Abstract

In Five Year Diary, Anne Charlotte Robertson chronicles twenty years of her life in a 40-hour-long Super 8 diary film. Robertson was on the schizoaffective spectrum, and this loss of faculty plays a constitutive role in her work. In her diary film it takes the form of a particular use of multiple parallel audio tracks that fulfill different functions: some reflect the events of her daily life, others chronicle various iterations of mania the filmmaker was living and thinking through. This chapter uses Robertson’s Five Year Diary to think the relations between image and sound and madness, between hearing and seeing and the in/visible, and suggests that Robertson’s use of sound is an attempt to convey the schizophrenic impulse in sonorous terms.