David Holzman's Diary is a 1967 American mockumentary, or work of metacinema, directed by James McBride and starring L. M. Kit Carson. A feature-length film made on a tiny budget over several days, it is a work of experimental fiction presented as an autobiographical documentary. "A self-portrait by a fictional character in a real place—New York's Upper West Side," the film comments on the title character's personality and life as well as on documentary filmmaking and the medium of cinema more generally. In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Synopsis L. M. Kit Carson plays David, a young white man living alone in his modest studio apartment on Manhattan's West 71st Street during July 1967. The film begins without the conventional opening credits or music that would signify a professionally made documentary or fiction film. Instead, it begins with David at home saying plainly that he has recently lost his job and may soon be drafted into the military and sent to Vietnam. He does not identify the job in question, but his apartment décor and cinephile personality imply that it may have involved film. Sitting on a chair with film equipment and posters behind him, and quoting Jean-Luc Godard, he says he has decided to make a video diary to try to document and understand his life. After this introduction, what follows is a series of filmed diary entries that David makes over a period of several days, depicting his daily life, his surroundings, and his most personal thoughts and feelings.
In some scenes, David goes around filming his neighborhood, from various people and historical buildings to spontaneous moments such as police officers helping an apparent robbery victim. This video is sometimes silent and at other times accompanied by dialogue or ambient sound, or sound that he may have taped separately and added to the film later, such as radio broadcasts. David interviews some people and lets others talk freely to the camera. In a scene about one-third of the way into the film, his friend Pepe gives an extended monologue on his critical assessment of the diary as it is shaping up so far, namely that David is making "a very bad work of art." Saying, "Your life is not a very good script," Pepe recommends that David try harder to find what is truly interesting. If he's going to focus on himself—someone who "is not a good character" to watch—then maybe he should take more risks, expose his vulnerabilities—perhaps even try filming himself standing naked in front of the camera, for as long as it takes to find some interesting truths. (Andrew Noren is one underground filmmaker from this time and place who had a lot of such nudity in his films.)
Most often in the film, David sits at home talking to his Lavalier microphone and 16mm Éclair camera about topics important to him, from film theory to his girlfriend Penny, who is a fashion model. Over the several days of making his diary, and maybe following some of Pepe's advice, David becomes increasingly obsessed with filming Penny, without her permission, and even once when she's sleeping in the nude. In that particular moment, she wakes up and attacks him for this transgression, and breaks up with him; this is followed by several failed attempts to contact her, and his monologue praising masturbation. David also repeatedly films through the window of a woman across the street, whom he nicknames Sandra, after the title character in Luchino Visconti's eponymous 1965 film. And, in another scene, he follows an anonymous woman out of the subway and onto the street, quietly stalking her until she turns around and tells him, "Beat it!"
David's diary project hits bottom after he leaves town for a day, to attend a family funeral, and returns to find all of his film equipment stolen. He reveals this in his last diary entry, which combines an audio recording of his voice with a series of photos David made of himself with rented or borrowed equipment. Disappointed and disillusioned, he says that this is the end of the film. The sound then stops and the image goes black for about ten seconds, seemingly the end of this diary film. But then David Holzman's Diary takes a sudden unexpected turn. It displays a title card (still no sound) saying simply "DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY," followed by another card identifying L.M. Kit Carson as the actor playing him. Then some cards for the rest of the cast and the crew. The cards effectively acknowledge that the preceding was a work of fiction posing as an autobiographical documentary.
Cast and crew David Holzman – L. M. Kit Carson Penny Wohl – Eileen Dietz Pepe – Lorenzo Mans Sandra – Louise Levine Woman on the subway – Fern McBride Sandra's Boyfriend – Michael Levine Max (Penny's agent) – Bob Lesser Cop – Jack Baran Writer-Director – Jim McBride Camera – Michael Wadley (now Wadleigh) Additional Photography – Paul Goldsmith and Paul Glickman
Production
Film critic Richard Brody writes that, "This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave." Jaime Wolf writes that, "At once a fictional narrative within a recognizable documentary setting and a kind of essay on the conditions of filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary stands as one of the few American equivalents to the work which Godard was doing at the time." The French New Wave clearly was an inspiration for this film, but there were others as well. One influence was The Diary of a Lost Girl, a book published in 1905 as a supposedly authentic diary of a prostitute named Thymian, but actually written by its "editor," Margarete Böhme; it was later adapted into a popular 1929 German film starring Louise Brooks as Lulu. This is what David refers to in the beginning of his film when he cites "the famous Lulu's diary" as an inspiration for his work. Jaime N. Christley notes some other cinematic influences, saying that, "the real point of origin is either Peter Watkins's docudrama The War Game (which won the documentary Oscar for 1967) or Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread, depending on where you draw the fault lines." James McBride identified his more immediate American context for making the film:
I entered the world of movies when cinema vérité work like the Maysles brothers' and Richard Leacock's and D. A. Pennebaker's was new and exciting, and when a lot of underground filmmakers were trying to use the medium in a more poetic way, as an exercise in different kinds of liberation—you know, from personal liberation to liberation from the classical forms of filmmaking. So there were a lot of alternatives to Hollywood moviemaking then. These movies were all trying to find a new way of looking at life. And I was a young, idealistic filmmaker dealing with these same questions. You know: what is one supposed to be trying to do in the movies and how ought one go about doing it? My film, David Holzman's Diary, was about this guy who makes a diary of his own life to try to find some truth that he can't perceive in real time. It was meant to be kind of an ironical formula, let's say, to explore a lot of those ideas.
