David Holzman's Diary (1967) Online

Mock cinema vertite about a young filmmakers consternation at finding 'truth' and putting it on film. Insightfully examines how we define reality, how our perceptions can cloud it, and whether it is really possible to show it on film. Probably to talky for most, but still quite thought provoking. Filled with some really offbeat ideas and camerawork. Among them: filming the faces of people at a bus stop while we hear excerpts from the McCarthy hearings. Also photographing a entire night of tv viewing each minute and then playing them back frame by frame. A very low budget movie, made by some very young filmmakers, with a very original point of view.

I first saw this film on public TV of all places, at about 2:30 am. Not knowing why(or anything about the film),I grabbed a blank tape and recorded it. What followed was a film that grabbed my attention from the opening shot of David with the camera to the end scene where the only thing left is some still shots and David's voice. Being that this is shot on a hand held,it gives it great atmostphere (especially the shots on the street and in Central Park). I recommend this to any future filmmaker and watch with awe.

***1/2

If you liked the Blair Witch Project, this is where they probably got the idea. Every film school shows this as an example of a completely fictional documentary, that works. Done in cinema verite style, the fictional angst filled life of a documentary maker falls apart, as he chronicles its disintegration, largely caused by his obsession with filming it as it crumbles. Like watching a train wreck.

Kit Carson's face has a relevancy even today, cutting through the demographic piece of the cake: he reminds one of Jean Pierre Leaud which is arguably one of the motives casting him as David Holzman, and he also reminds one of us today Beck's face, and his maybe signature lyric "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me."

But David Holzman as his name says is a man holding - holding what? A camera for sure, the instrument that ultimately makes him fall apart; pursuing his credo stated right at the beginning and maybe, uneasily, hilariously put to the test for the rest of it, that is Jean-Luc Godard's phrase that the cinematic truth runs 24 times a frame. I liked the fact that he rises a bit his voice and somehow overacts his name with an American accent as if it was not far away from jeans, luck, God and art.

I admit I expected something closer to the "I do this, I do that" poetic compositions Frank O'Hara was doing a bit earlier the same period, for he too queered and mocked supposedly avant-guard procedures, or at least their seriousness. I thought David Holzman's self-indulgence slightly needed the more constant alertness he exemplified in scenes like the one in the park, with rows of old people on benches and a dubious voice-over international commentary - that broke away from the rather one-dimensional reaction poor Penny has and seems that she conceives her late boyfriend a simple stupid stalker.

For me the anthology scene is the one with David's friend who talks on camera theorizing about film, in front of a pop mural at his place - and when you think the way the tableau conveys it that you are about to have an illumination on Rosenquist and his tableaux and the American predicament or what, David's friend moves and goes back to the wall resting his head on the crotch on the figure behind. This is great sophisticated camp.

And for me it echoes finely when the end comes with an unexpected intuition on the other side of the pitch: in the end David Holzman says he would not have done it; the 24-times truth seems to him something close to Bartleby territory. "I would prefer not to". Not to do it he says, but this, exactly, seems to me a grim acceptance of the American predicament. What I mean by this is that Bartleby never says "not to do it", nothing comes after his "not to," his denial is a formal gesture without content, that is why his presence is so unbearable. David is not Bartleby but he stumbles upon his presence, perhaps the way Zapruder stumbled upon a President's assassination some years back in his own brand of home cinema verite, and this is what troubles David and makes the film something else than a diary.

This film grabs you in from the get go, and takes you into the mind of a hapless young filmmaker. A true historic masterpiece! It's something completely different and unique from any other moviegoing experience you will ever have. Don't miss a chance to pass this up. A true step forward in filmmaking.

I guess you would get confused if you didn't understand the hype and hoopla surrounding the cinema verité movement during this era.

David Holzman's Diary serves to lampoon cinema verité by showing one dull, overly introspective scene after another. It's a thinly-veiled attack on what director Jim McBride saw as a pretentious cinematic form.

The fact that cinema verité is not widely regarded today (except in film schools) is a testimony to how dated this film now appears. That said, Roman Coppola endlessly references this film in his debut, "CQ". Perhaps McBride's film will enjoy a bit of a renaissance.

