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.”
Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week, online, in N.Y.C., and beyond. Paid subscribers also receive book picks.
Dept. of Medicine
How to Die in Good Health
The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way.
By Dhruv Khullar
Infinite Scroll
The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher
Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.
By Kyle Chayka
Daily Comment
The Supreme Court Asks What Enron Has to Do with January 6th—and Trump
The former President notwithstanding, the government’s position in Fischer v. United States is unsettling.
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Elements
The Highest Tree House in the Amazon
In 2023, conservationists and carpenters converged on Peru to build luxury accommodations in the rain-forest canopy.
By Allison Keeley