rambles for the camera about his ambitions and ideas, shoots his home and surroundings, and gener- ally tries to give a wholistic sense of his life (including his TV watching and masturbation habits). The foot- age is so raw that it seems to be edited in camera, with David visibly switching the machine on and off, and including interstitial sequences of placement, light flares, and distorted sound. Yet it’s all a fiction.
McBride’s movie not only pegged the emerging self- sufficiently self-obsessive moment but also antici- pated (and pre-satirized) the next half-century of first-person cinema—of videocam monologues, of YouTube exhibitionism, of faux confessionals, of media’s psychic irresolution; it jump-started the genres of pseudo-documentary, mockumentary, and “documentary-style” fictions. It’s partly why the film doesn’t feel dated, despite the now antiquated technology and deep-dyed specificity of its time and place (NYC, summer of ’67). It’s not a record of a world since passed, but rather the groundbreaking for a terrain we’re still tramping over.
Yet despite the clichés that its style would become, and despite being largely a fiction, the film rings bracingly true, like a phlegmatic Dostoevskian moan that never fails to stir the bones. A bewildered son to A Man With a Movie Camera, which had exploded with revolutionary, re-inventive potential 40 years prior, David Holzman’s Diary witnesses a modern man elevated by technology yet dogged by mortality, manipulating a machine of mass communication to express private distress. For what gives McBride’s film enduring, gut-punching power is not its fact/fiction
sleight of hand, but its lock-eyed existential lament, with David pursuing both voyeurism and exhibition- ism to a queasy ground zero.
It starts with a whisper to break silence. “Test, test, test,” David says, looking for audio confirmation that all is functional, and also that he’s actually there. “Please pay attention.” As with all diaries, it’s never clear if he’s speaking solely to himself or to a poten- tial audience, if he’s keeping himself company or if we—the idea of a ‘we’—are. He’s acting as his own witness, as well as recording for posterity, with his buzzing radio offering a wallpapered time capsule (the Vietnam War, a state of emergency in Newark) of the larger moment. With Carson superbly fabri- cating direct-address candor before that was even a thing, David itemizes his equipment and refers to his camera as “friend”; he plays unseen tour guide to his neighborhood, the Upper West Side of Manhattan; he films his girlfriend Penny (Eileen Dietz), a nude fashion model who wants no part of David’s intru- sive camera—a seeming contradiction that David can neither fathom nor honor; he creepily shoots into a stranger’s apartment, Rear Window style, and fabricates a life for her; he interviews strangers on the street, most notably a husky-voiced Amazonian who propositions him for sex (one of the few straight documentary sequences in the film); and he gets rep- rimanded from a friend, Pepe (Lorenzo Mans), who deconstructs the fallacies of the whole enterprise in a monologue of dizzying meta-ness.
“As soon as you start filming something, whatever happens in front of the camera is not reality anymore.
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