Who dunit

Charlotte Robertson at the NE F/V fest

I'm a regular attendee of the New England Film and Video Festival, the most adventurous and reliably judged showcase for the best of area independents. The 23rd fest takes place March 30 through April 4 at the Coolidge Corner, organized by the Boston Film and Video Foundation (call 536-1540). Here's my list of what you shouldn't miss (and see also our "Trailer").

March 30 at 7:30 p.m., Sharon Grimberg and Daniel Friedman's Miss India Georgia, voted Best Independent Video, in which a beauty contest serves as a telling anthropological mirror about assimilation.

April 1 at 9:30, Harry McCoy's Gas Huffin' Bad Gals!, winner for Best Genre Parody, a gleeful Russ Meyers ripoff of conscienceless chicks on the highway.

April 3 at 7 p.m., New England Spirit Award winner A Stranger in the Kingdom, a follow-up by Vermont's Jay Craven to his appealing 1992 regional feature, Where the Rivers Run North.

Scattered through the fest, spiffy animation shorts: Ellie Lee's "Repetition Compulsion," Phil Lord's "Man Bites Breakfast," Karen Aqua's "Ground Zero/Sacred Ground."

And March 31 at 9:30, winner for Best Experimental Film, Anne Charlotte Robertson's "Emily Died," which concerns the tragic death, at age three, of the filmmaker's niece.

This last promises a rare in-person appearance by an important, somewhat legendary Framingham-based filmmaker. The 49-year-old Robertson has made extraordinary diary films, 27 Super-8 works since 1976, more than 40 hours recording her oft-traumatized life. She's been hospitalized 10 times for mental breakdowns. She's fought drinking, depression, weight problems, relationship problems, over-medication. She's faced family deaths (her father, her brother, her niece); she's fretted about the possibility that she may never get the man of her dreams: Tom Baker, TV's once Dr. Who, who's now reduced to voiceovers.

She's been seriously obsessing about the British actor since the '80s. "I send diary tapes to Baker every day," Robertson told me, when we had coffee near her Framingham home. "He's written me a couple of times, but not lately. At Dr. Who conventions, he's quoted from my letters in a friendly way. But he lives in England, he's married, and doesn't want to lead a woman astray."

Robertson remains convinced they are a perfect match ("We're both equally anxious"), but, Dante-and-Beatrice-like, they've talked for only about five minutes, when she transported for him to Chicago 24 jars of home-grown peppers and home-cured pickles. "He asked about the peppers. That was all."

Robertson's diary films are by turns humorous, histrionic, masochistic, tragic, pathetic, incredibly courageous. They're self-absorbed without being self-indulgent: she always considers the audience watching, keeping those on the other side of her camera fascinated and entertained.

She shrewdly edits in the camera, and what we see is generally chronological. "I edit out only what's extremely underexposed or extremely overexposed. I can't stand the idea of throwing away anything." There's no script. "When I do a rap to the camera, I may have notes about the topics to cover, but the words are extemporaneous. It's an adventure story, a daily mystery how my life will turn out. So far I haven't bored myself."

The films have played across Europe (though she's never been there!), often in San Francisco and New York. They've been shown at MOMA and at the American Museum of the Moving Image, which in 1988 exhibited eight days of her work, four to eight hours a day. For the last, Robertson installed an environment.

"It looked like a 1950s den/bomb shelter, and included my manic letters and photographic portfolios. People could wander in at intermission and look at my stuff. It made it more lively! Some people came back every day."

Robertson's work has been screened often at her alma mater, Mass College of Art, where filmmaker and teacher Saul Levine "has been wonderful." Otherwise, she says, "Boston has been pretty bad" about showing much of her work. She mentioned the Harvard Film Archive as a logical place for a retrospective.

Her ambitious oeuvre can be rented on video from New York's Filmmakers Cooperative, though she has excised her on-screen nakedness. "I developed a stalker, someone who broke into my house, stole films, left lace and panties. I got paranoid, so the two hours of nudity are out. They'd been in to show the guy of my dreams that I was physically healthy. Now that they're out, I finally can screen my films for my relatives."

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A Hearty Backslap for Titanic's achieving the biggest box office of all time. I liked it fine, though once was enough, the same as for Star Wars and E.T. If my picture-going habits were shared by the world at large, the all-time smash movie would be John Ford's 1956 Western, The Searchers, which I've watched at least 25 times. The runner-up: 15 viewings of Rebel Without a Cause.

Time magazine got its 75th-anniversary party list just right, inviting Vietnam War mastermind Henry (Dr. Strangelove) Kissinger and 95-year-old Nazi filmmaker The Triumph of the Will's Leni Riefenstahl. Together at last!