: to voice the singular experience of hearing voices in a way others can understand.

Rendering the Psychotic Impulse in Sound

In an interview with Scott Macdonald, Robertson notes: “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?’”113 It should not be lost on us that the apparatus she had chosen to work in is one that similarly treads a fine line between reality and hallucination, a medium that, Cavell points out, is predicated on the disjunction between visible and invisible worlds. As “a moving image of scepticism,”114 film is, Cavell argues, something that plays with our perception of what is really there.115 To a large extent this is based on our cognition: our knowledge of the world is

113 MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 212. 114 Cavell, Contesting, 69. 115 This is of course one of the things that makes photographic or cinematic representations such interesting phenomena, as it functions in ways that suggest that those who are seeing what is fundamentally not there, are mad. Cavell perhaps best encapsulates this notion in Contesting Tears, where he notes that considering that this rising and falling is the light by which we see the figures on the screen, we have to ask whether there is something in the light of film that is inherently (not, of course, inveterately) maddening. Here I think of my emphasis, in speaking of photography, of photography's metaphysically hallucinatory character, its causing us to see things that are absent: it makes things present to us to which we are not present. As Cavell indicates, a surface, a screen, displaces an object from another world into ours, and it is visible to us even though its physical referent is missing, is not present with us. 194

largely derived from our senses, and as perhaps the most prominent sensory modalities, is predicated on that which we see, and that which we hear. Yet, Cavell argues, vision and sound operate in different ways: “ … it is the nature of hearing that what is heard comes from someplace, whereas what you can see you can look at.”116 We can only see that which is directly in our space with us — if someone sees something that does not physically share their space, the object belongs to another world, and their having access to it suggests madness. Thus, vision functions as a marker of reality — if we can see it, it is real.

In contrast to sight, hearing functions in a different register — we can hear something that is not directly in our space. In other words, we can hear something we do not see, in the sense of seeing that which makes the sound, from which the sound emanates.

Cavell uses the example of hearing a gramophone play in another room: we do not need to see the gramophone to know that it exists, we are accustomed to hearing it, and can identify it as what it is (a gramophone) even if we cannot see it. As Cavell reiterates in The World Viewed, we are used to hearing things that “are not present to us, present with us.”117 Yet that which can be heard still needs to have some type of physical referent, which is visible, from which the invisible sound emanates. If no physical referent exists (if there is no gramophone, if we are hearing a gramophone in the absence of one) it is seen as something that originates from another world, and can thus be a sign of madness. Cavell argues that knowledge of another world is often based on

Cavell, 68–69. Stanley Cavell, ‘What Becomes of Things on Film’, in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 9. 116 Cavell, World Viewed, 18. 117 Cavell, 18. 195

hearing a voice located in that world,118 and as sound is fundamentally invisible, it is able to constitute a world that is similarly invisible. In this way, sound is perhaps the sense which most closely approximates the psychotic impulse, as its basic functioning resembles the structure of reality that is experienced by those who suffer from auditory verbal hallucinations.

This use of what Michel Chion, drawing from Pierre Schaeffer, discusses as acousmatic sound, as sound which is heard in the absence of visual proof of its origin,119 is employed in Five Year Diary as a means to create a sonorous representation of Robertson's mind as she experiences psychotic symptoms. In the literature on auditory verbal hallucinations this state is articulated as “Hearing speech in the absence of corresponding external stimulation of the ear, with a sufficient sense of reality to resemble a veridical perception, which the subject does not feel s/he has direct and voluntary control, and which occurs in the awake state.”120 Simon McCarthy-Jones suggests that these may be actual acoustic voices, or may be soundless, where one only senses that one is being

“spoken to.”121 If one draws from Cavell's distinction between sight and sound, sound being that which we are always already used to not seeing the origin of, it could be argued that sound is very well suited to articulating the psychotic experience of hearing voices from invisible worlds.

Robertson’s particular invisible worlds are brought into being through competing

118 Cavell, 18. 119 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 72. 120 AS Davids cited in Simon McCarthy-Jones, Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes, and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 121 McCarthy-Jones, 108. 196

sound modalities, layering straightforward voice-overs that explain what’s happening on-screen with other audio tracks recorded during breakdowns, and that often include affective responses like cries, shrieks, laughter, sobbing, illegible speaking, obsessive repetition of certain phrases, and her own voice arguing with her voice on the main audio track. In Reel 22, Robertson set up the camera in a room of her apartment. We see her moving in accelerated motion between a host of large plastic bags, and she deposits objects into them before sitting down on the floor and eating something from a bowl, with her hands. In the next shot she faces the camera and signs into it. As in Reel 23,

Robertson’s voice-over is heard, explaining what we see on-screen — that she was again eating in front of the camera, and that “The landlord protected me, I took my films out on the curb, they were plastic, they were plastic, they had to be thrown away. But he told me it wasn’t garbage day. I brought all my films inside.” Also, as in Reel 23, this is not the only audio track heard. Running concurrently with the main audio track, a secondary audio track, lower in volume and edited from various sources, is heard. In this section it is all Robertson’s voice, although her tone changes dramatically from one section to the next. Initially she is engaged in a frantic monologue, speaking rapidly without any pauses: “I’m operating as if I’m on a normal plane, in in a normal plane, and I am a normal person. On the other hand, I do have some leaks with the past, and those will be revealed in time, everything will be revealed in time. We have to take it easy,” before aggressively shouting, “IS THIS RIGHT? HAVE I GOT IT TOGETHER? IS

IT GOOD ENOUGH? IS THIS THE CORRECT TIME?”

On-screen, Robertson continues to film different objects in her house, filming the view out the window and zooming in on individual objects, before cutting to a shot where the camera has been positioned across from the telephone, framing her face while she calls and cries, calls again, cries some more. She explains through the voice-over that “I

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kept trying to call him, he kept not being home. I was fully in the middle of a nervous breakdown.” But it is the secondary audio track, peeking out from underneath the voice-over, that truly registers the breakdown. An utterly deflated, almost sedated

Robertson is heard:

I am not sure of what exactly had happened in my lifetime, I know several times I have lost time. And the earth has shook under my feet. And sometimes this has seemed to be the breathing of another being. And I felt him surrounding me. And perhaps this is true, and it is also possible, that the world shook in its destruction, and it is also possible that I don’t know. The attempt at rendering the psychotic impulse in sonorous terms, I would argue, is an attempt at not only communicating her reality of invisible worlds, thus, an attempt to make sense of what is nonsensical, but in doing so, functions as a call to be taken seriously, a privilege often not granted by the voices emanating from these worlds. But it is not only the voices that do not take Robertson seriously, but all of the psychological and psychiatric infrastructure in which she finds herself throughout her life. It is at this point of approaching form that Robertson’s intervention becomes explicitly gendered.

Her efforts to make sense within a world organized by what Elaine Showalter terms

“the dual images of female insanity — madness as one of the wrongs of woman; madness as the essential feminine nature unveiling itself before scientific male rationality,”122 adopts the gendered form of the confessional as a means of revolt.

122 Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 3. 198

The Confessional Register

In the fall of 1994, Robertson sets up her camera in her lounge. 123 It is facing a day bed on which she sits and speaks. Her expression is despairing, her face appears haggard.

She is never still for long, anxiously touches her hair, or reaches for objects outside the underexposed frame. Throughout the scene Robertson struggles with the apparatus.

The monologue is plagued by constant technical interruptions. We see her adjust the lights she has set up for the scene, and the camera captures her seated body in long shot. She looks into the camera and says, “I empty the ashtray about eight times a day, I weigh 183,” but gets cut off before she can complete her sentence, and when she is again on-screen she frustratedly says: “This is called talking heads in documentary, somebody just talking. A picture of a person just a talking head. I’M MORE THAN THAT.“ There is another cut. Robertson again. She sounds angry, her hands expressively point out the apparatus she has set up in the room: “This costs 12c a second, for just the film and process. This is a SCENE. See, I have LIGHTS on. I have ANOTHER light on. I’ve switched film, the film ran out.” She throws up her hands, emits a frustrated, guttural sound. “This is a scene! I live on disability, social security, while I’m only 45.” There is another cut, Robertson still on her bed, where she reaches to retrieve two bottles of pills from beside the day bed, which she vigorously, angrily shakes: “How long before the psychiatric pills DESTROY my mind?”

For a few shots Robertson appears only in silhouette, having turned off the light, rendering the shot completely underexposed. Then the light is turned back on again. “It had been 10 years since I had made love with anyone…I’m terrified of not having a

123 This forms part of Reel 81: Mourning Emily (27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995). 199

husband or children.” Another cut, another flare-up of anger: “I’ve lived with my mother for eleven and a half years now, she watches me. I’m the potential mental patient. CHRONIC, CHRONIC, CHRONIC.” Her face distends in anguish. Another cut.

She still sits on the bed, nervously runs her fingers through her hair. “I’m afraid I’ve lost my beauty, I’m fifty pounds overweight. Fifty pounds, sixty pounds maybe! I lift weights, I go for walks, I bicycle.” She cuts, still seated, now with her arms wrapped around herself, in comfort. “I’m afraid I’ve lost my beauty.” Another cut. “And where’s the story?” She cuts again, her back now to the camera, again trying to fix the lights,

“something should have,” and a cut, another try: “something good has to happen.”

