Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it's a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down.

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen are not filmmakers first and foremost; they are film theorists, critics and thinkers. Mulvey and Wollen’s texts from the 1970s set their sights on utopian and revolutionary perspectives. Mulvey emphasizes the gestures necessary for a cinematic liberation struggle, while Wollen draws on the power of fantasy and adopts cinema as a model for a new avant-garde. Both play a role in writing a manifesto for a different kind of cinema, whose militant nature is gained from radical work on (cinematic) symbolization processes.

Chronic is an experimental narrative about a young woman who began mutilating herself as a girl to cope with a traumatic mid-western childhood. The lush optically-printed scenes take Gretchen’s point of view from her punk youth, a stay in a mental hospital, and her release into the big city. Scripted scenes are inter-spliced with documentary and found footage, illustrating the culture Gretchen lives in, her inner world and relationships from her birth to her final day.