David Holzman's Diary (1967)

Interesting facts

David Holzman's Diary is a 1967 American mockumentary, or work of metacinema, directed by James McBride and starring L. M. Kit Carson. A feature-length film made on a tiny budget over several days, it is a work of experimental fiction presented as an autobiographical documentary. "A self-portrait by a fictional character in a real place—New York's Upper West Side," the film comments on the title character's personality and life as well as on documentary filmmaking and the medium of cinema more generally. In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Production

Film critic Richard Brody writes that, "This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave." Jaime Wolf writes that, "At once a fictional narrative within a recognizable documentary setting and a kind of essay on the conditions of filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary stands as one of the few American equivalents to the work which Godard was doing at the time." The French…

I entered the world of movies when cinema vérité work like the Maysles brothers' and Richard Leacock's and D. A. Pennebaker's was new and exciting, and when a lot of underground filmmakers were trying to use the medium in a more poetic way, as an exercise in different kinds of liberation—you know, from personal liberation to liberation from the classical forms of filmmaking. So there were a lot of alternatives to Hollywood moviemaking then.

David Holzman's Diary was filmed in about a week with borrowed equipment and a mere $2,500 budget. According to L.M. Kit Carson, the money came from a book advance from The Museum of Modern Art, intended for him and McBride to research and write a book on cinema verité. After conducting several filmmaker interviews, they changed their minds and decided to do something better with the money:

Halfway through the book-writing, McBride says to me: "There is no Truth on Film. Basically as soon as you turn the camera on – everything changes – to not real – gets like unreal." So we decide it's more quote/unquote "un-truth-ful" to write this book – we decide not to write this book.

David Holzman's Diary exemplifies guerrilla filmmaking, a mode of production defined not by genre but by a drastic lack of production resources along with a by-any-means-necessary mindset. The needed resources include money, equipment, facilities, and professional cast and crew; lacking them requires filmmakers to be very economical and creative, as with McBride and Carson's use of the $2,500 MoMA book money.

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