Another break: “otherwise, I’m afraid, my despair will make me die.”

Variants of this scene crop up throughout Five Year Diary: scenes in which Robertson treats the camera as something to confess to. She interrupts the regular recording of her day and how it unfolds in accelerated motion, to pause for a series of particularly stylised scenes that are sparsely distributed in the first half of the diary film, but that steadily increase over the course of the latter half of the film, and culminates in large swathes of the final reels of the film being taken up in this register. These scenes take two forms. The first is close-up or extreme close-up shots of Robertson’s face as she speaks into the camera, often posing questions to the camera, addressing it directly. The second form also involves Robertson’s direct address of the camera, but here she is presented in long shot, for the most part seated on a day bed in her lounge. Both forms of confessional present Robertson in affective states of agitation, aggression, sadness or despair, and she appears visibly more unkempt than she does in other parts of the diary. These scenes are also all marked by the high instance of technical failure that is evident throughout: sound not properly recorded, underexposed shots, and unfocused frames. In this confessional register, where what Robertson discloses is the many ways a

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body like hers can break down, she employs the instances of technical failure to structurally embed this breakdown into the cinematic diary.

In Five Year Diary the register of confession is grounded in the form of the diary, but also in the practice of cinematic recording itself. Diaries, as private or secret documents, often bear the weight of its owner’s confessions, and from the early diaries onwards this is Robertson’s approach. In the very first of her diaries that form part of the work, written between the ages of ten and twelve, she notes, “I confessed to everything! Most everything that is. And confession is good for the soul.”124 Once Robertson starts shooting her cinematic diary, the confessional elements of the apparatus and of cinematic exhibition begin to play an important role in how she approaches the recording of every day. In early conceptions of the exhibition model of Five Year Diary,

Robertson had planned to include a "confessional wall” in the space where the film would be shown and the written diaries available for reading.125 It is into these underexposed shots that a dimly lit Robertson steps, where the dark space of the film theatre becomes the dark space of the confessional box, and confesses directly to the camera, as she does in Reel 47: I Thought the Film Would End,126 her speech slightly hysterical in certain instances, while she cries in others: “I feel as if I am protected, and I have gone through the fire of hell. I am not afraid of the darkness all around you in the movie screen.” By now Robertson’s adoption of forms that always already imply a listener or recipient should not seem incidental. Like the way she employs the diary as a type of letter, as discussed in chapter 2, the confessional is another form that, like the

124 In the same diary, Robertson also laments that the Protestant religion includes no confessional practice, again reiterating that she considers it good for “the soul and morale.” Childhood diary entries, 1960-1961 [Folder 10 #44b, #47]. 125 Written diary entry, 1985 [Folder 5, #563]. 126 21 October to 2 November 1986. 201

letter, speaks of being-with. This question of relationality, of how one lives and speaks with another, extends to how she uses the cinematic screen as a stand-in for the traditional screen between confessor and priest. In this piece of confessional furniture, the tension between visibility and invisibility that is central to the confession is already evident. Like all sacraments, the sacrament of confession, instated by the Catholic

Church’s Council of Trent in 1551, was framed as an outward or visible manifestation of something that is inside, or invisible, or secret. Forgiveness by a priest upon hearing the confession is thus bestowed in a semi-public space as a way of reflecting what Christ is doing inside of you. Robertson’s swopping of confessional screen for cinematic screen is thus an important intervention: where the confessional screen is a means to ensure the individual’s privacy, the cinematic screen does exactly the opposite. The confessional screen exists in a relationship that involves the confessor, the priest and God, and remains an explicitly private affair. The cinematic screen moves the confession from the realm of the private to the realm of the public by introducing an audience. The host of interlocutors that now hear the confession also changes its stakes: where the traditional confessional airs secrets before God, the cinematic confessional facilitates a making visible before the world, and becomes an attempt for the confessor to speak — to make sense to others, to be understood.

The confessional mode was by no means a new aesthetic device, as James reminds us in

To Free the Cinema — from the 1960s onwards American arts and literature had seen the emergence of many autobiographical texts that operate in a confessional register.127

James mentions the work of artists as diverse as Robert Rauschenberg and Allen

Ginsberg in this autobiographical turn, but also stresses the importance of confessional

127 James, ‘Film Diary’, 149. 202

poets like Robert Lowell. Lowell’s Life Studies, published whilst he was living in Boston in 1959, was instrumental to the new direction the work of prominent women poets, which included Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, who attended his poetry workshops in Boston in the sixties, followed. In the hands of these women poets, the confessional register provided a form with which to address the specificity of their lives as women, an especially ironic gesture given that the screen was first added to the

Catholic Church’s confessional furniture as a means to keep confessing women invisible.128 The emergence of the confessional register in the early days of second-wave feminism was also reflected in the movement itself, through the practices of collective confession in the form of the consciousness-raising session,129 and in the movement’s embrace of the diary. The confession in diary form is explicitly political, as James notes:

[in diaries by women] … introspection and self-awareness were understood as individual participation in a collective historical recovery … its open-ended, nonhierarchical, impermanent form could be proposed as intrinsically feminist, defined against its completed, teleologically ordered, permanent, and hence masculinist sibling, the autobiography proper.130

James’s articulation of the gendered divide when it comes to the forms of diary, confession, and autobiography is important for this discussion in part because it traces a

128 Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 101. 129 Although there is not any evidence that Robertson ever attended any second-wave consciousness-raising sessions, there are many elements in Five Year Diary that seem to operate in the tradition of the practice. As I outlined in chapter 1, this includes the conversations between female family members about certain elements of their gendered experience in the world, which Robertson captures and uses as an audio track in Reel 31: Niagara Falls, and other recordings of conversations between women that form the audio tracks for some of the early reels of the diary. Robertson’s confessional monologues also appear very similar to the types of confessions that were made as part of consciousness-raising sessions, in similarly domestic environments. 130 James, ‘Film Diary’, 150. 203

genealogy in which Robertson’s own confession/diary/autobiography steps into a few decades later. But it is also valuable for the way it casts the work of women in this field as that which is ultimately formless, “impermanent,” incomplete.131 James is not alone in typifying women’s diaries or autobiographical confessional texts in this way. The confession, as a “specifically female discursive practice,”132 highlights the way the personal and autobiographical is split along gendered lines. “The realm of the personal and the sexual has always been literary for men (Saint Augustine, Rousseau … Henri

Miller), writes Lori Saint Martin, “and confessional for women (Colette, Erica Jong,

Anaïs Nin).”133 This has long been an issue of contention for women filmmakers, too, as a recorded conversation between Michel Citron and Alexandra Juhasz reflects. “Part of what I’m writing about is autobiographical film, Citron notes, “like Ross McElwee's

Sherman's March (1985). The reviews said this male filmmaker was courageous. Men get applauded for their confessions. Women don't.” To which Juhasz responds: “When women do autobiography, it's confessional, but when men do it, it's courageous.”134

The gendered divide of the confession also figures distinctions in form; which is to say, who gets to have form, and who remains in the realm of the formless. In Beyond Feminist

Aesthetics, Rita Felski outlines “the tradition of women’s autobiography, which typically focuses upon the details of domestic and personal life and is fragmented, episodic, and repetitive, lacking the unifying linear structure imposed upon a life by the pursuit of a

131 James, 150. 132 Irene Gammel, ed., Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 1. 133 Lori Saint Martin, ‘Sexuality and Textuality Entwined: Sexual Proclamations in Women’s Confessional Fiction in Québec’, in Confessional Politics: Women’s Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media, ed. Irene Gammel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 28. 134 Alexandra Juhasz, ed., Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 149. 204

public career.”135 What Felski juxtaposes here is autobiographical texts about men’s lives that plot the traditional route of a public career, which proceeds through a linear route of education or training, followed by a succession of different positions with increased seniority that culminate in retirement; with women’s autobiographical texts that focus on their lives and work within the home, a sphere in which their labour and achievements is less easy to plot in a linear manner, and in which advancement is not a real part of the economy. The diary, filled with daily events and personal confessions, becomes emblematic of this gendered approach, as Suzanne Juhasz argues: “The diary provides the sense of factualness … the sense of the personal, the sense of process, the sense of dailiness, the sense of immersion rather than conclusion or analysis or patterning.”136 For Robertson, the sense of dailiness does not preclude the ability to analyse; the “sense of process” does not preclude the ability to recognise and establish patterns. The “unifying, linear structure” of her diary is indeed not the result of a life shaped by “the pursuit of a public career,” but it is nonetheless a product of doing the work: the work of producing and recording and interpreting the confession. For

Robertson, the confessional scenes of her diary are a way of making sense of her illness, where making sense is understood here as cohering into a form. What the next few pages show is just how formally exacting Robertson’s confessional diary entries are, and how paying attention to their formal specificity provides important clues to understanding her particular intervention in the role confessional material has played in historical instances of female pathology.137

135 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 86. 136 Juhasz is discussed and quoted by Felski, 96. 137 Here, again, Robertson’s work does not stand alone, with the confessional poets already mentioned (Lowell, Sexton, Plath) employing the confessional form to explicitly address their mental illness. 205

