5/3/2020 "Your life is not a very good script": David Holzman's diary and documentary expression in late-1960s America

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"Your life is not a very good script": David Holzman's diary and documentary
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Autobiographical films and videos bear witness to our lives in all its variation, and these lives are untidy and contradictory: we have
passions, both creative ones and destructive ones; we betray each other and do surprisingly heroic things; we experience profound joy
and almost crushing emotional pain; we are both cruel and compassionate. All these experiences and feelings fuel the autobiographical
act. Because of this, the autobiographical film or video can break a silence and by doing so lessen the isolation and despair that we often
experience, both personally and culturally.

--Michelle Citron (1)

The simultaneous convergence and divergence of the communications media has been one of the most paradoxical and significant
developments in recent decades, beginning perhaps in the 1950s with the growing relations between Hollywood and the television
industry, and accelerating since the 1970s. In terms of convergence, the media have become increasingly consolidated in their
technologies and corporate ownership, with fewer and larger conglomerates controlling more media domestically and around the world.
This has benefited the media conglomerates but also raised concerns regarding issues such as cultural imperialism. (2) However, ordinary
consumers also have gained access to more abundant and diverse media alternatives. Various constraints have eroded, markets
fragmented, and channels proliferated--together providing consumers (albeit not everyone equally) with a growing array of options; and
media consumers have increasingly become media producers, communicating through new and improved technologies. The social
benefits of this empowerment have been mixed, depending upon how these technologies have been used and by whom. The Internet, for
example, has served as a global distribution venue for images that serve all kinds of interests, from the altruistic to the illegal.

Within the context of these broad developments, David Holzman's Diary (1967) is a marker of how things already had shifted by the late
1960s, and a harbinger of the even more extensive developments that were to come. It is a film that explicitly addresses the empowering
opportunities opening up to individual filmmakers, and warns of problems associated with this new power. As James McBride has
described his prescient debut film:

I entered the world of movies when

cinema verite 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

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liberation to liberation from the classical
forms of filmmaking. So there
were a lot of alternatives to Hollywood
moviemaking then. These
movies were all trying to find a new
way of looking at life. And I was a
young, idealistic filmmaker dealing
with these same questions. You
know: what is one supposed to be trying
to do in movies and how ought
one go about doing it? My film, David
Holzman's Diary, was about this guy
who makes a diary of his own life to
try to find some truth that he can't
perceive in real time. It was meant to
be kind of an ironical formula, let's
say, to explore a lot of those ideas. (3)

In its contemplation of issues involving the new freedoms of filmmakers, McBride's film also deployed several related modes of
documentary film practice that would become popularized and commodified by the corporate media, including the home movie format that
serves as the basis for America's Funniest Home Videos, the video diary format found in programs like MTV's The Real World, the
observational direct cinema approach of Cops, and the making-a-movie format of Project Greenlight. But the film also addressed concerns
that would resonate with more independent filmmakers, such as film and video aiding in personal self-discovery, as with Sadie Benning's If
Every Girl Had a Diary (1990). Or documentary expression as formulaic artifice, as parodied in such "mockumentaries" as Christopher
Guest's A Mighty Wind (2003). In its hybrid stylization, David Holzman's Diary also provided a model for transcending conventional
documentary representation with more eclectic rhetorical approaches, as with Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite (1979), Jonathan Caouette's
Tarnation (2003), and Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989). In the latter case, critic Miles Orvell has observed that Moore's combination
of interactive and reflexive modes of documentary, which together foreground the relationships between subject, filmmaker, and audience,
"has its precedents in several other projects dating at least from Kit Carson and Jim McBride's quasi-documentary." (4)

A reviewer of David Holzman's Diary once predicted that McBride's film would be "revered" by film scholars of the 1990s as "the
underground autobiographical cinema verite film of the Sixties," a status that may be overstated but is not altogether inaccurate, given the
awards the film has won, including being selected in 1991 by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry, as well as its near
canonical status in college courses on documentary and experimental film. (5) An online search for this film yields numerous references to
its significance, for instance the British Film Institute website's description of it as an "underground classic [that] is a playful rift on
solipsistic cinephilia and voyeurism, anticipating the current craze for reality TV." (6) However, the writing on the film that would support
and explore such claims remains scant, limited mainly to reviews by film critics. As one of the first in-depth writings on this film, this essay
argues that David Holzman's Diary is both an example of and a critical statement about filmmaking theories and practices that would
become integral to contemporary documentary expression. More specifically, I examine the film's discourses on cinematic reflexivity and
individual identity, and how these relate to filmic and social practices that in some cases already had taken root and in all cases would
become more prominent in the media landscape.