Just watched the film, phoned the distributor (where I learned the film "is" fiction), read the reviews on this website, and feel happy to be the first in five years to comment on this masterpiece.

What an experience--especially thinking it was "real" and made by one person as a documentary. "Peeping Tom" (on U.K. 100) could have easily found inspiration from this film, as could have "Sherman's March". The earlier masterpiece, "A Man With A Movie Camera" (from Russia) contains hints of where Jim McBride's search for "truth at 24 frames a second" may have first popped up. Since none of these films find listing in the recommendations section for this film, I'll add them here and there.

OK, a few words about this father of fakeumentaries itself. So far ahead of it's time that it duplicates, at times, the life of a present day blogger, this film also historically depicts real-life New York, its citizens, and the media overlay placed upon the populace as the Vietnam War raged like a mental wildfire in the consciousness of millions of those citizens and media figures. There is a rage here, centered around David's (Kit Carson) relationship with Penny, and how her anger at David filming her finally let's her find a reason to break off an obviously one-sided relationship--and David's mild obsession with Sandra who lives "one floor above him" across the street. The two women counterpoint each other as David knows Penny too well and Sandra not a all. And all these metaphors, all the emotions played with in this film, also metaphor the Vietnam War and its effect on individual Americans, especially of draft age. I could go on and on along those lines, but will let it go at this. I'd suggest a viewing of this film, and show it to someone who doesn't know it's a work of 'fiction', and share with them, once again, "truth at 24 frames a second".

Jim McBride's mockumentary is a delightful satire about the filmmaker's compulsion to capture everything on camera, and also a wry character study of one young man who uses his "art" as a pretext for complete self-absorption. This film from the sixties eerily forecasts our present absorption with social media.

As played by L.M. Kit Carson, David is on an irreconcilable mission: to at once understand a world in chaos, and cocoon himself from it in his own cinematic world.

He is lucky that his girlfriend ( Eileen Dietz) didn't chuck his camera when he filmed her sleeping nude.

One thing I found fascinating is the "Observer Effect" as defined by David. Once you start filming, you cease to have reality as you change in response to the film. It is not real life, it is a movie. One would wonder here, if you wore a GoPro Hero all day would you record a normal day, or would you look for the abnormal?

With irritation, alienation, a sex-hungry lady sitting in a car in the middle of traffic, and a few bloody noses, this one "Diary" worth peeking into.

David Holzman's Diary comes close to the "dream" of what was possible in the ideal of the American independent cinema of the 1960s. Taking the lessons of John Cassavetes with Shadows and French new wave filmmakers, specifically Godard and Truffaut, Jim McBride decided that shooting a narrative with a documentary approach- following the characters hand-held, without the artifice of a constricting studio- wasn't quite enough to get at a really personal cinema. At the same time his film is something of a cunning, if not always obvious, attack on "personal docu-style" essay movies. The idea that anyone can get a camera and make a movie or something on film about their lives has now mutated into something else with reality TV (True Life on MTV is like a professional extension of David Holzman's Diary), but at the time this was something extraordinary to attempt. And even today, it still shows.

This doesn't mean David Holzman's Diary is perfect, but then how could it ever be? Or would anyone in their right mind think it should be? It's imperfections are part of its... I won't say charm, since the film isn't exactly "charming", but it's got a certain something to it by having some longer takes, some shots or moments that are extended on David Holzman going on and on to the camera about his life, or what little there is of it. It's got that randomness of a diary, of anything popping into one's head put down on record. And that aspect, about film being "truth 24 frames a second, is one of the strongest things about it. It's message is both clear and hard to take: film is something that creates a reality of its own, as the male interviewee says, that a person can't have their own reality because of an aesthetic addition or distraction to it.