The Close-up Movement, Imbalance, Crisis. Crack. The confessional scene starts with a face of a woman not groomed. Or: if she appears like that on camera, she must be crazy. In scene after scene Robertson presents her face to us in close-up, the lack of proper lighting emphasizing the heavy, ever-present bags under her eyes, her blotchy or inflamed skin, her scraggly hair. She asks us to look at her; she asks us what we see. Already here Robertson inserts herself into the history of female pathology. As Mary Ann Doane articulates in The Desire to Desire,

In the 1940s films of the medical discourse, neuroses and even psychoses are evidenced not by contorted limbs and paralysis but by a marked lack of narcissism on the part of the sick woman. The illness of the woman is signaled by the fact that she no longer cares about her appearance.138 But it is not only caring too little that is marked as pathological, Showalter reminds us: when it comes to outward appearance as a manifestation of a woman’s mind, she is always already caught up in a double bind from which she cannot escape. She writes:

Victorian psychiatrists had strong views about how their patients should look … Female patients were expected to care more about their appearance than males, and indeed, their sanity was often judged according to their compliance with middle-class standards of fashion … Yet too much attention to dress and appearance was a sign of madness as well. 139

Both these markers — of caring too much, of caring too little — are singled out as outward markers of madness in the photographs taken in Victorian asylums, the very first instances of the photographic capture of madness. A focus on her appearance

138 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40–41. 139 Showalter, Female Malady, 84. 206

remains an enduring marker of Robertson’s confessionals. In Reel 81: Mourning Emily,140 where Robertson is fresh out of the hospital,141 the sequence begins with an initial shot where she looks dejectedly into the camera and asks, “I’m 45 and a half. Have I lost my beauty?” This is followed by shot after shot where she repeats the same phrase, or parts of the phrase, as her voice oscillates between despair, and aggression, the tone of her voice escalating as the repetitions build:

Have I lost my beauty? Have I? Have I? Have I lost my beauty? Have I? The sequence escalates to an extreme close-up of her forehead and her one eye. This is followed by another extreme close-up where Robertson moves the camera across her face, her skin inflamed as we are offered an intimate survey of her mouth, up to her nose, moving to her eyes, where she stares into the camera. She never lowers her gaze even as the image repeatedly cuts, the tight editing repetitively enacts the splitting of the self that occurs in the breakdown. Here Robertson is in effect using her body to show us how things break, where her insistent questioning unearths the violence that is embedded in this endeavour. Brecan, the Old English word from which break originates, reminds us that this involves the division of “solid matter violently into parts or fragments,”142 the different parts of Robertson’s face in extreme close-up the fragments we are left with.

140 27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995. 141 Robertson had recently left the hospital following a breakdown in the wake of the death of her niece, Emily. 142 ‘Break | Origin and Meaning of Break by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 30 August 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/break. 207

Here it is important to pay attention to the formally consistent manner Robertson shoots these elements, starting with her use of the close-up. It is not necessarily surprising that

Robertson chooses what Germaine Dulac terms “the psychological shot … the very thought of the character projected on screen”143 to present her confessionals, often framed within the context of an illness of the mind, to an audience. Dulac also reminds us that the close-up “belongs to the intimate life of people or things,”144 and thus its use underscores the very particular movement that the confessionals, and Robertson’s diary as a whole, engages in: of taking the world of the everyday and the admissions of the private realm into the sphere of the public, of blowing it up, of projecting it.145 Cinema is crucial to this attempt, as what Robertson captures in these close-ups of the cinematic diary are the “nervous gestures”146 which Jean Epstein argues figures as the medium specific photogénie of the form. Still in Reel 80, Robertson cuts to another shot of her face, the heavy bags under her eyes still the prominent focus even though the shot is generally not in focus. Her tone has shifted to aggression, her teeth involuntarily grind in the pauses of her speech, and one can almost imagine that it is about Robertson that

Epstein writes when he describes a close-up: “A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theatre curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack.”147

143 Germaine Dulac, ‘The Expressive Techniques of the Cinema’, in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 310. 144 Dulac, 310. 145 Although Robertson’s use of the confessional close-up relies on the big screen of the cinema, she is, as I’ve discussed in chapter 2, also indebted to the televisual. The small screen and its derided women’s form of television talk shows is reliant on the televisual intimacy of direct address, a strategy Robertson echoes in terms of both shot scale and framing, but also in the types of confessional, dramatic monologues she engages in in these scenes. For more on TV talk shows as a women’s form, see Shattuc and Wood. Jane Shattuc, The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997). Helen Wood, Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-Reflexivity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 146 Jean Epstein, ‘Magnification’, in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 238. 147 Epstein, 235. 208

Robertson speaks, looking directly into the camera:

Sometimes I seem happy sometimes I seem happy despite it all I don’t know, well pretending to be happy that can’t be happy! What is MANIA? CAN I ALSO HAVE HAPPINESS? And am I NOT MANIC when in fact it’s fantasy! Or joy, or panic. And perhaps what I need is goodness. Epstein’s description already foreshadows the way Robertson engages the close-up to figure the breakdown of the mind in the way he describes the shot scale’s ability to capture everything that splits: “The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a key-board like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips.”148

Photographic Endoscopy Robertson’s Face and Female Pathology In focusing the camera on her face, Robertson enters the long history of psychiatric profiling on the basis of physiognomy. As Showalter explains in The Female Malady, this practice originates from a Darwinian understanding of mental illness, where “insanity

… represented an evolutionary reversal, a regression to a lower nature,”149 which doctors could diagnose by carefully studying the face. “For Darwinian psychiatrists,”

Showalter writes, “the set of an ear, the shape of a brow, even the quiver of an eyebrow” were clues to the lingering madness of an individual.150 The invention of photography greatly facilitated this diagnostic tool, as Georges Didi-Huberman notes in

148 Epstein, 235–36. 149 Showalter, Female Malady, 106. 150 Showalter, 106. 209

Invention of Hysteria:

In the 1860's, photography made its triumphal, triumphalist entry into the museum of pathology. Photography, showing the least flaw. And what an impression it made: photographic endoscopy, finally able to unveil the most secret anatomy — as it is. The seat of nervous illnesses could finally be seen, and in person. 151 What photography gives to the project of rendering visible the invisible malady of madness is strikingly similar to what the project of diarising gives to the individual recording their life: a means of preserving a memory; and of providing the possibility of review.152 The photographs of these women, like Robertson’s, captured in temporal states either waiting for an attack, in the midst of one, or just recovering, were firstly

“supposed to serve a memory” of an event in the patient’s medical history.153 This record of the past could then be employed to review different cases as they came into the hospital, and be circulated between hospitals, and between doctors who were all engaged in research of these nervous disorders, as “a durable trace of all pathological manifestations.”154 This visual manifestation of the “intimate life” of the ill woman is made possible because the mind is breaking. Didi-Huberman employs an image

Sigmund Freud uses to think about what the camera offers Charcot’s project at

Salpêtrière,

151 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 34. 152 For an in-depth theorisation of how cinema enables the process of review, see Kate Rennebohm’s dissertation manuscript “Re-Vision: Moving Image Media, the Self and Ethical Thought in the 20th Century.” Rennebohm defines cinematic review as one made possible by the fact that “Cinema entailed new forms of activity around encountering the self and new frameworks of thought for considering oneself … The cinema enabled the self to review the self, but it also made that self reviewable by others.” Kate Rennebohm, ‘Re-Vision: Moving Image Media, the Self and Ethical Thought in the 20th Century’ (Harvard University, 2018), 68. 153 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 45. 154 Didi-Huberman, 9. 210

Where [pathology] points to a breach or a rent, there may normally be articulation present. If we throw a crystal on the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along its lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of this same kind. 155 Photography thus becomes, Didi-Huberman argues, a “great optical machine” that allows one to “decipher the invisible lineaments of a crystal,”156 by repeatedly breaking it, again and again, capturing every break on film.

But perhaps even more importantly, what photography gives to the treatment of madness is the ability to take these singular instances of breaks, and consolidate them into a type. As Albert Londe (in Didi-Huberman), one of the photographers at the

Salpêtrière, explains:

Determining the facies appropriate to each illness and each affection, placing it before everyone’s eyes is precisely what photography is able to do. In certain doubtful or little known cases, a comparison of prints taken in various places or at distant times provides the assurance that the illness in different subjects who were not on hand at the same time is indeed one and the same. 157 What photography thus makes possible is the containment of the excess of madness into a type or a form, a type or a form that coheres around the repeated capture of the figure of the face. It is my contention that Robertson’s confessionals operate in a similar register, an attempt to impose form on the excesses of madness she is subjected to. This stretches from the close-up to the act of cinematic diarising itself, where the possibility of review, of observation over time and across repetitive instances, becomes a way for

155 Didi-Huberman, 9. 156 Didi-Huberman, 10. 157 Didi-Huberman, 48. 211

Robertson to make use of what Scott Curtis, in speaking about the observational practice that film made possible for early scientists, describes as “a self-disciplinary method of ordering thought.”158 As he continues to explain: “ … film was not simply a useful tool for understanding complex events: the use of film actually made manifest a mode of understanding.”159

The imposition of form becomes a mode of understanding for Robertson, a mode of making sense. In part, this imposition of form lies in the way her confessionals, like the images captured one hundred years earlier, rely on a structure of repetition, and are carefully calibrated to remain formally consistent over large periods of time. This too is a marker of the formal confession, in both the Catholic tradition and in the way it is used in criminal investigations, which is to say both these instances rely on a specific, repeatable form. The sacrament of confession is implemented through a dogmatically sanctioned practice that is done in a particular way, with particular confessional furniture, a confessional manual, and particular words that need to be said every time, both consistent and repetitive from instance to instance. The criminal interrogation which facilitates the confession is similarly structured, with manuals that “detail the design of the interrogation room, the close proximity of the interrogator’s chair in relation to the suspect’s (providing even a diagram), the interrogator’s clothing, his forms of address to the suspect …”160 Robertson works hard at achieving the same consistency of form from confessional to confessional.

