![]() Second Run's full frame transfer of the B&W film faithfully reproduces the rough look - complete with lengths of leader, overexposed shots, film damage, scratches (we see David manhandle film stock, so what do you expect?) and the occasional hard-to-make-out mumble. Imaginatively shot by Michael Wadley (later Michael Wadleigh, director of Woodstock and Wolfen), who necessarily has to be hands-off in the sequences where we see David's camera in a mirror, this also gets in early on the Blair Witch trick of letting technical lapses into the finished film as a guarantor of authenticity. Truth weaves in and out of the fiction - the extravagant creature in the sports car, who might be a Warhol Factory refugee or just out for a good time, genuinely happened to be passing and interacts teasingly with the offscreen David while the attempt at a 'story' about David losing his girlfriend collapses (along with the relationship) as he becomes more interested in the process of recording his life than the business of living it. ![]() One of the achievements of McBride's debut feature is that it perfectly parodies a style of cinema that hadn't yet been born. Now, available technology has enabled a nation of David Holzmans, who post diaries on YouTube or contribute to features like Capturing the Friedmans or Tarnation. McBride's protagonist has to be someone like the director, with access not only to the recording equipment but (it is implied) a sophisticated editing set-up. Furthermore, along with Peter Watkins' films, it stands as a precedent for the mock-documentary format of This is Spinal Tap, The Blair Witch Project or The Last Horror Film. Forty years on, David Holzman looks exactly like the 'video diaries' commonplace on contemporary TV (or as DVD extras). Then, only underground films by Andy Warhol or Shirley Clarke approached the form McBride (and Holzman) set out to establish, though elements were appearing in the near-mainstream within months in the likes of Medium Cool, or even Night of the Living Dead. It remains a key work in the ongoing debate about whether 'truth' can ever be captured in an audi-visual medium. When first seen in 1967, it was widely taken for non-fiction, despite the prominent billing of actors in the end-credits. ![]() Second Run DVD make a point of billing David Holzman's Diary as 'a film by Jim McBride' in equal point-size on the sleeve. Finally, David loses all his equipment when his apartment is burgled, and has to close the film with a do-it-yourself vinyl recording and photo-booth snapshots. As David cracks up, he is more and more compelled to film himself, though he cries 'Why isn't this helping?' - a statement as resonant as 'All this filming, it's not healthy' ( Peeping Tom). In a bravura sequence, the film stop-frames in minutes through an entire evening's viewing, providing a surprisingly poignant summary of 1967 programming: flickering past are Vincent Price as Egghead on Batman, the second Star Trek pilot, Joan Crawford in Harriet Craig and now-vintage adverts and new shows. He also turns his camera on random strangers and the city (playing with a new fish0eye lens), a gender-ambiguous glamour girl who swans past in a sports car and his own television set. David becomes vaguely interested in a woman across the road (Louise Levine), whom he bubs 'Sandra' because she reminds him of Visconti's heroine (!), and a pretty girl on the subway (Fern McBride). Penny (Penny Wohl, later The Exorcist's Eileen Dietz), David's girlfriend, a model who poses for pictures all day, is exasperated to be an after-hours subject for his camera - and so creeped out to wake up and find he has been filming her naked that she leaves him. Pepe (Lorenzo Mans), an articulate if smug friend, stands in front of a Cuban mural and extensively criticizes David's work-in-progress by claiming scenes from his life could have come from a badly-written and acted film. He props up a cine-camera in his New York City apartment and records stream-of-consciousness thoughts via a lavalier mike onto reel-to-reel tape, promising to fulfil Jean-Luc Godard's promise that cinema should contain "truth, twenty-four times a second."ĭavid's impulse to chronicle his life outs a strain on his relationships. Kit Carson, later the screenwriter of Paris, Texas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) - a young man who looks like an excommunicated Monkee - makes an audio-visual diary. Newly unemployed and categorised A-1 by his draft board, David Holzman (L.M.
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