New York Times By Nora Sayre (link requires registration)
Published: December 7, 1973
"Life as a work of art"—at least once a decade that ancient concept seduces some members of yet another generation, and inspires them to hash up their lives in the name of truth or beauty. Jim McBride's "David Holzman's Diary," a totally delightful satire on "the blubber about cinéma vérité," mocks those ghastly reels from the nineteen-sixties, when various film makers immortalized themselves or their friends by trying and failing to be spontaneous. "Diary," which derides directors who scorned imagination or invention while worshiping the camera, opened yesterday at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Holzman, an earnest young Godard-hound, decides to film his life in order to understand it—and only succeeds in ruining it. As a voyeur, a gentle intruder into other people's lives, he can't understand that the filming makes his subjects feel self-conscious, or that "reality" is altered by the presence of his camera and his tape recorder and his lavalier mike, which he calls his "friends."
His girlfriend, who detests his movie-making, finally leaves him because of it. He's already told us in a dry, flat voice that he really loves her, though he can't resist pointing out that she's "dirty, sloppy." Forlornly, he adds, "I don't quite get her sense of privacy." After she's gone, he argues that masturbation is an improvement on the real thing because You can think of anything . . . pigs. Think of trains going in tunnels. Think of bagels. I mean, you're not limited to women."
However, his obsession with freezing everything on celluloid rarely allows him any other fantasies. He gives manic attention to every detail of his New York neighborhood, from derelict sofas on the street to the installation of matchstick bamboo blinds in a nearby apartment, and finally gets slugged by a cop for filming people through their windows.
Soon, we realize that the camera is his analyst. He tells it everything, and then grows furious because it doesn't answer him with "the right things," and also makes him "do things" that he wouldn't ordinarily do. Accusingly, he asks it, "What do you want?" Then he shouts at the lens that it hasn't helped him—just as a frustrated patient may denounce an all too silent psychiatrist.
"Diary" was made in 1967, and time has served it very well. We get a pungent flash on the past when a radio announces the numbers killed in the Newark riots, or refers to "the new Israel-Egyptian cease-fire," or quotes the Pentagon on the probable increase of American forces in Vietnam next year. But aside from politics, that period now seems a rather innocent one in retrospect, and the character of David Holzman (admirably played by L. M. Kit Carson) distills the eager naiveté that accompanied the zest for technology, deliberate inarticulation and the mistrust of words, the vibes and the hoaxes and all the lighter put-ons of 1967.
At the end, Holzman is bitterly disappointed that his movie and his camera have taught him nothing — least of all how to control his life. The picture reminds me of the late A. J. Liebling's recollection of being 23 in Paris, when he felt that his life hinged on an impossible decision. Meanwhile, he was writing a novel about a 23-year-old in Paris whose future hung upon an insoluble choice. When the character caught up with the day of his own life that he was describing, he couldn't finish the book. Jim McBride's movie evokes the spirit of Liebling's enormous laughter when he remarked that few diaries yield conclusions or solutions.
Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr
Jim McBride's ingenious puzzle movie presents itself as a cinema verite document--the attempt of a young filmmaker (L.M. Kit Carson) to put his life in order by recording it on celluloid (1967). The simulation is seamless (it's much more convincing than Woody Allen's Zelig), which produces some wonderful paradoxes--as when one of David's friends (Lorenzo Mans) criticizes the footage of his violent breakup with his girlfriend for looking like "a bad movie." Where most independent productions are founded on self-righteous claims of truth and honesty, McBride's film wittily observes that Hollywood has no corner on illusionism. Even the black-and-white, hand-held cinema still lies 24 times a second.
Time Out Film Guide
An enduring delight from the Underground era, cleverly sowing arrant lies at the then-sacred 24 fps. McBride's good-humoured gag on 'personal cinema' and the diary genre casts a wry sidelight on a generation's self-obsession and cinephilia. David Holzman commits his life (film-making) to film - directing and starring in the film we're watching, his home-movie autobiography. So far, so faddish. But 'David' is actor Kit Carson, behind the camera he's apparently twiddling is Michael Wadleigh, and the auto-vérité amounts to as much of McBride's script as could be filmed before his $2,500 ran out. Retrospective ironies pile up with interim career leaps: Carson shot a documentary on Dennis Hopper, married Karen Black, and is now a Hollywood screenwriter; Wadleigh tripped through Woodstock to Wolfen; and McBride has limped through sci fi and softcore satire to the added narration credit for The Big Red One and the remake of Breathless. The illusion is complete. PT
1001 Movies You Must See by Adrian Martin
In his early 20s, on the staggeringly small budget of $2,500, Jim McBride began making David Holzman’s Diary from three ideas: the image of a man filming himself in a mirror, the banality of daily life, and how the oppressiveness of New York affects people’s perceptions and behaviour.
David (screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson) is a schmuck. He decides to film the smallest details of his daily life “to find the truth”. But his approach, by turns obsessive, voyeuristic, and paranoic, swiftly alienates everyone around him. Far from a standard “mockumentary”, McBride’s recreation of the stages of this audiovisual diary is peppered with dramatic ellipses, emotional suspense, and a pleasing, always surprising set of variations. The result is remarkably prescient. The cinema verite obsessions of the 1960s targeted here were to reach their full flowering much later, in the eras of video and digital.
David Holzman’s Diary has aged well. Not only has it been paid elaborate homage – in Roman Coppola’s CQ (2001) – but its formal inventions, static long takes, black screen, fish-eye distortion, lateral travelling shots, single-frame pixallations, have pre-figured many other experiments. McBride had already synthesized, and critiqued, the legacies of Godard, Mekas and “direct cinema”.