158 Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 123. 159 Curtis, 124. 160 Brooks, Troubling, 38. 212

She adopts the same pose in each shot, holds the camera in the same position, either at eye-level, or slightly above her face, or set up to film her body seated on a chair or a day bed. The first instance captures her face in close-up; the latter a medium-long shot of her figure, which emphasises the excesses of her body, the weight she has gained under the baggy sweatshirts. Here the choice of close-up is important again. If Robertson employs the close-up to articulate the ways in which she can break, she also makes use of what Doane terms “the contradictory status” of this shot scale, where it is “both detail of a larger scene and a totality in its own right,”161 and employs the close-up as a means of gathering the broken fragments, and patching them back into a coherent whole. Indeed, “the scale of the close-up transforms the face into an instance of the gigantic, the monstrous: it overwhelms,”162 Doane notes, yet it is this excessive technique that Robertson chooses in her attempt to impose form, to curb that which is too much. Where the close-up is traditionally understood as a means to direct the focus of the audience, Hugo Münsterberg in The Film: A Psychological Study noting that “the close-up has objectified in our world of perception our mental act of attention,”163 for

Robertson it becomes a means to direct her own thoughts, to focus her mind.

“I Will Talk and I Will Talk” Speaking as Structural Silence in the History of Female Pathology The close-up eye of the camera fulfils this function of facilitating form as a mode of

161 Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (30 December 2003): 93. 162 Doane, 94. 163 Munsterberg is not the only theorist who thinks of the close-up in these terms. Epstein considers it a device that “limits and directs the attention,” and Perez notes that through the close-up “the camera focuses it [our attention] for us.” Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study; the Silent Photoplay in 1916 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 38. Epstein, ‘Magnification’, 239. Perez, Material Ghost, 24. 213

understanding in certain of the confessional instances; in others this role is taken up by

Robertson’s voice. In October 1986, Robertson is preparing to conclude her diary project, the anniversary of the date on which she first started shooting the film, an attempt at ensuring that Five Year Diary remains a five-year diary. In the reels that lead up to November 3rd 1986, the date at which the diary ends, Robertson spends much of her time on-screen simply addressing the camera, speaking to it, or to her audience, as much as she can, in the time she had left, with the most amount of sound film stock she could afford to purchase. In Reel 47: I Thought the Film Would End, Robertson is waiting by the door of her mother’s home on Halloween, having positioned a camera to capture each trick-or-treating child that enters. In the periods in-between visiting children,

Robertson addresses the camera directly: “There is a tendency when you make a diary, to film your life as if it were scenes. I’ve told you before, of my problems with that. And

I’ll tell you again, before the diary is over.” The scene cuts to the next shot, where

Robertson is still in the same position, and notes:

Taping, taping tapes to Tom for a long time now, I feel like he’s my divine husband. I’m worried about having another breakdown, I’ve thought of him for the last 6 years, and then the last four years, considered him very, very fine and mine. I didn’t write to him or taped to him, I believe, for two years, for 1984 and 1985, once I found out he was married. Robertson continues to speak about Baker, smoking a cigarette while she becomes more and more agitated, until she eventually starts to cry, still steadily holding our gaze:

“And I feel like I am too CRAZY to be loved. And I have HERPES. And I feel I will never have CHILDREN. And I am living at my mother’s house. And I will have no

LOVER here.” Robertson’s need to talk is not only grounded in the sadness and despair of her condition, as she so often points out in these addresses, but also in speaking about that which makes sense only to oneself, to which no one seems to want to listen.

214

As we hear in Reel 54: Still Mourning,164 where Robertson includes an audio track where she speaks to herself, talking about how her plants communicate with her, “giving me poems,” when she is interrupted by her mother:

Mother: You are giving me the creeps. Robertson: I’m just talking into a tape recorder, mom. Mother: I know, but you are confiding very important things into it, speaking about very important things that will change the world. Robertson: I’m making a diary. Saying things that are important.

The need to both speak, to say things that are important, and to record those important things, is a structuring silence in the history of female pathology. As Showalter notes about the absence of women’s own accounts of their illness in official psychiatric records: “The standard sources for psychiatric history, such as medical journals, psychiatric textbooks, asylum records, parliamentary minutes, court cases, and journalistic accounts, leave out … women’s voices.”165 These voices are only found in an alternative history, constructed from what Showalter calls “a wholly different set of cultural sources,”166 from which she and other theorists of female madness, most notably

Phyllis Chesler and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, draw.167 These texts, which include

“inmate narratives … women’s memoirs, and novels,”168 rely most strongly on the form of recording Robertson herself takes up, that of the diary. Historical specificity is

164 4 July to 5 October 1987. 165 Showalter, Female Malady, 5–6. 166 Showalter, 6. 167 Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972); Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 168 Showalter, Female Malady, 6. 215

important when thinking about this issue: in many of the cases Showalter writes about, the Victorian practice of psychiatric care was indeed rooted in doctors who did not devote much time to speaking to patients, as she notes, “Their cure involved refusing to discuss the lunatic’s feelings, ignoring her demands and observations, and instead, diverting her mind from its ‘delusions’ through physical activity and communal recreation.”169 Of course, Robertson’s history of psychiatric treatment took place in a wholly different era, one where Freudianism had already strongly ingratiated itself into the treatment of mental illness in the United States.170 Robertson had the chance to speak to many, many different psychiatrists and psychologists over the course of her life, and yet she found these interactions largely frustrating. Her attitude is perhaps most succinctly summarized in Reel 71: ON PROBATION, ETC.,171 where an audio diary recording of a therapy session forms part of the film, and we hear the therapist ask

Robertson, “What if you are chronically mentally ill and will have to go to hospital for the rest of your life?” to which Robertson responds, not in the actual conversation, but after the fact, through voice-over: “I'd rather watch Doctor Who.”

What Robertson’s confessional scenes thus afford her, is, firstly, the very act of speaking on her own terms. I read Robertson’s speech in these scenes as what “was from the start,” Arendt reminds us, “considered a form of action.” As she continues:

169 Showalter, 61. 170 Healy notes that by the time DSM-I was created, in 1952, American psychiatry was “a system that was notably Freudian and Meyerian [referring to John Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer] in approach …” This is backed up by Ronald Fieve, who argues that by the 1950s “most American psychiatrists … were totally immersed in Freudian psychiatry …” Healy, Antidepressant Era, 223. Ronald Fieve, Moodswing, the Third Revolution in Psychiatry (New York: Morrow, 1975), 21. 171 3 February to 6 May 1990. 216

Man cannot defend himself against the blows of fate, against the chicanery of the gods, but he can resist them in speech and respond to them, and though the response changes nothing … such words belong to the event as such … our downfall can become a deed if we hurl words against it even as we perish. 172 Robertson’s words thus break what Julia Kristeva in Black Sun calls the “illogicality and silence”173 that marks the depressive episode. It also grants her the choice of when to speak, as is evidenced in the way she harnesses the voice-over in Reel 71 to respond to the therapist’s question, using her ability to review and edit past events as a means of establishing agency in situations where she has none.174 She could also choose who to speak to: Doctor Who and not the litany of other doctors, and about what, not being bound by the endless doctor’s questionnaires she had to answer anew during every doctor’s visit, every hospitalisation, but this: the very fact of recording herself speaking, and her ownership of that record. To be sure, elements of recording would have been part of the practice of the doctors responsible for Robertson’s care, which could range from cursory case notes about therapy sessions, scribbled down by the doctor, to actual audio recordings of conversations between the two of them. But these could never be as complete as the record Robertson herself kept, and as her continued, failed attempts to extricate her official medical record from the Massachusetts hospital system proved,175

172 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 125. 173 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 222. 174 Here Robertson’s approach again seems to operate within the larger legacy of second-wave consciousness-raising. As Johanna Burton outlines by discussing Carol Hanisch’s seminal early piece in Voices from the Women’s Liberation, in these sessions, which second-wavers adamantly refused to liken to therapy, despite it often being framed as such by outsiders, the personal became the political because “individual experiences offered the potential for ‘chang[ing] the objective conditions, not adjust[ing] to them.’” Johanna Burton, ‘The New Honesty: The Life-Work and Work-Life of Lee Lozano’, in Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel, ed. Helen Molesworth (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2008), 19. 175 Official documentation of patient rights, McLean Hospital [Folder 9, #239]. 217

this record would actually be one she had access to, and right of revision over. In this way she could escape the situation where, Doane reminds us, “Narration by the woman is therefore therapeutic only when constrained and regulated by the purposeful ear of the listening doctor.”176

