Improvisational filmmaker Jim McBride knew enough of the "cinema verite" genre to poke fun at it in David Holzman's Diary. L.M. "Kit" Carson plays Holzman, who tries to put all of his life experiences on celluloid. His insistence upon poking his camera where it isn't wanted results only in irritation, alienation, and a few bloody noses. As Holzman's life (and his film) becomes harder to follow, the audience is liable to be as confused as Our Hero, especially if they make the mistake of taking this whole thing seriously. Filmed in five days on a $2500 budget, David Holzman's Diary won both the Mannheim and Pesaro Film Festival awards; history does not record whether the judges caught on that McBride was pulling their legs. The director, incidentally, is the same Jim McBride who years later went "mainstream" with such films as The Big Easy (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
In his genuinely independent film shot on weekends with borrowed equipment, news-cameraman-turned-film director Jim McBride interrogated Jean-Luc Godard's claim that film is truth at 24 frames per second. A mock-documentary that mordantly sends up the notion of the 1960s Direct Cinema movement that a camera can record reality without interfering with it, the film presents the pre-scripted exploits of L.M. Kit Carson's Holzman, staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, that become increasingly chaotic as his filming of his life starts to take over his life. Media-made reality perverts what it tries to capture, as voyeurism replaces relationships with other people, including David's bond with his exasperated girlfriend. Holzman's periodic presence in front of his camera, or filming himself in a mirror, calls attention to the act of filming and to the person who shapes what is seen. One of a group of films in the late 1960s and early 1970s that dealt with Vietnam-era questions of media-made fact and fiction, including Medium Cool (1969) and The Last Movie (1971), David Holzman's Diary puts that tension in a personal context, revealing the impact of movie-made illusions outside media industries. McBride and Carson themselves moved to mainstream Hollywood with their 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Bob Lesser - Max, Penny's agent; Jack Baran - Cop; Lorenzo Mans - Pepe; Eileen Dietz - Penny Wohl
Credit
Jim McBride - Director, Jim McBride - Editor, Paul Glickman - Cinematographer, Paul H. Goldsmith - Cinematographer, Michael Wadleigh - Cinematographer, Jim McBride - Producer, Jim McBride - Screenwriter
In 1991, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