This won't be news to anyone who's seen docu-horror films like Blair Witch Project or Diary of the Dead, but the difference here is that of high-minded artistic aspirations. David Holzman is a filmmaker already, so to make a film about himself, mostly with him in his apartment pondering things like Vincente Minelli or Truffaut's comment on a woman's flicking of a wrist like Debbie Reynolds, it's bound to be pretentious. The trick is to know that McBride is mocking this particular high-and-mighty artist who does have some good intentions, while at the same time making a very personal kind of film. Seeing McBride and Michael Wadleigh's camera going down a block, put to the local radio station, then going past old people's faces in close-up in a park or going by a cop who may or may not know a "film" is being shot, is incredible on-the-fly material. That or just Holzman shooting out of the window as a voyeur on another woman in an apartment reveals as much about the character as the filmmaker making the film within the film. Did I mention that Holzman, long before the semi-tragic ending, shoots the television at night one frame every single cut and then puts all the frames together? It's awe-inspiring and breathtaking.

Might sound confusing, but it's worth it to take the experience if you know what you're getting, which is an experiment as much as a essay-style narrative. This doesn't mean all the performances are very good (I liked the woman in the car very much, the girl playing Penny or the male guy being interviewed not so much), but some moments, some truly cinematic experiences come out of it. 9.5/10

I found this film quite depressing rather than funny. It sort of gives you a lonely feeling while you're watching, as the protagonist documents his sad everyday life. The moments when David is with his girlfriend Penny, it feels very real; so real that it's scary as you witness their relationship fall apart due to David's narcissism. Definitely an underrated film worth checking out. It contains one of the longest monologues I've ever heard and is sort of educational in a way.

This fake documentary (which appears quite real on the surface) is about a young man making a movie about his everyday life and discovering something important about himself and his reality. Again, this film is not a real documentary... or is it? Personally, I don't think this is a great film. Even in its short run time, it has a lot of fluff. But I do think it has a certain level of brilliance in that it does appear to be a real documentary, even crediting the actors under false names. Also, it does offer a nice reflection on the role of film, bringing up some ideas expressed by Godard and others.

I can see how a film like this could be used to launch a career, but in and of itself, it really is nothing too exciting and really more of a curiosity.

This film was on a list of films to see because it appears in a book "1001 Films to Watch Before You Die" or similar title. It has been languishing on My Netflix List for several years. It is disappearing from streaming there in a few days so I decided to watch it. I am glad to see that it is apparently a faux documentary. I think it should have been titled "Diary of a Creep" or "Six Days in the Life of a Loser". The only bit of the film that I enjoyed at any level (and am disappointed to find out that this was faked) was the "Night of Scenes on NBC" from 1967. I am astonished and a bit disgusted that it has such a high rating (average on IMDb).

It seems reviews of David Holzman's Diary were written with a sense of nostalgia and cinéma vérité in mind. Various reviews from several years back have the writer staying they caught this particular film late at night on cable and perceived it to be real, which would definitely add to the experience, regardless of whether or not you agree with the ideas and themes of the film at hand. I knew if during one of my insomniac nights I caught David Holzman's Diary on Television and witnessed what it had to offer, I'd report back with a review that would sound more in the way of a kneejerk alarmist about the radical style this film bears. My only question to those who initially believed this film to be authentic and not a mockumentary - did you miss the end credits?

David Holzman's Diary is a piece of "docufiction," or a film genre obsessed with the concepts or reality and time and conducting them in such a way that gives you the feel that you're watching an authentic account of real life, when really, you're watching a scripted film. This particular film stars L.M. Kit Carson as the titular David Holzman, a young filmmaker and cinephile who, one day, decides to start videotaping his life and keeping video diaries of his thoughts on the world and himself. Over time, he watches himself grow as a person while making these videos and becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of defining reality.

The film is slender at seventy-four minutes long, shot in black and white and made up predominately of lengthy, static shots with its loquacious and confused subject. Carson is said to basically be reiterating the thoughts and musings of the film's director, Jim McBride, but does so in such a natural way that he's obviously doing something right if people were believing he was just some nut with a camera in the sixties. He talks a great deal about the portrayal and image of women during the tumultuous time of the sixties, which provides for a nice time capsule to the time period, especially for those less fortunate, like me, who have no primary account of the period.

