Anne Charlotte Robertson, Reel 22: August 23–September 1, 1982: A Short Affair (And) Going Crazy, from Five Year Diary (1981–1997), Super-8 transferred to digital video, film stills, Courtesy Harvard Film Archive
Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949–2012) was a Massachusetts-based filmmaker who used her Super-8 camera and acute self-awareness to forge a radically intimate mode of first-person cinema. Although she was celebrated as an artist in her lifetime, only today is Robertson finally being acknowledged as an influential pioneer of the first-person diary cinema that has long flourished in the Boston-Cambridge area, perhaps best known in the work of Ed Pincus and Ross McElwee. The first of two programs of Robertson’s films at documenta 14 combines rarely seen shorter works such as Spirit of ’76, with three arresting chapters of the Five Year Diary, including the seminal Reel 22: A Short Affair (And) Going Crazy (1982), now featuring Robertson’s filmed spoken narration and added music track as well as a second performed voice-over integrated by the Harvard Film Archive, the sole repository of Robertson’s films and papers and now charged with the preservation of her films and legacy.
Special screening with Haden Guest, Director of the Harvard Film Archive
