DVD of the Week: “David Holzman’s Diary”

Jim McBride’s 1967 mockumentary “David Holzman’s Diary” (which I discuss in this clip) is a self-portrait by a fictional character in a real place—New York’s Upper West Side. The premise of the movie is poignantly testamentary—a young independent filmmaker has lost his job and been reclassified 1-A for the draft. Expecting to be called for military service in the Vietnam War any day, he decides to document his life on film, as if to leave a cinematic trace of his existence in case of his death. Holzman (played by L. M. Kit Carson, who would eventually co-produce “Bottle Rocket”) wants to preserve his life—the practical details of his daily existence, his friends, his surroundings, his city—but he also wants to preserve his inner experience. McBride turns Holzman into something of a cinematic tummler, an anything-for-a-response comedian with a camera who is seeking to break through the conventions of mere recording in quest of a jolt of revelation. The director lends Holzman a media-savvy awareness of the influence of pop culture on consciousness—whether it’s Top Forty radio, broadcast news, or television—and McBride’s greatest innovation is his encapsulation of an evening’s TV viewing in a single sequence. It could stand on its own as a masterwork of so-called experimental cinema; in context, it’s a tangle of memory-tentacles that pull Holzman into depths of free association with an almost dizzying and inescapable grasp. The power of media to inform our lives with real memories of virtual experience has rarely been dramatized so well. I wrote here yesterday about Mel Brooks’s recollections of his New York childhood; in “David Holzman’s Diary,” McBride gives the streets an inner life, turns ordinary experience into a treasure trove of loss that empties out faster than it fills. Holzman quotes Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum about cinema being truth twenty-four times a second, but enacts Jean Cocteau’s statement about it being “death at work.”