CINEMATIC REFLEXIVITY

David Holzman's Diary is a work of fiction that successfully masquerades as an autobiographical documentary combining such techniques
as interactive cinema verite and its more observational counterpart direct cinema.

(7) L.M. Kit Carson plays David Holzman, an alienated young film enthusiast who has just lost his job and draft deferment. The film
consists of a series of diary entries by the Holzman character, each chronicling his physical and emotional landscape as he seeks insights
into the meaning of his life during a week in the summer of 1967. The film reveals David's seedy Manhattan neighborhood and apartment,
his girlfriend Penny, and other local characters in a manner that seems utterly authentic, even to the trained eye. Only in the closing
credits does it become clear that this film is actually a work of fiction starring Carson, directed by McBride, and written by both men. Such
cinematic trickery did not originate with this film; Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes (Tierra sin Pan, or Land Without Bread, 1933), for example, is a
seminal if rare early example of a film that radically blurs fiction and nonfiction. Like Bunuel's film and another more recent faux
documentary, The Blair Witch Project (1999), David Holzman's Diary was made with a miniscule budget and was highly convincing in its
realism. Made for less than $3,000 over five days of principal photography, McBride's film managed to be both decades ahead of its time
and intimately tied to its particular milieu.

As McBride suggests in the above quote, the 1960s was a vital period of American film history, during which the Hollywood studio system
collapsed after years of decline and numerous alternative cinemas prospered. (8) David Holzman's Diary mimics one emerging
alternative, namely the private sphere documentary, a genre made viable by recent technological advances in location shooting that
enabled one person to record both film images and sounds simultaneously with relative ease and reliability. In the 1960s, these advances
tended to result in documentaries about the public sphere, as with news reportage, political documentaries, the films of Frederick
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Wiseman, and rock music documentaries. (9) By shifting the documentary impulse from public institutions and personalities to the lives of
common people, David Holzman's Diary offered a fresh (if not absolutely new) alternative that would subsequently expand with the
proliferation of video and other new media technologies. In shifting its emphasis toward ordinary people, this film anticipated, valorized and
critiqued the expansion of amateur video production--a mode of filmmaking that can have deep meanings for its practitioners and is
increasingly finding its way into the mainstream media as a form of evidence and / or entertainment. On the latter point, amateur video can
serve the interests of the individual and the public good, for instance, as Michelle Citron writes, by speaking publicly about marginalized
people and challenging a social order that has "been little able to tolerate the truth of the variety of lived experience"; but it also can exploit
and harm people. (10) David Holzman's Diary explores both the positive and negative potentials of autobiographical documentary.

Among the most obvious private sphere documentary intertexts that informed the production of David Holzman's Diary is the seminal
Edgar Morin/Jean Rouch film Chronique d'un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), which introduced cinema verite theory and practice with
its man-on-the-street interviews and profiles of selected ordinary people, and its self-critique by those same people. This self-conscious
documentary shows Morin and Rouch concluding that their effort to faithfully capture life was a failure because the act of filming
transformed what they wanted to record, a theme with which McBride's film would engage more fully. In an American filmmaking context,
the wave of independent/ avant-garde New York-based film production in the late 1960s and early 70s provided another intertext, including
the work of Andrew Noren, whose diary films including Say Nothing, Forget It, and New York Miseries "seemed to hit life at a more direct,
personal level than the other film makers--that is, Pennebaker, et al made documentaries about other people, but Noren made
documentaries about himself." (11) Scott MacDonald has written that the film diaries of Noren, as well as Jonas Mekas and Carolee
Schneemann, demonstrated that there are

other interesting, fulfilling ways to

live besides the narrow range of
middle-class lives (and their predictable
"secrets") marketed by so many
industry films. And the unusual
forms they develop for depicting
their experiences reveal the conventionality
of industry narrative. The
candid revelations of the personal
filmmakers provide viewers with a
healthier set of personal and filmic
options. (12)

Before the final credits appear, David Holzman's Diary may seem to be another underground private sphere documentary like those of
Noren. Indeed, many spectators reported being tricked into believing the film's apparent documentary authenticity. (13) However,
McBride's film actually critiques these types of films on a number of levels. For example, David Holzman's lonely life is "interesting" mostly
in a negative sense and hardly seems "fulfilling," especially after his breakup with Penny. His self-revelations are never truly "candid"--he
always shuts off the camera just when it might capture something truly private in him--and his increasingly bizarre behavior hardly
suggests a "healthy" personal or cinematic option.

