Unique, prolific, emotional and funny, the filmmakers George Kuchar (1942 - 2011) and Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949 - 2012) both left behind many hours of moving image diaries, much of which is housed at the Harvard Film Archive. While the tones of their respective diaries are quite different, both Kuchar and Robertson cover similar leitmotifs, including food, the body, cats, family and the natural world. They also share the tradition of cinematically confronting the holiday season—a time that can be melancholy or festive, lonely or celebratory, and usually a bit of everything. Tonight we present a selection of their complementary, alternative visions of sugar plums.

Boston area Super 8 filmmaker Anne Robertson’s primary body of work is her Five Year Diary, an approximately thirty-seven-hour film which spans the years 1981 - 1997.  Begun a couple of years before she began graduate school at MassArt, Five Year Diary was conceived as a film that would document something everyday, a way to tell a story, to keep track of her life and to lose weight. For an artist who continually struggled with mental health issues, the diary also became a method of simply maintaining her sanity. When presenting the diary films to an audience, she often included performative elements, including her live narration over layers of prerecorded audio.

Cult and avant garde film star George Kuchar began making short comedic melodramas on 8mm and 16mm with his twin brother Mike as a teenager in the Bronx. After collaborations like Born Of The Wind (1964), they each eventually developed their own individual films and styles. George churned out classics like Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) and The Devil’s Cleavage (1973)—influencing many young filmmakers like John Waters—and taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he operated his class like a demented younger brother of the Hollywood studio system.

When consumer home video became affordable in the mid 1980s, George started making video diaries. His Weather Diaries follow dramatic external and internal weather systems usually while holed up in Midwestern hotels. And like Robertson, Kuchar frequently focused his camera upon the festivities of winter; his oeuvre features over two dozen videos celebrating the rich foods and friendly frolics of the holiday season. – Liz Coffey