By Jaimee Edwards
“She was very serious about the composting. There is more and always more. Each reel wants the viewer to see her hand at work, there is no magic of movie making in Five Year Diary, more of more is the intention. It is tending.”
It is patient work, this composting. It is much more than collecting your food scraps. You have discovered that to make compost you must work toward the movement of things, specifically the movement of green and brown matter, carbon and nitrate, transferring, transforming and going in multiple directions. You must live within the passage of time, the duration of breaking down.
The surprising part is how much brown matter you need. The food scraps are collected easily enough, but you have really started thinking differently about egg cartons. With hard fingers you assess the paper that comes into the house, you strip it of any plastic tape or stickers, and you tear it to confetti. Or you don’t, and whole toilet rolls go into the plastic bucket on the kitchen bench that temporarily holds what is destined for the compost. In go coffee grinds, gooey pumpkin seeds, eggshells, avocado skins and seeds, the parsley stalks, the onion skins even though you aren’t too sure if they should, the banana peels, the broken crackers, those toilet rolls, moulding bread. The bucket shows distinct layers of brown and green, brown and green.
You take your bucket of scraps to the large, shared compost bin in the garden. You lift the lid and much of what has been added is starting to look unrecognisable as the form of things has slipped away, given over to the forces of digestion. Microorganisms and worms are at it, in stages. If you are being diligent, you will get the pitchfork and give the compost a good tun to oxygenate it. If everything is going well, then the compost will be breathing, kind of. You want to feel hot breath in your face. The heat is an indicator. The ideal temperature is between 135-160 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s when everything begins to stew. If there is sufficient oxygen, then volatiles such as hydroxymethyl furfural will smell of the forest floor, woody, sweet, just a hint of tobacco and it will be pleasant. If the oxygen is low and the matter compact, then the compost will become anaerobic and produce methane and hydrogen sulfide and smell putrid, like rotten eggs. This would be the wrong kind of break down and when you are composting you need to understand the right kind of breakdown. Composting is the right kind of break down.
There are other break downs that can happen before your very eyes and as difficult as they are to witness, you must try and understand that they too are the right kind of break down. Wholeness is overvalued. An over determined emphasis on a whole centred self shouldn’t be held in ideal contrast to the scattered decomposition to our many selves. Contradiction, inconsistency, pointlessness, non-truths, fantasy and dreams as divination all do very well in offering a passage out and away from the demands of composure. The break down’s value is in disruption that makes wormholes connecting disparate points. And the wormhole itself? Well, it can be straight or follow a higgledy-piggledy path to transformation.
One day you are in the garden listening to a podcast and you hear about this mad film that is thirty-six hours long and the whole thing is about gardening and cooking. You make a run for the internet and look up what turns out to be Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary, the Super-8mm film that chronicles her life between 1981 to 1998. When you look at the jittering frames on your laptop screen, so full of life and its end, you can see that the film has an affinity to compost, alive and decomposing - the effluence of breaking down. The film isn’t really about gardening and cooking, although there is plenty of that, it’s about life, it’s about breaking down to fertilize your own life. Robertson used the Diary to save her life, she said so herself, “Making my diary has literally saved my life.”
The Super 8 camera was the technology of home movies, of domestic spaces, of amateurs and their spontaneous exigencies. That’s what Robertson liked best, that the form was already a diary. But Five Year Diary isn’t spontaneous, it isn’t a home movie and it isn’t really a diary. Or it is, but its crude materiality is shaped and athleticized to make a thing that is neither fully realized nor unfinished. Both style and method are always approaching. With Robertson before and behind the camera a sense of being both, of approaching for its own sake is always accumulating. The film’s sound is in excess, your ears try to catch this word and that, your sensorium is overloaded. Hold on, its a little sick making. Radio and records and two tracks of audio; on one track Robertson reads her diary, on the second track her voiceover comments on the film’s images. The images are grainy and unreliably focused, they document her manic and depressive episodes, her hyper attention to her weight, her yearning heart, her glorious garden, neglected after being in hospital or thriving from tending, here she is cooking, here she is taking meds, here exercising, there she is doing the weeding, and there she is bent over the compost. She was very serious about the composting. There is more and always more. Each reel wants the viewer to see her hand at work, there is no magic of movie making in Five Year Diary, more of more is the intention. It is tending.
In reel 22, ‘A short affair and going crazy,’ Robertson films herself composting food, a leather jacket, household items, to “return to the earth.” All the excess of an unrequited love affair, the dinners made for love and then after, the scraps and peels are gathered in an open bucket decomposing. Robertson is adding to the compost bucket but also searching through it, looking for items to recover, a silver cross and some sable brushes. What kind of repository is this compost bucket? A grave? An incubator?
Over the scenes of a composting you listen to Robertson’s voice, doubled, echoing, possessing itself, saying, “the worm. I speak for the worm, who is a nicer version of me.” The compost is the home of the worm as well as its source of nourishment and purpose. Yet you are struck by the notion of a worm being a nicer version of anyone. Niceness being both insipid and ideal. Niceness, the affectation of receiving without complaint. The worm makes its way through the receiving matter that is compost quite nicely. That is, if you are going to consider a worm on these terms. But shouldn’t you rather consider the worm on its own terms? Perhaps what Robertson was really getting at, was that the worm, her wormself, was a model of conduct. Recall what Dodie Bellamy wrote in Bee Reaved (2021), “I imagine existence as a boundless expanse of dirt and I’m a worm burrowing through it, gorging on it on one end, shitting it out on the other.” And this is just it. The regenerative powers of a worm as it makes its way through the compost, breaking down matter, matter that is story to create soil to support growth.
Over the 16 years that Diary was filmed, composting became a motif of a life in a perpetual state of gestation. It’s the kind of thing that Robertson liked most to do, working on what is expansive, always burrowing, making passages through time like all those hours of film. Just because Diary has a ‘last’ reel doesn’t mean it has an end. You go back again and watch the film from the middle and stop, then pick it up later, somewhere near the beginning. Film and compost are both technologies of animation. You are learning to compost, you are watching this glorious film, you are stewing in life’s readiness.
Drawing boundaries between a practice of writing non fiction, day dreaming and the everyday labours of gardening no longer make sense on a planet that never had any use for human boundaries anyway. In the break down of boundaries our imagining and our critical work are one in the same. To immerse myself in the work of the film maker, Anne Charlotte Robertson, I reached for the practices that she practiced: composting, cooking, gardening. And across time and space we comingled, broke down, and became some thing new.
Jaimee Edwards is a writer and independent researcher living in Sydney, Australia on unceded Gadigal land. Her writing focuses on the difficulties and joys of living during our climate emergency. Her writing has appeared in Best Australian Short Stories, Australian Literary Studies, Philament Journal, Wonderground and numerous Australian media.