While David Holzman's Diary has been described as "a satirical essay on the autoeroticism of self-referential film," made overt with
David's monologue extolling masturbation, the film's critique of the impulse toward private sphere documentary is perhaps strongest in
regard to his problematic relationships with women, as in the scene in which David films Penny sleeping in the nude and she awakens and
attacks him for his transgression. (14) Even after they split up and David attempts to reconcile, he still does not realize that some things
are (or should be) too private to be filmed and potentially made available for public consumption. Rather than inhibiting David's intrusive
tendencies, this breakup precipitates his voyeuristic obsessions with his neighbor Sandra and his disturbing stalking behavior exhibited in
scenes such as when he follows an anonymous woman out of the subway and into the streets, filming her in a subjective POV manner
which, by the 1980s, would become a convention of horror films. (15)

If a social theme of the 1960s and 70s was the personal being political this film and its exhibition exemplify the private becoming public,
which is consistent with various subsequent media and cultural practices. Among the numerous examples of this increasing presence of
the private in the public sphere are specific movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); various genres of Reality TV; high-profile public
scandals involving the likes of O.J. Simpson, Bill Clinton, and Michael Jackson; the expansion of gossip from isolated TV segments or
programs to whole cable TV channels like E!; the paparazzi who intrude into peoples' lives; and all the surveillance cameras that watch
our daily movements. As practiced in the Reality TV series Big Brother and parodied in The Truman Show (1998), today the private is not
only more public but also more a product packaged for mass consumption, whether by the likes of corporate profiteers or complicit
celebrity wannabes. In its depictions of people who may or may not want to be filmed, David Holzman's Diary is a case study of the kind of
narcissism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and humiliation that would become so integral and profitable for the contemporary mass media.

While some reviewers of McBride's film noted its relations to private sphere documentaries, more often they commented on its cinematic
reflexivity, although without examining this reflexivity in much depth or considering its broader implications for documentary or filmic
expression more generally. The film's self-conscious examination of documentary expression, and the medium of cinema more generally,
is manifest on many levels, from references to specific films and filmmakers to images of the filmmaking apparatus and related objects
(TVs, film posters, mirrors, windows) to dialogue about film and reality. David Holzman's Diary's numerous allusions to other films are
consistent with tendencies toward pastiche that have been termed "postmodern," but these allusions occur in a film that ruminates on film
theories and practices, not simply quoting for its own sake or paying homage.

One of the film's more direct and insightful comments on documentary expression is the monologue by David's friend who himself appears
only once in the film and remains anonymous until the credits later identify him as Pepe. This single shot appears approximately one-third
of the way through the film and features the Pepe character, a young apparently Latino artist or intellectual played by Lorenzo Mans,

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directly addressing the camera with an extended critical monologue on David's project as it has developed so far. Pepe begins by saying
that Penny is "ridiculous" and "trite," and, like David, an uninteresting subject for a movie. "Your life is not a very good script," he states
bluntly. Pepe observes that what David seemingly wants is not a good movie that would entertain

audiences, but something more personally significant--an understanding of the meaning of his life. He says, however, that David fails to
realize that merely filming events cannot explain them; instead it transforms reality into art and, in the case of David's project so far, "a
very bad work of art." Filming events distorts them, as people become self-conscious in front of the camera, or behind it, resulting in
behavior that is no longer natural but instead aesthetically or morally motivated; again, life is not passively recorded as it is but instead
transformed into a work of art. Pepe suggests that to make a film that is honest, interesting, and personally rewarding, David should try to
film the "safe" or private self that he has been hiding; he should reveal his most private thoughts and feelings more spontaneously to the
camera, or even stand naked in front of it until some interesting truth emerges. (16) As it is, Pepe concludes, David has just been
producing half-truths, "which is worse than a lie."

