I. AM I MAKING A DOCUMENTARY?

Anne Charlotte Robertson angles her face upward to catch the lens of her Super8 camera, which she’s perched on a ledge in her bedroom. She sits on the bed, brown-gray hair hanging heavily and face warm with lamp-light. I feel ugly, she says. It’s no wonder. The little light of our life, Emmy, little Emmy! All we have is pictures now, pictures in my films even. She touches the stacks of unfinished grant applications beside her. I had a breakdown, so what if I look ugly?! I’m 45, I haven’t got any kids. And the little niece who called me Auntie Anne, she died. The sound of passing cars swells and light creeps into the frame. In true film-diary fashion, she reaches toward the lens and shuts off the camera.

The films Robertson refers to are the 83 individual “reels” she made between 1981 and 1997. Together they comprise her Five-Year Diary, a 36-hour magnum opus chronicling not five but 16 years of her life. And the child she refers to—who exists only in pictures now—is her three-year-old niece, Emily, whose death midway through Reel 80: Emily Died (1994) hurls Robertson into profound and floundering grief. After having a nervous breakdown and spending three weeks in a psychiatric hospital, Robertson begins filming the impact of Emily’s death. Her raw materials are the objects and obsessions of her daily life: gardens, birds, true love, children, weight loss, filmmaking, medication (and their side effects), and the particularities of her illnesses, addictions, relapses, and recoveries.

Despite its meandering style, Reel 80 remains hyper-aware of its architecture. In fact, the entire film is sequenced around the process of analogue image-making. Robertson begins by narrating her eight years of “temporary disability” status over a black screen. She lives with her aging mother in Massachusetts and life, she explains, is made up of social security benefits, psychiatrists/social workers, and antipsychotic medications. After establishing her medical conditions, she cuts from the black screen to a tri-folded red paper, which unfurls in stop-motion animation and inside reads “Five-Year Diary.” She continues in voice-over: My niece Emily had been in intensive care (we know from the title that the three-year-old will die). Streaky blue leader brings us from the title card to a handheld shot of birds. Two brave doves! It’s spring! Spring! Spring! Spring! 

From here, Robertson combines elements of documentary and diary, using light leak, frame lines, animation, and sprocket holes to expose the celluloid seams of her making. She narrates her actions, layering sync-sound with voice-over narration, often cutting herself off mid-sentence, muddying, even contradicting, her own accounts and disclosures. She names her film stock (Kodachrome Sound) and exclaims to her pregnant friend, Am I making a documentary? Yes I Am! I am!  For Robertson, both subject and object of her camera’s gaze, making is an act of visibility and refusal; her impulse toward tell-all/abnegation, expression/erasure, sets the dialectic through which we come to understand her filmmaking style, embodied experience, and material conditions.

For instance, Robertson relies on artist grants to fund her practice and supplement less-than-adequate disability benefits. Over the course of the film, she returns to scenes of exasperated grant-writing in her bedroom. I’m going on with life in part because of life, she says, applying to life a cyclical logic, while also equating it with the desperate need for income. She slams her hands down on her typewriter and fumbles with a stack of papers. Grant applications! Grant applications! Typing! Giving in! We can only assume Robertson’s pressured into the position beneficiaries always are: extracting from and performing her life experiences to garner the support and approval of her funders. Instead of concealing the capital-labor nexus that undergirds her practice, she highlights it. While not explicit in her political messaging, she skillfully evokes the feeling of capital’s chokehold over cultural production and health/social services. Her process of making films is necessarily bound up with her financial precarity, disability status, and medicalized state of bereavement.

Over the last several decades, queer/disability theorists have reflected on mainstream “disability narratives,” in which disability is erased, overcome, vilified, exalted, pathologized, or generally rendered palatable by non-disabled people for largely non-disabled consumers. In “Narrative Prosthesis” (2001), Daniel Mitchell and Sharon Snyder explore the way films and literature tend to narrativize disabled bodies metaphorically, to signify not an individual’s embodied experience but their symbolic deviance from a perceived norm. This is not simply a matter of representation, they explain; the conflict-resolution structure of these narratives in and of itself adheres to and perpetuates ableist logic.² Jasbir K. Puar adds in “The Right to Maim” (2014), “What it means to represent disability is already superseded by the logic of narrative that pivots on the exceptional accident and the triumphant rehabilitation from it.” ³

Roberton’s rejection of metaphorical “prosthesis” comes through in her use of experimental visual and sonic techniques and meandering narrative style, and through her emphasis on the mechanisms of production i.e. direct address, analog artifacts, layered narration, grant-writing. Her “story” has no arc, no forward-looking teleology of time and recovery. At once, she represents her authentic experience and disrupts the notion of beginning/middle/end, problem/solution, dis/ability, life/death, self/other. Despite her obsession with gender norms (or perhaps even because of), Reel 80 moves in what Alison Kafer calls “crip time”: “flex time not just expanded but exploded.” ⁴
 

