White Light Cinema and The Nightingale Present
The experimental film community lost one of its most original and distinctive voices last fall with the passing of Framingham, Massachusetts Super-8 filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson. Robertson’s films (and later digital videos) were visceral, haunting, emotionally raw works that opened up the artist’s life and her anxieties, obsessions, compulsions, addictions, and mental illness in unprecedented ways. Robertson’s films, now housed at Harvard Film Archive, are powerful documents of maintaining oneself with art, sharply incisive self-analysis, and caustic wit while struggling with an often times debilitating illness.
White Light Cinema is proud to present a selection of five early works by Robertson (whose films have not been seen in Chicago in well over a decade, and only a handful of times before that), in new digital transfers. [Robertson rarely screened her originals, and only when she was present. The previous solo show of Robertson’s work in Chicago, which I was fortunate to present at Chicago Filmmakers, was from VHS.]
These are startlingly moving works about the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. Robertson’s legacy is a remarkably brave example of really living life through art.