Pepe's critique adds humor to McBride's ponderous film while also deflating the pretenses of nonfiction film practices like interactive
cinema verite and observational direct cinema. Some peoples' lives may not be interesting for audiences, and the filming of reality
changes life into art. Illusions of objectivity and truth are shattered by the fact that, at all stages of production, the documentary filmmaker
makes numerous conscious and unconscious decisions that mediate the truth value of what finally appears onscreen. Likewise, the
subjects of documentaries know they are being filmed and tend to behave accordingly. Hence, in regard to capturing truth,
autobiographical documentary is problematic on multiple levels that may or may not be controllable by the filmmaker. One of the few film
critics to discuss Pepe's monologue was Vincent Canby, who wrote:

The argument that Pepe raises, as

well as the actions of David himself,
highlights questions we all have
about the quality of truth that can be
captured by the cinema verite camera.
These questions have not only to
do with the awful possibilities for
distortion through the process of selection
that goes into editing a film,
but with the way David's camera allows
him to stand outside his own
life, to be a disengaged spectator.
Carried to an extreme, it becomes an
escape from any commitment whatsoever.
At the end of David Holzman's
Diary, David is totally bereft. There is
much that cinema verite [can] do, but
it's a complete fiction to suppose that
it can necessarily teach us to see and
hear any more efficiently than a fiction
film as intelligent as, say, Mean
Streets or American Graffiti. (17)

While few reviewers said as much as Canby about the film's critique of documentary expression, even fewer discussed the wider
implications this critique holds for cinema generally. A fuller interpretation of David Holzman's Diary would view it not simply as a critique of
particular modes of documentary, but as participating in a longstanding theoretical discourse on the truth value of film and the
photographic image. In varying historical contexts prior to the making of this film, many artists and critics had argued for the ability of film
and photography to capture "reality" or truth, including Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin, and the theorists and
practitioners of cinema verite and direct cinema to whom McBride's film most directly responds. (18)

Indeed, David Holzman naively accepts the famous Godardian aphorism that "cinema is truth 24 times a second." What is often ignored or
downplayed in these arguments, however, is that cinematic images are always the product of manipulations that "create" the truth as
much as--if not more than--simply revealing it. As the mural behind Pepe may suggest, photographic media are potentially as creative and
painterly as they are mechanically re productive; and no image is unmediated. David believes that photographic media can capture truths
that are normally invisible to perception, like the dirt on Penny's neck, and yet he is oblivious to how much he shapes the truth before,
during, and after it is recorded. Thus, David Holzman's Diary critiques notions of cinema's capacity for objective truth by revealing how
elusive and malleable truth can be in cinema and perhaps ultimately life itself. In what may be a reference to existentialism, the
unattainable essence of David's life may suggest that "reality" itself is largely a function of subjective perceptions and mediations.

Subsequent academic discourse would further theorize the cultural constructedness of everyday life, but one need not be a
deconstructionist to see that documentary expression is as mediated as fiction. Neither the film or its reviewers addressed an intriguing
implication of the relations between fiction and nonfiction, namely that the former actually can be more honest and truthful than the latter,
since it is relieved of the ethical and personal consequences associated with nonfiction. As Citron writes, fiction "allows for more
authenticity by giving voice to that which we both consciously and unconsciously know. Yet at the same time, it works by deception, which
ironically, by opening up a space of safety, may ultimately lead to honesty and truth." (19)

In addition to critiquing the truth value of documentary expression--and images more generally--David Holzman's Diary also critiques
related metaphorical notions of cinema that have long circulated in both theoretical and popular discourse. These include cinema as an
extension of the body (eye and phallus); as a diary, confessor, therapist, or (girl)friend; and as a weapon or instrument of aggression.

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McBride's film depicts these notions primarily in negative terms, an attitude consistent with the historical context of the late 1960s, when
commercial and independent films commonly interrogated the social functions of American film and media, questioning "the customary
notions of representation, of how we see and know the 'reality' of the world around us and how we communicate those perceptions." (20)
The idea of cinema as a weapon, for instance, was as old as 1920s Soviet cinema and common in films and writings on cinema from the
1960s, as with a "Newsreel" publication that frequently advocated cinema as a weapon in political struggle. (21) Like other films of the 60s,
such as Peeping Tom (1959) and Medium Cool (1969), David Holzman's Diary depicted the movie camera "as an intrusive and aggressive
instrument of the self," a description which encapsulates David's voyeuristic, phallic, and weapon-like deployment of the cinematic
apparatus. (22)