In a 27-minute film “about” her niece’s death, she doesn’t really mention the death until nearly 15 minutes in. She cuts from a shot of her friend’s infant child (hi! she exclaims to the baby from behind the camera) to a shaky shot of the moon. The white orb bops around the frame while Robertson narrates both diegetically and in voice-over: 

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II. UNWED, UNWAGED, UNPRODUCTIVE & MEDICATED

This display of raw feeling dredges up another important and no less layered component of Reel 80: Robertson’s seemingly unexamined attachment to gender norms. So desperately, she wants to fulfill a woman’s inalienable (uncompensated) duty to nurture a child, a husband, a family unit, the entire American workforce! Feeding the kids, fucking her husband at the end of a long workday: this is the bedrock of capitalist-patriarchy, and Robertson wants in. She caters to imaginary male audiences—doctors, therapists, fictional characters, the teenage boy who mows her lawn—and fantasizes about “true love.” She crushes on all men that enter her orbit, having also internalized her own ableist undesirability (she admits to “delusions” that men desire her in return). As Burstow puts it: “The fundamental reduction that all women suffer is the reduction to bodies tailored for and relegated to the sexual and domestic servicing of males [...] The cruel paradox that women with disabilities face is that they are penalized dramatically both for falling dramatically short of this male-serving ideal and for realizing it far too closely."⁶ What Robertson (and Burstow) is getting at here—via this exaggerated loyalty to cis-womanhood—is a non-essentialist understanding of gender that is necessarily tied to capital and dis/ability.

Within the last half-century, Marxist-feminist scholars have also zeroed in on biopsychology as a site for the policing and (re)production of gender. In “Beyond the Periphery of the Skin“ (2020), Silvia Federici describes the naturalization of fixed “female” dispositions and the medicalization of deviant behaviors and attributes. Despite the good intentions of many medical practitioners (social workers, therapists, etc.), Federici stresses the overarching disciplinary function that biotechnology has and continues to have over women’s bodies and minds: “The history of medicine has consistently displayed a will to social control and determination to reprogram our refractory bodies so as to make [women] more docile and productive.”⁷

Industrial psychology, Federici continues, “enclose[s] [women] workers into a network of constraints [...] built on the systematic mystification of the origins of workers’ ‘pathologies’ and the normalization of alienated labor.”⁸ Federici suggests gender manifests not solely through the “performance” of norms, as queer theorist Judith Butler popularized in the early 1990s, but also as the wringing out of unpaid reproductive labor from women-workers while concealing the coercive class relations that underlie them. 

Robertson lives with her elderly mother and receives treatment at the Tufts Medical School. She enjoys some degree of housing and healthcare security, however, her disabilities render her unable to work, and public benefits (and the occasional artist grant) make up her primary sources of income. Robertson is unwed and unwaged. She presumably won’t bear biological kin, work a “real” job, or own property. Her body/mind and labor-power render her “unproductive” and relegated to society’s surplus. If not a mother, wife, lover, even a worker how, then, is her womanhood reified? The role of grieving aunt doesn’t quite cut it. On the contrary, many people—quick to police the bounds of women’s emotional expression—consider inappropriate the extent she mourns a child she did not birth. And yet, with no husband—only her unemployed/able, unruly body—pregnancy would be deemed ill-advised (at best) or obscene. 

Disabled writer and artist, Johanna Hedva, contemplates the “co-construction” of femininity and disability/illness in “Sick Woman Theory” (2016). Hedva describes their entanglement under the weight of capitalist, patriarchal, and racialized oppression; disability has been historically “feminized” in the sense that it renders “weak” and “more fragile” those in need of care. Hedva writes: 

III. LANGUAGE & FLOWERS, THEY WILL NOT SAVE US

Is there anywhere Robertson can break from the coercive pathologies of illness, gender, capital? Is there a place to go where suffering subsides? Where grief is not stigmatized, gender melts away, bodies look, feel, and act any which way, and where rest, care, and collectivity flourishes?

Leading up to Emily’s death, Robertson has established the garden as a respite from everyday life. I lift weights and do my gardening! Gardens! Gardens! Gardens! Everything has to go outside! Love! She films houseplants, packets of seeds, tree-lined streets, friends’ gardens, and her mother’s backyard from the living room window. And yet before Emily’s death, Robertson never films inside her own garden. Its power lies in its promise of realizing her desires, its meaning in her refusal to show it directly.

Those desires grow when Robertson visits several child-rearing friends. One is eight-months pregnant, fat in the right way, her body ripe with female “productivity.” Robertson notes that everyone in her life seems to be married with children. So I figured, these are the gardens of my life. People! After her encounter with a friend who’s just birthed her second child, Robertson more precisely identifies the garden’s meaning. It stands in for—or, rather, she desires it to stand in for—her lack of children. But I had no children. All I had was a garden with seeds. 