David Holzman's Diary was filmed in about a week with borrowed equipment and a mere $2,500 budget. According to L.M. Kit Carson, the money came from a book advance from The Museum of Modern Art, intended for him and McBride to research and write a book on cinema verité. After conducting several filmmaker interviews, they changed their minds and decided to do something better with the money:
Halfway through the book-writing, McBride says to me: "There is no Truth on Film. Basically as soon as you turn the camera on – everything changes – to not real – gets like unreal." So we decide it's more quote/unquote "un-truth-ful" to write this book – we decide not to write this book. We take the $2,500.00 book-advance – and over the 10-day Easter Break from college – we make a cinema-verite mock-documentary – we figure it's the strongest way to question cinema-verite: David Holzman's Diary.
David Holzman's Diary exemplifies guerrilla filmmaking, a mode of production defined not by genre but by a drastic lack of production resources along with a by-any-means-necessary mindset. The needed resources include money, equipment, facilities, and professional cast and crew; lacking them requires filmmakers to be very economical and creative, as with McBride and Carson's use of the $2,500 MoMA book money. Or with the writing of the film's dialogue. Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum says the dialogue in David Holzman's Diary "was basically written (when it was written) on a scene by scene basis" with the actors involved. Other scenes were completely impromptu, such as the one with "the frank sexual talk from the lady in the Thunderbird–actually a transsexual who'd recently undergone a sex-change operation." David B. Lee describes this woman as actually a "pre-op transsexual," and more importantly notes that this is the only woman in the film who isn't victimized by David's camera; who instead openly engages with it, cracking bawdy jokes and even explicitly soliciting sex.
Earlier in the 1960s, McBride had attended NYU's film school, in the same class as Martin Scorsese. "When he was doing Who's That Knocking at My Door and I was doing David Holzman's Diary, we were both working with the same cinematographer, Michael Wadleigh." It turns out that Wadleigh was key to making David Holzman's Diary, and not simply as its cinematographer. According to McBride, Wadleigh was doing commercial work at the time, and took creative advantage of that situation to get resources for their film:
It's kind of a complicated process, but we would go out and shoot something for somebody and if he had to shoot something on the following Monday, say, we'd keep the equipment over the weekend. So Mike's idea was, this movie you want to make, why don't we just use this free equipment we have on the weekends and shoot stuff. So that's what we did. We used leftover film stock. To process the film we would go to the lab under the aegis of some other project we were working on.
The choice of the Upper West Side location for the film came from McBride's own life experience: "I was born and raised there and I still lived there, not with my parents but I still lived in the neighborhood long after I left home and so these were the streets that I walked, these were the things that I saw. [It] was kind of my world and I wanted to share a little bit."
Distribution
A highly unconventional film made completely outside the studio system, David Holzman's Diary was not distributed theatrically. However, it had early successes at film festivals, cinema clubs, and museums. It screened at the New York Film Festival and the San Francisco Film Festival, and won awards at the Mannheim, Brussels, and Pesaro film festivals. It screened in 1968 at the Flaherty Seminar and the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1973 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Regarding the MoMA screening, L. M. Kit Carson said the museum, "was not happy that we did not make the contracted book," until the film won awards at festivals. "Then the Museum arranged for a high-profile Special Screening of the mock-doc – the beginning of a film-series called CINEPROBE" and then added the film to its collection.
In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." It has since had varying distribution on videotape, laserdisc, DVD, and online.Amazon.comKino Lorber Home Video
Reception and legacy