The distinction Doane makes here is important, and follows from the way Michel

Foucault positions the confession as central to the larger psychiatric apparatus, where its status as subjugating tool was disguised to make it seem as that which could free the confessor. In The History of Sexuality, where he writes about this dubious therapeutic strategy, he notes:

… one has to have an inverted image of power in order to believe that all these voices which have spoken for so long in our civilization — repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking — are speaking to us of freedom.177 It is within the confines of the clinic and the couch that the confession itself is articulated as a form “within the norms of scientific regularity.”178 More specifically, a list of clinical Freudian and post-Freudian practices are what bring about the coherence of the confession as form. These practices include, Foucault notes, the “clinical codification of the inducement to speak,”179 and “the medicalization of the effects of

Letter from McLean Hospital to Robertson, 5 August 1988 [Folder 9, #240]. Letter from Massachusetts Mental Health Centre to Robertson, 9 August 1988 [Folder 9, #241]. Letter written by Robertson to unknown hospital, 1 August 1988 [Folder 9, #242]. 176 Doane, Desire, 54. 177 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 60. 178 Foucault, 65. 179 Foucault, 65. 218

confession,”180 but it also foregrounds the role of the doctor as confessant, in the power he yields to read and interpret what the confession is actually saying. Thus, Foucault notes:

If one had to confess, this was not merely because the person to whom one confessed had the power to forgive, console, and direct, but because the work of producing the truth was obliged to pass through this relationship if it was to be scientifically validated. The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing, would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it. 181

It is this relationship that Robertson’s confessions have to the figure of the doctor that is important to understanding how she intervenes in the history of female pathology captured on camera. Which is to say: the doctor is missing. The stark difference between

Robertson’s confessionals and what Linda Williams calls “the bodily confession of involuntary spasm”182 of the hysterical patients that early doctors like Hugh Diamond and Charcot captured, thus lies on a number of fronts. There is no doctor “inducing”183

Robertson to perform this confession; she is the one both in front and behind the cinematic apparatus that captures the confession. In the absence of a doctor, the record and interpretation of the confession is hers as well, one which she can continually rewrite and re-edit.184 Most importantly, this rewriting and re-editing occurs on the level

180 Foucault, 66. 181 Foucault, 66. 182 Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 48. 183 Williams, 48. 184 Editing and rewriting the confession was already a practice in Salpêtrière, which Foucault defines as “the more frequent practice of deleting from the succession of dossiers” which were kept 219

of form, in how Robertson presents her visual taxonomy of failure always within the context of her verbal articulation of a confession. Robertson employs photography, that which shows “the least flaw,”185 to cast a spotlight on every single flaw, but to also iterate these flaws repeatedly, articulate them one by one.

Failure and Form As she addresses the camera directly, Robertson’s articulates all the ways in which she can fail, in a repetitive, almost list-like manner, as if imposing form on the different ways a life can break allows her to break in this failure, to get a handle on what is always in excess, always too much. In Reel 81: Mourning Emily, Robertson films a child demonstrating to her “how to eat a peanut butter sandwich,” then turns the camera on herself, reminding us how many things she has not learnt to do. Different shots of herself are edited together here, many of them underexposed or unfocused, her face framed in close-up in each. “Other people have kids,” she mentions as she moves the camera from her face down to her bedside table, capturing her many bottles of pills. “I lost my beauty, and my pills exist,” she notes before cutting to her face in extreme close- up, her face now dappled in sunlight, highlighting the heavy bags under her eyes: “My lover didn’t come last night. Who am I kidding? A filmmaker? I think I’m beautiful?

Are you kidding? There’s days, you know, when you’ve lost your beauty forever.

Forever.” Still in sunlight and in close-up, but at a different time, Robertson notes: “That child is beautiful, but I don’t have any children. I have a film that’s going on its fourteenth year. And I have no beauty. And the lover didn’t come. I have no children, no mate.” She interjects with a shot of her cigarettes, and a glass of orange juice in the

by Jean-Martin Charcot’s “hierarchy of personnel who kept watch, organized, provoked, monitored, and reported.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 56. 185 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 34. 220

hand that is not holding the camera, noting “I smoke cigarettes,” while in voice-over alerting the viewer that there is vodka hiding in the orange juice, before she cuts to a blurry, shaky shot of her medication lined up on the bedside table, and the lament: “I’m supposed to face this as my fate. Broken. Broken.” We return to a blurry shot of her face in close-up.

If the confessional scenes become a litany of the very many ways Robertson’s life breaks down, it also functions as a way for her to break down the various elements of her life where she has failed. This is not just a way of recording these failures, but of ordering them, of breaking up her life into smaller parts, of differentiating them in a list, of analysis, of classification. Here the attempts to make sense, often brush up against that which is not sense; Robertson’s attempts at breaking down her illness are always haunted by the spectre of a mental breakdown. In these scenes, she is often recovering from one, or trying to guard against one, or watching as one approaches. In Reel 80:

Emily Died, just before she is hospitalised again, she turns the camera on herself. As is often the case in these scenes, Robertson positions her face in the centre of the frame, and appears in close-up. The viewer is first struck by two things: the heavy, pronounced bags under her eyes, and the strange cadence of her voice as she begins to speak, where it is unclear if she is drugged, drunk, or just severely upset. Robertson, visibly suffering, begins to speak, periodically punctuating the phrases of a sentence with a rueful smile, her mouth moving strangely throughout the scene:

I shall try to imagine being happy. I shall hope for … miracles. Why not? It’s a good idea. I shall try to imagine being happy.

221

The idea even. If a mental breakdown is defined as “fail[ing] through incapacity, excess emotion,”186

Robertson, even in the midst of such a breakdown, is attempting to make sense of the excesses of her mania by ordering it, explaining it, editing it. In the first shot, soon after she begins to speak, a second audio track is heard, and Robertson explains, in voice- over recorded later, that the movements her mouth is making in this scene, and the stiffness of her face, is a side-effect of the anti-psychotic medication she is taking. As outlined earlier in this chapter, Robertson often employs the voice-over, within the diary’s temporal possibility of review, to make sense of the non-sensical, the mind in recovery clarifying the behaviour and speech of the mind broken down. This scene, as all the other confessional scenes, is also tightly edited, as Robertson cuts between different points in the same monologue, excises parts from a larger, longer recording.

Even the confession, the taking of one’s measure, must itself be measured, moderated.

The impulse to edit here is thus another attempt to curb the excesses of mania even as the camera starkly reveals its stigmata: how stiff her facial muscles appear, the involuntary grinding of her teeth, the heavy bags under her eyes.

But failure figures in another very important manner in these confessionals. As she attempts to order her thoughts, and visibly struggles to articulate the formless into some sense of the coherent, she simultaneously visibly struggles with the very apparatus she works with. The most common forms of technical failure in this regard are Robertson’s inability to, on the one hand, light the scenes where she addresses the camera, and on the other, keep the image in focus. The dovetailing of her inability to focus the shot and her inability to focus her thoughts is perhaps most evident in Reel 81:

186 ‘Breakdown | Origin and Meaning of Breakdown by Online Etymology Dictionary’, accessed 30 August 2019, https://www.etymonline.com/word/breakdown. 222

Mourning Emily, where Robertson tries to film the flowers she has planted for her dead niece Emily, but is unable to adjust the camera to articulate them from a blur to a hollyhock. We watch as Robertson tries to adjust the exposure, and frustratedly notes, playing on the double meaning of the word, “Can I even get them in focus? Who can?

Who can focus?” Throughout the confessional scenes Robertson treats the failure of the apparatus as the structural means to articulate the failure of her body. In this way she harnesses the failure of her films in a register that corresponds with how Sara Ahmed considers failure in Queer Phenomenology: “So what does it mean to say that an object fails to do the work for which it was intended? This failure might not simply be a question of the object itself failing … A hammer might be broken and not enable me to do one thing, but it could still let me do something else,”187 or to again quote Arendt:

“the downfall can become a deed.”188 The failure of the apparatus becomes another way for

Robertson to articulate form, which is to say, another means of making sense.

Reel 80 is a salient example in this regard. Robertson is recovering from a breakdown, and uses the reel to, again, list the various parts of her life plagued by failure. She sits on a day bed in a series of shots all plagued by underexposure, and the cuts suggest that this is not the first take. She eventually settles on a greeting for her audience that acknowledges the failure of the frame: “I’ll probably only appear in silhouette.” “I drink too much wine, with juice” she notes, the camera momentarily darting in an unfocused manner around the interior of the house in which Robertson is seated, before returning to her face, still unfocused, her face bathed in the yellows and reds of a world without white balance. Later, she sits on the daybed again, a lamp next to it the only light

187 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 49. 188 Arendt, Promise of Politics, 125. 223

source, Robertson basically shrouded in darkness. The camera’s inability to render the specificity of her body in the absence of light, its failure to produce a clear view of what has been placed before it, mirrors the many ways in which Robertson’s life has broken down. “I drink too much wine!” she aggressively asserts as she speaks into the camera.

