Le journal de David Holzman

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.

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.

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.

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

What at first seems a fairly straightforward piece of sixties cinema verite turns out to be a precursor to 'The Blair Witch Project' which could easily have been found by the police next to the maker's body and which Maxine Audley might have had in mind when she declared in 'Peeping Tom' "all this filming isn't - healthy!"

I hope the people being filmed through their windows were in on the joke, otherwise the makers would been in serious trouble had they been caught!