Robertson is drawing our attention to something beyond symbolic similarity. Her words are tinged with resignation, as if hinting at the inadequacy of metaphor to actually evoke her staggering loss. What Robertson gestures to here—via her fixation with the garden as a site of solace—is precisely the impending failure of the garden’s crop to transcend her oppressive circumstances. She searches for and fails to find somewhere she won’t be pathologized for mourning Emily’s death with the intensity that she does. Somewhere she can have children. Somewhere she can be normal.

Robertson enters the garden for the first time after Emily’s death. She swings her camera, leaving trails of motion blur while panning toward brightly-colored petals that catch her eye. The slightest lag time keeps her pinwheeling narration a half-step behind her camera’s wandering lens. It’s as if her stream-of-consciousness monologue, intensifying as she ambles along the garden's paths, itself moves through the camera’s photographic mechanisms. You were like a flower in our lives, and then it rained. It rained! The little blossom. Where's the little blossom? The little blossom. We buried you with these kinds of flowers all around. We buried your ashes, but not you. Not you, Emily. Oh, Emily. Emily. Gathering flowers. I gathered flowers. 

We put them in the ground with you, Emmy. That was just ashes, but where are you Emmy? Emmy, dear Emmy, Emmy, Emmy. I wish we could see you, face you, Emmy. See you, see you. We have to wait. I hang my head low like a flower. Heavy. Heavy. I remember you sparkling in the sun, Emmy. Emmy, flower, Emmy. You beautiful flower among flowers in heaven. 

We witness here not Robertson’s breakdown but that of her language. Emily is to be brought flowers, is like flowers, is a flower. Emily—or her ashes?—are buried in the ground beside Robertson’s planted seeds. Emily is like the dew that coats flower petals at dawn. She’s a beautiful flower. A beautiful flower among flowers in heaven. 

Robertson plants flowers, picks flowers, gathers flowers on Emily’s grave. She herself is like a flower, her head hanging low to the ground like a sunflower’s heavy and dilated center. 

But where are you Emmy? she asks, failing to locate Emily in metaphor’s murk. Where is Emmy? What is Emmy? It’s language that Robertson rubs up against—its disconnect from love, loss and the ravaging desire, and its sly offer of meaning (the possibility of standing in for something else, of delivering her to unobstructed, hard-wired cis-womanhood, or of escaping her material constraints) before failing her at the last moment. Emily becomes the vessel through which Robertson explores this state of lack. The name, Emily, extends beyond its designating function to describe the inability of empty phrases and metaphors to transcend the devastating experience of life and loss. Robertson wants the garden to be a child, an organic foil to the doctor-prescribed drugs. To offer a shred of relief from a world that exploits, harms, oppresses, and disables. 

The ultimate tragedy for Robertson is that she desires everything she is supposed to: the weight loss, the husband, the child, the normal life. She can have her garden and grow her flowers, but the moment she ascribes symbolic value, metaphor fails her. The tropes of womanhood loop in on themselves. As she grows closer to the garden’s center, to Emily’s gravesite, she repeats the words with mounting desperation. Emmy. Emmy, flower, Emmy. They’re supposed to work, they’re supposed to mean something. She’s supposed to belong: to a family, to a man. To protect and be protected. She’s supposed to funnel her own love into another being. To possess a lover, her body, an Emily of her own. 

When unraveled, the fabric of cis-womanhood—of feminized labor, grief, desire, and illness—is not stitched out of kids, crushes, pregnant bellies, and flower metaphors. The fabric of cis-womanhood under capitalism is the endless deferral of these things. A void, a crisis, the “actual” psychosis. 

Where can she go from here? What is she left with? There is the fear of never finding love, of abnormality. Of being at once too much and never quite enough. There is self-disgust for the unruly body that didn’t produce the child who died, and the trauma of losing someone you can’t appropriately mourn. There are celluloid’s brittle edges and tendency toward decay. There’s a great big gooey, take-out, vegetarian submarine sandwich, her favorite food, and the hunger that never seems to fade. There’s the garden in full bloom, always on the verge of winter (but nothing more than the way it looks or smells).

In the film’s final moments, Robertson’s pill bottles dance a stop-motion dance, and light leak consumes the frame. There is no man, family, or child, just as she’s always feared. And so, she returns to grant-writing one last time—something so bland, bureaucratic, and thoroughly un-metaphorical. Reel 80: Emily Died cracks open Robertson’s most intimate experiences, and yet she reminds us that bodies, minds, images are never wholly autonomous when beholden to capital and its institutions. And what better emblem of her failures and her triumphs—the contradictions and entanglements of both things—than suggesting the structural continuity between her treatments and her livelihood: to name, in voice-over, her prescriptions and her funder.

Risper-dal, Val-i-um, Ben-a-dryl, occasionally, Co-gentin. Medications! Medications. Partially funded by the New England Film/Video Fellowship Program of the Boston Film-Video Foundation, through a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council 1995-1996.