“And I shouldn’t! Yet I don’t think of myself as an alcoholic.” These failures are always all intertwined, a list never contains only one entry. It is still too dark to properly make out her features. She continues: “I smoke marijuana occasionally, and I drink TOO

MUCH COFFEE … WITH SOYMILK … trying to be a vegan trying to NOT HURT THE

COWS. I am at LEAST 60 POUNDS OVERWEIGHT. I weigh about 183.” Robertson moves slightly closer to the one lamp that lights the scene, now no longer completely shrouded in darkness, as she picks up a bottle of pills from the table beside her, and starts to violently shake it, matching the cadence of her voice, as she aggressively asserts, “AND I take ANTI! ANTI! ANTI-psychotic drugs!” Suddenly deflated, she looks up, frustratedly throwing her hands up in the air: “And can I find my true love?

It’s a good question. It’s a good question.”

We should be cognisant of the fact that Robertson does not cut these technical failures.

But she does not leave them unannounced, either. Again and again, she draws overt attention to the failures of the film, and mentions how she forgot to switch on the microphone, that the tape ran out, the light meter broke, the camera jammed. We are made to see that she has failed, but we are constantly reminded that she is aware of this failure, that she is not oblivious, that it has not passed her by. Failure (of her mind, of the camera) may have been the hand she has been dealt, but it has also been forged into a form, as neatly packed as Robertson’s duffel bag she presents to the camera, arriving in San Francisco in 1994 for a screening of her work, where the film reels are tightly nestled next to a change of clothing and an illicit bottle of brandy stolen from the house

224

of a friend.189 It is important to note that Robertson’s failure here is not the failure that

Jack Halberstam outlines as an “alternative feminist project,”190 although it is feminist, and it is central to her project. Halberstam’s transgressive approach to the embrace of failure is one he articulates in The Queer Art of Failure, where he notes that “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”191 Halberstam advocates for a complete dismantling of self,192 and for forgetting, “as a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary”193 and it is here that his failure is everything that Robertson’s is not.

Dismantling the self is only an option for those not always already actively engaged in putting that self together. So is forgetting: you can only forget if you still actually remember, or, as Robertson notes in Reel 47, looking into the camera: “Maybe these pictures will constitute my memory.”

Conclusion

In the 1985 3-minute film Talking to Myself, which forms part of Five Year Diary,

Robertson is seen on-screen, as she argues with another version of herself, produced through double exposure. Both walk back and forth between two stools set against a wall, and a camera positioned to capture this, the figures repeatedly adjusting the camera as it shoots. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how this camera works, I haven’t read the instruction booklet,” the one Robertson loudly complains, her head cut

189 As seen in Reel 81: Mourning Emily (27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995). 190 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 124. 191 Halberstam, 2–3. 192 Halberstam, 124. 193 Halberstam, 70. 225

off for the third consecutive shot. This is not the only technical failure: the homemade titles with which the film opens are pasted on skew, the camera struggles to focus or its view is obscured by some piece of furniture in the foreground, and for an entire minute of the film the screen goes completely black. The conversation between the two

Robertsons is also difficult to follow — both speak simultaneously, which makes their respective contributions difficult to place. Over and over, the figures repeat the same movement on-screen: they walk to the camera, walk back to their stools, sit for a moment, address the other, then get up again, return to the camera. “I’m really sick of this, I don’t know how to ever get through to myself,” Robertson says to Robertson, “I

NEED TO TALK TO SOMEBODY AND YOU’RE THE BEST THING I’VE GOT.”

In some ways, Five Year Diary embodies the madness it is trying to escape. It is too much, it is too long, it is a very complicated way to feel less lonely, to initiate conversation. Sitting in her home, continuously speaking to herself, to her mother, and to a camera, Robertson waits for a television star who never arrives: Five Year Diary seems like an endeavour one would call, well, crazy. In the initial project of the World

Movie, Robertson’s psychosis coalesces around the idea of a film that contains all of history, of desire, of experience and impression, an always already fully formed object,

Foucault’s “unbroken sphere.”194 But there is also another Five Year Diary, where, like

Talking to Myself shows, form is hard-won, an unending labour. For Five Year Diary is not just maddening, but it is also an attempt at a way out of the madness, of a slow, repetitive articulation of form that produces sense. Form that fails, that breaks, that is

194 “While men of reason and wisdom see only fragmentary figures that are all the more frightening for their incompleteness, the madman sees a whole, unbroken sphere.” Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009), 19. 226

gathered again, stitched together. I’m really sick of this, Robertson says in Talking to

Myself. Sick of the sickness, yes, of the ways in which her mind can break, but also: all the other broken things, not least of all the camera. “I borrow camera from school and no one retrieves it. It is taped together, the focus is broken, since it has fallen twice.”195 A borrowed, broken camera, the ontology of the apparatus itself already signifying the mode of failure embedded in Robertson’s record of the very many ways an individual can break (down). As Ahmed reminds us: “the arrival of an object does not just happen in a moment; it is not that the object 'makes an appearance' … An arrival takes time, and the time that it takes shapes 'what' it is that arrives. The object could even be described as the transformation of time into form …”196

Diaries are distillations of time, and if Five Year Diary does not contain the history of the entire world, it does serves as a documentation of the endurance of decades of a mind breaking down. The cyclical nature of Robertson’s illness, as it is recorded in the film, the repetitive regimes of therapy and drugs and hospitalisations and diagnoses, and the very scope of the film itself — how much of it there is, the excess of it, embodies this survival. In The Power of Feminist Art, Norma Broude notes that “Women are conservators, we collect, we save, we curate our lives, keep our diaries, journals, scrapbooks, so that we can prove we lived.”197 This is not a new sentiment: writing about her own art practice, often located in forms of art traditionally deemed “female,”

Miriam Schapiro asks, “If I repeat the shape of my being enough times will that shape

195 Written diary entry, April to May 1983. [Folder 5, #12]. 196 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 40. 197 Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard, ‘Conversations with Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 82. 227

be seen?”198 For Robertson, it is the repetition of the being that shapes that being, that allows it to cohere into a form, a coherence which makes it visible to others, which allows her to move from speaking to herself, to speaking to others. What makes her work so compelling is the way Five Year Diary seems to operate in both registers at once:

Robertson is both caught up in her own worlds of mania, and at the same time attempts to break through this impasse by continually trying to make herself legible to others, to that which is outside herself, a process we could perhaps call sanity.

198 Miriam Schapiro quoted in Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Miriam Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life (New York: Harry N Abrams Publishers, 1999), 172. 228 Conclusion

In 1987, Robertson was trying to put together a marathon screening of Five Year Diary.

How to present the very many reels she had accumulated over the course of the six years recording her life was always an important consideration. For the proposed screening, Robertson wrote to the Massachusetts College of Art, she hoped to secure a venue for five days, which would allow her to screen reels each day from 1pm to midnight, with intermissions between.1 From her proposal, Robertson seemed to want viewers to hang in there with her for the long haul: the room would be outfitted with a screen “that goes all the way to the floor,” and the room would have to be “warm enough so people can lie down in front.”2 Nine hours of screen time per day, Robertson noted, kept it “within audience attention limits,” and the breaks would allow her to smoke a cigarette and get coffee.3 These arrangements are indicative of an enduring concern for Robertson: how much work she was making, how to contain that work. To work in Robertson’s archive of personal documents is to be faced with how much of it there is: how many diaries Robertson wrote over the course of decades, and how she used those diaries to keep track of her other forms of recording. Throughout the written diaries Robertson kept lists that delineated how much footage she shot every month, how many tapes she recorded for the film and to send to Tom Baker, in my estimate what amounts to thousands of audio tapes over the course of two decades. During spring, summer and fall she recorded the many vegetables she harvested every week

(which, during a week in late September included 65 lbs green tomatoes, 15 lbs red tomatoes, 6 cabbages, 5 summer squash and 8 lbs of peppers),4 and would follow that

1 Screening proposal addressed to Massachusetts College of Art, 1987 [Folder 3, #18]. 2 Screening proposal addressed to Massachusetts College of Art, 1987 [Folder 3, #18]. 3 Screening proposal addressed to Massachusetts College of Art, 1987 [Folder 3, #19]. 4 Garden harvest list, 28 September (year unknown) [Folder 10, #1].