David Holzman's Diary is a lot more interesting to discuss than it is to watch, at times getting too stylistically wrapped up in itself and obscuring its own ideas, but such is the case, I suppose, when you are discussing lofty concepts and theories involving destiny and time. Carson gives a performance of true naturalism, and the home- video effects McBride's docufiction presentation provide the film with a feeling all its own. The more I flirt with shorts and full- length films of decades past, the more I realize cinematic radicalism dated back further and further.

Starring: L.M. Kit Carson. Directed by: Jim McBride.

I saw this film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and that was a very good reason to watch this for me, but I saw a critics review give it a low rating which I found a little surprising, but I was still going to watch it and see if it deserved some kind of recommendation, from debuting director Jim McBride (The Big Easy). Basically this is a realistic spoof documentary about a man living on his own documenting his life every day and almost every hour, while filming himself David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) is discovering important things about himself. While he is filming himself, detailing every major or minor thing that has happened during a day and asking questions about himself and the world, he is causing some problems in whatever personal life he has, including his girlfriend walking out on him. Every scene of this film is from the perspective of the camera that he uses, we see him using it in some photographs as well, he uses it a lot in his own house, and he is not bothered what people think as he takes it everywhere with him, often using interesting alternative angles to capture his movement. It is towards the end of the film though that he questions his sanity and his reason for beginning his film diary in the first place, he knows that he is creating problems for his life and that it would be a greater benefit for himself and everyone to end the film entirely, and get rid of it afterwards, so he does. Also starring Eileen Dietz as Penny Wohl, Lorenzo Mans as Pepe, Louise Levine as Sandra, Michel Lévine as Sandra's Boy Friend and Robert Lesser as Max - Penny's agent. I can see it is clearly an experimental film and it was considered rather daring for its time, I guess the reason the critics give it a low rating now is because it seems a little dated, but you can't argue that has given some directors good ideas for camera movement and angles in future filmmaking, and it has a good performance by Carson who is fascinating filming himself, overall I agree it is a satire film to be seen. Worth watching!

I don't know why this rather dull piece of cinema verite is so famous. Perhaps you had to be there - in the sixties I mean.

A man films his own life for a week or so and in the process loses his girlfriend. There are some effective moments - like when he films an endless row of elderly people sitting on park benches, and when he films, in fast motion, what he watched on television one evening.

But the long, self-indulgent, angst-ridden diatribes at the camera bored me to tears.

It is quite convincing though - so it is surprising to learn that it was scripted and acted. A curiosity piece that is mercifully short.

Wildly unconventional and sadly underrated, "David Holzman's Diary" is, in my opinion, the greatest "found footage" film ever made. While "found footage" is a genre normally associated only with horror movies, and wasn't even a term in 1967, this still plays out extraordinarily similarly to a film like "The Visit" or "Willow Creek". However, it is much, much better and is a tragicomedy rather than a horror flick.

Before delving into the depths of this obscure oddity, one must be aware that it is a highly satirical film. It mocks the avant garde and cinema verite movement in a deadpan and, at times, subtle way. It portrays those who attempted to find art and truth in the painfully mundane as people who are pretentious, delusional, and occasionally creepy. Of course, I am something of a fan of these movements, but it is important to also note that the film isn't mocking ALL cinema verite or experimental films, just the highly pretentious and annoyingly boring ones that began to spring up back in the mid to late 60's.

Although he is something of an antihero, the film also gives poor David Holzman some sympathy as we witness his life steadily decay due to his cinematic obsession. It's tragic, it's satiric, and it's comic.

My golly- boy. Man, this flick rocks kicks it dances all over the place pretty heavy.Bad. Bad can mean good. You decide. Personally, I'm straight like the dude who films the show. This was way before black metal less you count Brian Jones an Jim Morrison. You know, its up to you--- do it mean love is real, love is unreal, diamonds for eyes, ghosts for lips, everything OR nothing?... is it existential or is it nihilist? You figure. Believe in God.. I'm religious. Check out "Pretty Girls" B SPEARS AN Iggy A.Z.--- then the film. OK? Anybody gets it then, anybody. Now I tried to submit my democracy & being told I don't got enough lines>>> OK let's add some more... like a college paper. There. I'm not shouting, corrected spelling, and should have plenty of lines.