The kinds of tensions in this film between fact and fiction, and between film and reality, have continued in films and the media since the
1960s. Indeed, if David Holzman and his audience were taught lessons about the problems of film truth, then our contemporary media
seem to be endlessly repeating these lessons and variations of them. Whether in the comedies of Christopher Guest, or in more complex
films like The Thin Blue Line (1988), filmmakers have challenged simplistic notions of seeing as believing. (23) This may be symptomatic
of a broader postmodern cynicism or relativism, or of the more specific historical legacies of institutional authorities that have blatantly lied
to the public, whether in government (the Vietnam War, Watergate), business (the tobacco companies, Enron), or journalism. In the latter
case, contemporary media often have blurred lines between "objective" and advocacy journalism, and between journalism per se and
entertainment, and made journalists and pundits into celebrities who sometimes have been caught in their own lies or incompetence,
epitomized by the fate of CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather. Given such developments, it is perhaps no surprise that media
consumers increasingly look to alternative news venues such as late-night comedy programs, or become news producers in the
blogosphere, or simply tune out altogether, preferring the safe familiarity of their own local worlds to the fray which lies beyond.

INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY

While several critics noted the cinematically reflexive nature of David Holzman's Diary, few commented on the film's analysis of the
psychology of its title character. As much as this film is about film and imagemaking, it also is about an alienated young man whose life is
in limbo due to the recent loss of his job and draft deferment. Suddenly finding himself cut off from his means of support and looking
toward a very uncertain future, and with a lot of time on his hands, David makes a film diary of his life--taking stock of who he is, where he
is, and what his life is about. Ironically, though, this preserving of his life on film damages his life and leaves him further alienated,
disillusioned, and unstable--again confirming the idea that recording things changes them.

Among the few critics to comment on Holzman's identity, Chuck Kraemer wrote that David represents both a specific individual and a
universal figure: "He is every down-and-out filmmaker struggling for a vision, every sensitive New Yorker overwhelmed by the city's visual
fecundity, every young man suffering lost love, every inchoate artist trying to sort out his life, to explain himself to himself, and to the
world." (24) Indeed, David also is a young adult male experiencing an identity crisis engendered not only by his immediate personal
circumstances but also by the Vietnam War. Although the war is never shown in the film its presence is constantly felt, as a primary
motivation for David's project of self-documentation and also as an aural presence in the radio broadcasts that permeate the soundtrack,
as with one that cites an escalation of American forces by 80,000 men. (25) At this time, a lot of young American men confronted the
prospect of fighting in an increasingly unpopular war. Some wanted to fight while others resisted, but most who were called up probably
were self-reflective or perhaps even undertook projects analogous to David's, whether to resolve personal issues or preserve their lives in
some way before leaving for an uncertain future. In the late 1960s, the numbers of those actively resisting the war in Vietnam grew rapidly,
both in actual terms and in their visibility in the media. David Holzman's Diary is not a politicized antiwar film, but its concerns with the
anxieties of a young man facing an uncertain future and possible death clearly are central to the film.

Were a young David living in today's post-9/11 environment, his anxiety would be lessened by the lack of military conscription, but if he
were living in Manhattan he likely would continue to feel the reverberations of 9/11. Maybe he still would be documenting his life, not in the
face of fighting in an unpopular war but in the possible event that, when the next shoe drops, it may be on an even greater scale, with
millions rather than thousands of casualties. Perhaps he would post his video diaries online, safe in cyberspace rather than vulnerable in
an Upper West Side apartment. Maybe he would channel his energies away from self-absorption toward documenting how life has
changed for his fellow New Yorkers, or work on collaborative projects such as the September 11 Digital Archive, which provides online
access to numerous images, audio, documents, and links to other websites--together both preserving and constructing a record of that
fateful day.

Another major trend of American social life with which David Holzman's Diary engages is identity or liberation politics. America in the
1960s and 70s saw the rise of several movements for the liberation of oppressed groups including ethnic groups, homosexuals, women,
and the young. In response, David Holzman arguably represents a white heterosexual male on the verge of adulthood struggling to come
to terms with the world that is changing around him. (26) Among these liberation movements, the film seems to engage most directly with
feminism, in that David may represent patriarchy in crisis, or at least the

growing realization that male power over women is waning, as suggested by his problematic relations with independent women who resist
being controlled. Whereas Sandra and especially Penny and the anonymous subway woman are independent and associated with the
outside "man's" world, David is comparatively needy, impotent, and isolated in his small inner world. In nearly all of the scenes that depict
women, David uses his camera to assert power over them, although he is always ultimately frustrated. The scenes where Penny attacks
David for filming her sleeping in the nude and where the subway woman tells him to "beat it" represent contestations of a male's attempts
to assert power over females. Only the "Thunderbird Lady" who claims she is a nude model is willing to indulge him, except she is too
liberated and aggressive for David, who seems to prefer women that he (thinks he) can control. This may help explain why, at a time of
increasing liberation for American women--sexual and otherwise--David is alone with his camera. (27)