229 up with lists of her preserves, endless jars of jams and pickles.5 Thinking about the immensity of scale of Robertson’s project has been an enduring concern in writing about this work: what it signifies, what it does. On one level, Robertson’s recording was a means to register the labour she was engaged in throughout her life, the fact that she almost never stopped working. As this dissertation argues, Five Year Diary became the vehicle for Robertson to showcase this labour, in all its different forms: the labour of making and maintaining an ideal body; the labour of conjuring the “true love” for whom the cinematic “trousseau” was intended; and the labour of imposing sense on the many nonsensical experiences in her mind, of trying to capture them in a form that could be understood by others, what I have called, in chapter 3, the process of moving from speaking to oneself to speaking to others. But Robertson’s record of her labour also fulfils another function, as testament to how long she endures: the never-ending counting of calories, the weight that always comes back, the man who continues to send signs of his coming but never arrives, the paranoid hallucinations and voices and tardive dyskinesia. To the viewers lying in front of the screen in the screening proposed for 1987, working their way through forty hours of footage, surrounded by decades of paper diaries they could read, this in itself was an experience in endurance. Akin to large-scale durational works like Marina Abromavić and Ulay’s The Lovers (1988), where the artists walked the length of the Great Wall of China, but from opposite ends, then met up in the middle and ended their relationship, the duration of Robertson’s Five Year

5 Robertson would routinely preserve hundreds of jars every summer, which she used herself, gifted to friends and family, donated to homeless shelters, and sent in care packages to Tom Baker. This is recorded both in reels (like Reel 21: Still Berrypicking (12 to 23 August 1982) and Reel 81: Mourning Emily (27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995), and in written diary entries. Written diary entry, 1991 [Folder 1, #354]. List of packages sent to Baker, 1998 [Folder 6, #65].

230 Diary “confounded any possible continuous spectatorship; it measured heartbreak in slow, deliberate steps.”6

If Five Year Diary both speaks about Robertson’s endurance and requires a similar commitment of endurance from its audience, it also is a study in the world-making that

Robertson engages in in order to survive, in order to endure. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren

Berlant describes what could have been Robertson: “In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown. Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least.”7 In Robertson’s case, as in so many women before her, what Adrienne Rich calls “the resourceful, heroic coping of ordinary women everywhere,”8 this meant making do with what you have: a diary, a home, and a whole lot of failure. In his Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam draws from Scott

Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America to argue that failing is essentially tied to not leaving any trace. “As Sandage narrates in his compelling study,”

Halberstam notes, “losers leave no records, while winners cannot stop talking about it.”9 To the good housewife and homesteader Robertson fantasised herself to be, this privilege did not exist: everything, regardless how shitty, could be, had to be used, a recurring motif in the film as kitchen scraps get saved for compost, again and again, meal after meal, day after day, year in, year out. The women’s movement had strategically employed “personal history” as something to be “ransacked, analyzed, displayed and re-invented”10 as a means of feminist revolt, and Robertson followed in

6 Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 104. 7 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. 8 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 263. 9 Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 88. 10 Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, 1970-1980 (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983), 18.

231 this tradition. Following the lead of artists like Lee Lozano, she scavenged the scrapyard of her personal life into a work: “turning everything into a piece was effectively a way of redeeming or repurposing bouts of depression, disappointment, frustration, loneliness, anxiety, rage and (self)-destruction.”11 As I argue in chapter 1, recording the labour that she engages in, even if that labour fails to bring about the desired end, becomes a way for Robertson to create what exists as her body of work: paraphrasing

Mierle Laderman Ukeles,12 Robertson’s working becomes the work.

The world that second-wave feminism was facing at its tail-end, which also happened to be the world at the beginning of Five Year Diary, was one which Mary Daly would describe as

a period of extreme danger for women and for our sister the earth and her other creatures, all of whom are targeted by maniacal fathers, sons, and holy ghosts for extinction by nuclear holocaust, or, failing that, by chemical contamination, by escalated ordinary violence, by man-made hunger and disease that proliferate in a climate of deception and mind- rot.13 Robertson shared these concerns: her political letters, written to congressmen, newspaper editors, presidents, and the pope, advocated for an end to war, nuclear disarmament, vegetarianism and an end to animal cruelty, stopping the destruction of the natural environment, the eradication of child hunger and poverty.14 But her utopian vision was always rooted in an institution second-wavers had worked hard to move

11 Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece (London: Afterall Books, 2014), 19. 12 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, ‘Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969’, Arnolfini Art House, accessed 24 July 2019, https://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969. 13 Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), iv. 14 There are too many to list them all. Some of these include: Political letter, unaddressed, 3 November 1989 [Folder 11, #1]. Political letter, addressed to Pope John Paul II, 30 May 1988 [Folder 12, #1]. Political letter, addressed to “The People of the World,” 1988 [Folder 12, #2]. Political letter, unaddressed, 27 March 1984 [Folder 12, #3].

232 beyond: the enduring centre of Robertson’s home movie was the redemptive potential of the home. In an undated political letter, Robertson’s desire is not only for the major changes in world events that I delineated above to come to pass, but is also particularly focused on the world of the personal, of the domestic. She writes:

I wish I could write more poetry for people to read; I wish I could afford more film and a closetful of Polaroid film; I wished I could work with closedcircuit and recorded video; I wish I had a little house in a 500’ diameter dome somewhere a little south of here; I wish I could have six children and adopt a dozen and then have foster children too; I wish I could [have] dogs and cats and birds and all the kinds of animals roving free; I wish I could have a huge fruit, flower, vegetable and houseplant garden with tiny patches of all the kinds of habitats, and lots of woods with a river, a little river, with calico goldfish; I wish I could grow old so my hair would grow very long; I wish I could have met him and my hair had never been cut and we had met earlier when we were younger; i wish I could get off all these drugs this moment so my skin could take the sun again, I could have children …15

It is in the domestic realm that Robertson’s world-making functions, a domesticity that is always closely coupled with film. In the proposals for marathon screenings that

Robertson outlined in the 1980s, the domestic environment she tried to recreate for these events were to resemble a “home rec room fall-out shelter,”16 or “a home movie basement viewing room, a diary den, a bomb shelter, a comfortable living-room filled with artifacts from the life of a 20th century woman.”17 But the home of the home movie would extend farther than this: Robertson routinely included money for refreshments as part of her screening budget, and her diaries show plans for staggering reels between

15 Political letter, unaddressed and date unknown [Folder 12, #4]. 16 Five Year Diary overview written by Robertson, date unknown [Folder 5, #200]. 17 Robertson filmography, date unknown [Folder 3, #279].

233 different courses of a meal, so that spectators would watch a few reels, then have an entrée, then more reels, followed by dessert, then the reels continue, followed by a snack, before ending the night with a few final screened reels.18 What Robertson seems to try and approximate in these settings is the scenes around a table that are peppered throughout the film, of people talking and eating together: the many instances where her family eat hamburgers and freshly shucked corn around her grandmother’s table; the large watermelons that are perched on picnic tables in the summer, children crowding around; and the meals prepared and enjoyed at her own kitchen table, where she recorded the conversations that occur as she chops and fries. Robertson’s is a diary founded on the need for conversation. As I’ve indicated, many of her written and audio diaries take the explicit form of letters, and years before her diaries are first on display as part of Five Year Diary she already sent entries to a friend or colleague who responded in letters of his own, and left comments in her diary margins.19 Although diaries are traditionally positioned as private documents where the writer is the only reader, revisionist diary scholars have, over the last few decades, conclusively argued for how few diaries adhere to this idea. Diaries are often written for an audience, either a domestic or public one, and in some cases are used, in lieu of letters, to keep people abreast of events, sending diary entries back and forth.20 Robertson was particularly

18 Project description, date unknown [Folder 3, #280]. It bears noting that food was often a part of second-wave feminist exhibition practice. Food was served at the open house events for the California Institute of the Arts feminist collective, and Suzanne Lacy hosted a range of communal dinners, starting in 1980 with a potluck for 500 women, which she called an “expanded performance.” Faith Wilding, ‘The Feminist Arts Program at Fresno and CalArts, 1970-1975’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 38. Judith E Stein, ‘Collaboration’, in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (New York: HN Abrams, 1994), 245. 19 Written diary entry, 1970s [Folder 7, #235]. 20 Elizabeth Podnieks, Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 13, 23, 27.

234 enamoured with the idea that hers was not the only diary, but one that was in conversation with others. In its most extreme iteration, she detailed the way in which the diary, as her “cinematic trousseau” was matched by a diary that her “one true love” was keeping in parallel but removed from her, and that the two films would be matched up when they meet, slotted into one another. But at screenings of her film

Robertson also often included a call to the viewer to “compare the dates with your life then,”21 at some point noting: “I invite other diary-keepers to project their film at same time + share their written diaries.”22 In Five Year Diary, the home and the home movie become the site of facilitating conversation, conversation that becomes a way of hinting at a new, different world. Like the audio track to Reel 9 that records Robertson and her mother talking while cooking doughnuts, egg rolls and tempura, a new world opens up, in the words of Silvia Federici, “through the day-to-day activities by means of which we produce our existence … [so] that we can develop our capacity to cooperate and not only resist our dehumanization but learn to reconstruct the world as a space of nurturing creativity, and care.”23 The conversation that the diary, as a record of everyday life, thus initiates is a form of homework. “Feminism is homework,” Sara

Ahmed notes, “because we have much to work out from not being at home in the world. Feminist housework does not simply clean and maintain a house. Feminist housework aims to transform the house, to rebuild the master’s residence.”24 For

Robertson, rebuilding the home starts with writing the diary. As she notes in an undated diary entry: “SOMEONE WILL WANT THIS BESIDES ME.”25

21 Screening notes, 1985 [Folder 3, #11]. 22 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 5, #563]. 23 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 2–3. 24 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 7. 25 Written diary entry, date unknown [Folder 1, #198].

