I’ll be your mirror Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
— “I’LL BE YOUR MIRROR,” THE VELVET UNDERGROUND & NICO (1966)
A man makes a picture A moving picture Through the light projected He can see himself up close — U2, “LEMON” (1994)
Objects. People. Events. Seem to speak to me. They seem to carry some meaning that I can’t quite get. My life, though, ordinary enough, seems to haunt me in uncommon ways. It seems to come to me from somewhere else. I’ve been trying to understand it but it seems I can’t get it. So the noted French wit Jean-Luc Godard said what is film? Film is truth 24 times a second. So I thought that if I put it all down on film, and I run it back and forth, and I put my thumb on it, and I stop it when I want to, then I got everything. I got it all. I should get it all. I should get the meaning. I should understand it. So this is what this is going to be. I’m going to make a diary. My diary.
—L.M. Kit Carson as David, David Holzman’s Diary
In a sense, David Holzman’s Diary marks the begin- ning of the modern media era. Fundamental changes in the production, consumption, and physical engagement with film were afoot in the mid-1960s,
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particularly the increasing portability and afford- ability of film cameras and sound recorders, a tandem development that allowed for on-the-fly sync sound and, most seismically, solo filmmak- ing. Suddenly it was possible for a filmmaker to approximate the self-sufficiency of a writer, painter or singer-songwriter, and have autonomy over his or her art. And what was the lonely probing artist to do with such self-sufficiency, but make a subject of the self—to scrutinize his reflection, heroicize his reflection, and posit that reflection as evidence of a larger human condition. But with David Holzman’s Diary Jim McBride went one further—he identified that even a form with the veracious promise of film (“cinema is objectivity in time,” wrote André Bazin) could also be a looking glass, a distorter as well as a recorder, a bald-faced liar employing the vocabu- lary of truth.
The film comes on as a first person, documentary- style, chronological diary of a young man, recently unemployed and potentially going off to war. David
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