Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949 – 2012) was an independent filmmaker who gave new and melancholy meaning to the term. For to call Robertson’s cinema ‘independent’ is to recognize not only the minimum financial or institutional support given to her work, but also the ways her films speak with poignant directness to her own extreme independence as an artist and woman who lived and worked largely alone. Indeed, Robertson’s struggles with loneliness and clinically diagnosed manic depression were integrally woven into the complex fabric of her films, most especially her magnum opus Five Year Diary, a thirty-six-hour chronicle of her life begun in 1981 and completed sixteen years later.   

 

Intended first as a means to carefully monitor and measure her changing self-image, and her fluctuating weight in particular, Robertson’s Five Year Diary became an ambitious first-person epic comprised in total of eighty-three completed parts (or ‘reels’, as Robertson preferred), most often centred around single major and minor events: a visit to a relative, a nervous breakdown, the traumatic death of a family member. […] The Five Year Diary also offers an important record of Robertson’s continuing creative evolution as an artist who restlessly experimented with various techniques and approaches throughout her career to create a complex oeuvre that spans from the confrontationally and emotionally raw to the lyrically quiet and understated.

– Haden Guest