235 Anne Charlotte Robertson Filmography

Five Year Diary Average length of reel approximately 25 minutes. All Super 8mm.

Reel 1 The Beginning Thanksgiving 3 November to 13 December 1981

Reel 2 The Definitions of Fat and Thin 13 to 22 December 1981

Reel 3 Christmas 1981 New Year 1982 22 December 1981 to 9 January 1982

Reel 4 My Father Died 10 to 21 January 1982

Reel 5 Mourning 23 to 30 January 1982

Reel 6 The Lights of the Bardo 30 January to 26 February 1982

Reel 7 Home Alone 26 February to 6 March 1982

Reel 8 Leaving my Father’s Office 7 to 16 March 1982

Reel 9 Happy Birthday ’33 17 to 27 March 1982

Reel 10 Easter 28 March to 19 April 1982

Reel 11 Data Entry 19 to 30 April 1982

Reel 12 Reunion 30 April to 6 May 1982

Reel 13 Visiting in North Carolina 6 to 9 May 1982

Reel 14 North Carolina and More Data Entry 9 to 12 May 1982

Reel 15 Even More Data Entry 13 May to 19 June 1982

Reel 16 Soon to be Unemployed 9 to 24 June 1982

Reel 17 End of the Job 25 June to 2 July 1982

Reel 18 Raspberry Season 3 to 15 July 1982

Reel 19 Heat of Summer 16 to 28 July 1982

Reel 20 Blackberry Season 29 July to 11 August 1982

Reel 21 Still Berrypicking 12 to 23 August 1982

236 Reel 23 A Breakdown (and) After the 1 September to 13 December 1982 Mental Hospital Reel 24 Christmas 1982 New Year 1983 14 December 1982 to 26 January 1983

Reel 25 Getting Fat Again 27 January to 27 February 1983

Reel 26 First Semester Graduate School 28 February to 20 May 1983

Reel 27 Visiting North Carolina Again 21 to 24 May 1983

Reel 28 Leaving the Apartment and 25 May to 28 June 1983 Moving Home Reel 29 New York City & the Berry Season 29 June to 4 August 1983

Reel 30 Visiting Grandmother ’83 5 to 18 August 1983

Reel 31 Niagara Falls 19 to 28 August 1983

Reel 32 Losing Weight 29 August to 11 October 1983

Reel 33 A Crush on Doctor Who 12 October to 18 November 1983

Reel 34 Doctor Who Convention and the Day 19 November to 6 December 1983 After Reel 35 Christmas 1983 and New Year 1984 7 December 1983 to 6 January 1984

Reel 36 Another Nervous Breakdown 7 January to 9 February 1984

Reel 37 After the Mental Hospital Again 16 February to 6 April 1984

Reel 38 Watching Music Television 6 April to 18 May 1984

Reel 39 Yet Another Breakdown 19 May to 17 July 1984

Reel 40 Visiting Grandmother ‘84, Wyoming 17 July to 26 August 1984

Reel 41 California, Massachusetts & Wyoming 27 August to 25 December 1984

Reel 42 Christmas ‘84, New Year ’85 + 25 December 1984 to 10 March 1985 Gaining Weight Reel 43 Myself Day-to-Day (and) Visiting 11 March to 26 August 1985 Grandmother Reel 44 Last Semester of Graduate School 27 August to 13 December 1985

Reel 45 Christmas ‘85, New Year ’86, Then 13 December 1985 to 17 May 1986 Employed Again Reel 46 Yet Another Breakdown (Then) Doctor 18 May to 20 October 1986 Who Convention

237 Reel 47 I Thought the Film Would End 21 October to 2 November 1986

Reel 48 The Fifth Anniversary of this Film 3 to 8 November 1986

Reel 49 Lunar Phases 8 November to 5 December 1986

Reel 50 Christmas ‘86 and New Year ’87 5 December 1986 to 11 January 1987

Reel 51 Another Breakdown: Will I Ever 12 January to 17 February 1987 Mend? Reel 52 Preparing for a Big Show (and) 17 February to 28 March 1987 Happy Birthday 38 Reel 53 CinnamonAmy Cat Died 30 March to 30 June 1987

Reel 54 Still Mourning My Dear Friend Cat 4 July to 5 October 1987

Reel 55 Breakdown Wasn’t Filmed 6 October to 20 November 1987

Reel 56 Christmas ‘87, New Year ’88 21 November 1987 to 22 January 1988

Reel 57 Employment (and) Birthday 39 23 January to 10 April 1988

Reel 58 California Show 14 April to 1 May 1988

Reel 59 BIG RELIGIOUS/ POLITICAL 4 to 22 May 1988 LETTER Reel 60 New York City Peace March 22 May to 27 June 1988

Reel 61 More Doctor Who 27 June to 18 July 1988

Reel 62 In a Performance 18 July to 1 August 1988

Reel 63 Family (and) Gardens 7 to 28 August 1988

Reel 64 Visiting Grandmother ’88 29 August to 25 September 1988

Reel 65 Big Show in New York City 26 September to 26 November 1988

Reel 66 Hanukah, Christmas ’88, 26 November 1988 to 7 March 1989 New Year ’89 Reel 67 So Much Doctor Who 7 March to 4 June 1989

Reel 68 Plenty of Doctor Who 10 June to 15 September 1989

Reel 69 Guess Who, Breakdowns 4 October to 21 November 1989

Reel 70 Christmas ’89, New Year ’90, 23 December 1989 to 3 February 1990 Flashbacks and Resolutions Reel 71 ON PROBATION, ETC. 3 February to 6 June 1990

238 Reel 72 Still on Probation (and) Visiting 7 May to 3 September 1990 Grandmother ‘90 Reel 73 Untitled 3 September to 1 December 1990

Reel 74 Christmas ’90, Iraq, and Getting 2 December 1990 to 7 May 1991 Religion Reel 75 Untitled 7 May to 30 October 1991

Reel 76 Fall to Spring 30 October 1991 to 28 March 1992

Reel 77 Untitled Not known

Reel 78 Untitled 7 November 1993 to 2 April 1994

Reel 79 Untitled Not known

Reel 80 Emily Died 14 May to 26 September 1994

Reel 81 Mourning Emily 27 September 1994 to 29 January 1995

Reel 82 Untitled Not known

Reel 83 Untitled 24 December 1995 to 18 March 1997

Reel 84 Untitled Not known

Short films

Quitting Smoking Date unknown Super 8mm Color. Sound. 2 minutes.

Garden Wall Date unknown Super 8mm. Black and white, colour. Silent. 6 minutes.

Spirit of ’76 (Self-portrait) 1976 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 10 minutes.

Pixillation 1976 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 3 minutes.

Going to Work 1976 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 7 minutes.

239

Subways 1976 Super 8mm. Black and white. Sound. 13 minutes.

Suicide 1979 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 10 minutes.

Dawn 1979 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 13 minutes.

Robertson 1979 1979 Super 8mm. Details unknown. 3 minutes.

Locomotion 1981 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 7 minutes.

Out a Window: Self-portrait 1981 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 3 minutes.

Magazine Mouth 1983 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 10 minutes.

Depth of Field 1983 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 13 minutes. Possibly incomplete.

Merry Christmas 1984 1984 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 10 minutes.

Depression Focus Please 1984 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 4 minutes.

Windows 1984-1998 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent with tape. 40 minutes.

Snoozalarm 1985 Super 8mm. Color. Sound. 10 minutes.

Talking to Myself 1985 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 3 minutes.

Kafka Kamera 1985 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 3 minutes.

240 Fruit 1985 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 8 minutes.

Rotting Pumpkin 1985 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent, or with live narration. 13 minutes.

Wait 1985 Super 8mm. Details unknown. 3 minutes.

Wait/Fat 1985 Super 8mm. Details and duration unknown.

My Obsession 1986 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound on film and with live narration. 24 min.

With Clothes 1987 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent with tape, and with in-person performance. 17 minutes.

Fat Talks to Thin 1987 Super 8mm. Details and duration unknown.

The Nude 1987 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent with tape, and with in-person performance. 17 minutes.

Seasons 1987-1988 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent with tape. 40 minutes.

Weight 1987-1988 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound on tape. 55 minutes.

Diet 1988 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 24 minutes.

Measurements 1988 Super 8mm. Colour. Silent. 20 minutes.

Sign of Jesus is the Fish 1989 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 3 minutes.

241 Apologies 1990 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 17 minutes.

Alien Corn 1998 Details and duration unknown.

Melon Patches , Or, Reasons to Go on Living 1998 Super 8mm. Colour. Sound. 27 minutes.

Letter to my Men 2001 Mini-DV. Details and duration unknown.

Letter to the Rabbi, the Ayatollah, and the Pope 2001 Mini-DV. Details and duration unknown.

Letter to Toms 2001 Mini-DV. Details and duration unknown.

To My Family and Friends: Will and Testament 2001 Mini-DV. Details and duration unknown.

My Cat, My Garden, 9/11 2001 Super 8mm. Sound. Colour. 6 minutes.

242

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