The notational: mental health and female identity in the diary films of Anne Charlotte Robertson

This project focuses on the archive of independent filmmaker, Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949-2012), to explore the use of the "notational" as an alternative lens for understanding the lived experiences of those with mental health issues.

Robertson chronicled her experience of mental illness through compulsive documentation of daily life. Her relationship with loneliness, manic depression and schizophrenia is integrally woven into the complex fabric of her Super 8 film, Five Year Diary (36hrs, 1981-1997), and her archive containing short films, video works, photographs, audio tapes, diaries, letters, notes, and other ephemera.

Through a close analysis of Robertson's archive, I will explore how her cycle of film 'entries' could be defined in relation to the 'notational' - a short form of note-making, often private but having public outcomes, which might include diaries, journals, film scripts, notebooks and medical notes. I will question how we might think with and against the experience of living with mental health conditions through these modes of writing, recording and filmmaking which offer a means to capture transient states and resist established forms of narrative containment and constructions of the self in the history of artists' moving image, as well as employing them in the treatment of Robertson's archival material as an embodied practice.

Situated within the context of feminist theory, film studies, and embodied research practices, this interdisciplinary methodology will inform my own contribution to the field through practice of the notational form, offering a means to engage with archives and reflect on artistic practices by using these very same tools.

At a time when the notational is gaining critical currency in contemporary literature (Zambreno, Kapil, Briggs), this project offers contributions to how the notational embraces what is mundane, ephemeral, transient, fugitive and cannot be held - and can act as a feminist resistance to medical categorisation.