David Holzman's Diary

by Michael Atkinson

L.M. Kit Carson as David Holzman

Only seventy-three modest, very-indie minutes long and tumbling out into the ether the same year as Belle de Jour, The Graduate, and the Godardian triple play of Weekend, La Chinoise, and Two or Three Things I Know About Her, David Holzman’s Diary is an easy movie to underestimate. Yet watching it today, it seems to prophesy the future as deftly as it nails down its day and age. In its simple, crystalline way, Jim McBride’s film encapsulates the follies, ironies, and raptures of a full half-century of film culture, with little more than a Nagra, an Éclair, and one man talking.

What it isn’t, technically, is the first mock-documentary; Robert Benchley was writing and starring in farcical-fake “educational” shorts as far back as 1929. Others might well have preceded him, but before the Sixties, all a satirical mock-doc could skewer, properly speaking, was the industry itself, something of a fat fish alone in a big barrel. By 1967, though, the landscape had changed: 16mm “direct cinema” documentaries were suddenly not only popular but also necessary; filmmaking independence became a generation’s anti-authoritarian axiom; Godard and his Cahiers du cinéma compatriots had sold the world the nutty idea that movie love was a way of life; consciousnesses, particularly of the powerful fifteen-to-twenty-five-year-old demographic, were being raised everywhere on earth.

Still, the concept of McBride’s masterpiece doesn’t look from this vantage point to be a gimme: the film itself, in its entirety, will be the self-introspective 16mm “diary” that a single young Manhattan cinephile (L. M. Kit Carson) makes about himself. At no point does McBride intervene—Carson is obviously alone with his camera in many scenes, just as the film students in The Blair Witch Project never saw their “directors” for the duration of the shoot. The simulacrum is so convincing in all of its details that you can be forgiven for idly thinking, as you watch, that it’s Holzman’s film, not McBride and Carson’s. As a character, Holzman himself constitutes ninety percent of the film’s “material,” and the film functions in its various mirrored ways because he is simultaneously such a vivid, convincingly flawed creation, and because he represents not just a generation of media children, but also aspects of us all.

The film's naturalistic detail cements its central illusion

What is Holzman, after all, if not the aboriginal creation of the modern AV geek, lost in an infinitely reflecting hallway of broadcasted self-images? It can be chillingly hilarious watching Holzman descend into oblivious, self-destroying narcissism, all the while casually looking at us—meaning, at the camera and at himself—right in the eye. But consider how ordinary this creepy, self-obsessed paradigm is today, and what staggering percentage of the world’s population is now deeply experienced with talking to the world (or doing any number of other things) via a computer cam, Skyping, posting cell-phone movies on Facebook, reviewing films extemporaneously at their bedroom desk, ad infinitum, in a global cataract of unchecked self-promotion. (We call it “sharing,” as Holzman might’ve done.)

We should call it the Holzman Effect. In a sense, David Holzman’s Diary is the first YouTube movie, but it’s also specific to its time and place: even Holzman has the sense of grabbing the film-culture Zeitgeist of 1967 and being the first to turn its creative juices and introspection into a bullshit-free torrent of personal honesty and truth. Of course, the impulse itself poisons the well, and Holzman’s idea of truth isn’t quite the acidic truth we receive as viewers. Telling us in the first scene that he not only lost his job the day before, but also subsequently received his draft report notice, Holzman begins by simply, idly, wanting to make a film about his life so, he says, he may fathom it, referring to Godard and his dictum about film being “truth twenty-four times a second.” Holzman refers to JLG as “that great wit,” suggesting immediately a reserve of skepticism and self-knowledge on his part, but immediately then he introduces us to his girlfriend Penny (Eileen Dietz), by way of photos of her. Thus objectified as a filmic image, Penny becomes Holzman’s crucible, as his compulsive filming, and voyeurism (is there a difference?), drives her away and sends him into a desperate, camera-shouldered scramble to assemble some kind of sense out of his dissolving life.

David's girlfriend and voyeurist obsession Penny (Eileen Dietz)

Each of Holzman’s appearances in his own movie, fondling his Lavalier mic, peels another layer on an onion; what we thought was affable, earnest cinemania is laid bare as rampaging neurosis. Eventually Holzman, disillusioned with the power of cinema and therefore with life, turns on his own movie for not producing meaning out of his existence, like movies are supposed to do. Encased in his pathetic arc is the experience of a million YouTubing teen pontiffs, longing for celebrity and verification but ending up soured and alone and still needing to face real-life problems.

McBride went on to make other films—including the surprisingly seductive Richard Gere remake of Breathless (1983)—but none as insightful and uncanny. David Holzman’s Diary is, in addition, a sterling time capsule vision of Manhattan in the mid-Sixties, and particularly of the Upper West Side’s still-diverse street life. The era is captured as if in a lightning flash by one of the film’s pure moments of documentary—a sultry, cigarette-voiced woman in a Ford Thunderbird pulls up to Holzman/Carson on the street as he’s filming and begins trying to talk him into bed, all the while blocking traffic and yelling at irate motorists around her. She’s like a penis-obsessed comic-relief missile shot out of a Jacqueline Susann novel, and her name does not appear in the film’s documentation. You want to climb into that car with her, she’s such a blast, but of course Holzman/Carson doesn’t, since that would mean discarding the safety of cinema for the risk of actual engagement. Here, in a rousing cameo-sized splat, you can see the unspeakable tension between cinephilia and reality, the tension that ruined Godard’s marriage to Anna Karina, that has made Quentin Tarantino possible, that fuels and troubles our absurdly screen-cluttered world, almost a full half century after Carson first turned on his Nagra.

The Kino Lorber DVD and Blu-ray editions of this classic meta-must-see, restored and transferred beautifully, come with three McBride memoir-shorts, My Girlfriend’s Wedding (1969), Pictures from Life’s Other Side (1971), and My Son’s Wedding to My Sister-in-Law (2008), all of them delicate, personal, and, as far as we can tell, actually filmed by McBride himself.

Michael Atkinson is the author of seven books and writes regularly for The Village Voice, Sight & Sound, In These Times, IFC.com, TCM.com, and LA Weekly.

To purchase David Holzman’s Diary, click here.

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVII No.1 2011

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