David's frequent reference to his camera as "she" is significant in regard to the film's engagement with issues of gender politics. Unlike the
real women in David's life, the camera can be controlled and used for his pleasure, especially by filming women to whom he is attracted.
Of course the camera cannot provide the physical pleasure that a woman can, but David's fondness for masturbation helps to ameliorate
this shortcoming. The camera's abilities to go anywhere, see anything, and record it also empower David, although the camera also
controls him, because of his growing dependence on it for pleasure and power. In the end, although David craves human companionship,

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he probably prefers the safer pleasures afforded by the camera to the frustrations associated with actual women, so that his ultimate loss
of the camera seems more devastating to him than his loss of Penny.

David Holzman's Diary may participate in the social currents of identity politics in late-1960s America, but it probably does not respond to
the early private sphere documentaries of the feminist, gay, or ethnic movements of the time, as those films began to appear after 1967.
(28) Nor could it have responded to the subsequent conservative backlash and ongoing "culture wars" that followed the movements of the
1960s and 70s and have dominated social and political discourse in a seemingly endless stalemate of bitter partisan rhetoric and
dysfunction. In terms of film and gender politics, the patriarchal exploitation or subjugation of women has both lessened and continued
since the 1960s. Women have become empowered vis-a-vis film, whether in "tough-girl" roles onscreen or positions of power behind the
scenes. Feminist critics have interrogated media sexism while women producers, directors, and writers have diversified contemporary
media production, sometimes directly addressing feminist issues that men had been unable or unwilling to treat adequately, or making
films and TV programs that have no overt gender agendas. Barbara Kopple, for example, has built upon her initial success with Harlan
County, U.S.A. (1976) by continuing to make quality documentaries, such as Bearing Witness (2005), which is about female journalists
working in combat zones, while also diversifying into fiction films and episodes of the TV series Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street. But
despite such successes, women also continue to experience discrimination behind the scenes and exploitation onscreen, whether on a
macro scale in the growth of the pornography industry and the Internet as a mass marketing and distribution medium for exploitive images,
or on a micro scale with miniature cameras or camcorders equipped with night vision that enable voyeuristic gazing and recording in both
public and private places. The unscripted sex tapes that circulate today, such as the Paris Hilton video entitled One Night in Paris, make
David Holzman's recording of Penny sleeping in the nude seem comparatively tame and innocent.

Just as women have achieved greater access and voices in documentary production since the 1960s, so too have other marginalized
groups, if again with mixed results. Independent African-American film, for example, has flourished in the wake of the Civil Rights and
Black Power movements and the rise of film schools and media literacy programs, perhaps most visibly with Spike Lee, whose fiction films
often contain documentary-esque didacticism and whose forays into documentary include 4 Little Girls (1997) and Jim Brown All American
(2002). Black documentary film and video have challenged white supremacy and provided a more diverse and complex portrait of African-
American life, as with the PBS series Eyes on the Prize and the films of Marlon Riggs. And they have explored power relations between
race, sexuality, fact, and fiction, as with Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996). However, documentaries made by, for, and about
African Americans remain comparatively few in number; and documentaries about other minority ethnic groups, such as Asian Americans,
are even more marginalized. With commercial TV venues such as Black Entertainment Television emphasizing popular culture and
entertainment, serious or non-commercial African-American documentary remains limited to the likes of PBS, local public access TV, and
independent distribution venues such as California Newsreel, which in the latter case has expanded its reach with online access, but still
remains marginal.

Some women and members of ethnic minorities are now achieving positions of power at the highest levels of the media, but white males
continue to dominate. Likewise, independent production and distribution have flourished with new technologies, but marketplace
imperatives continue to drive media production and reception. Many of the positive changes anticipated in David Holzman's Diary have
occurred, but other problems have persisted or even worsened, as with the invasion and commodification of private life. If David's life was
"not a very good script" in its lack of commercial appeal, then the lives of countless other people today are providing more effective fuel for
the global entertainment machine, entertainment that too often is both fascinating and degrading to watch. David Holzman's Diary is an
ambivalent film, utopian in its celebration of emergent filmmaking practices, but also cautionary regarding the potential excesses of those
practices, a potential that has become real.

While David Holzman's Diary may not be familiar to many people today, it should. It functions on numerous sophisticated levels that have
deep implications for subsequent media and social practice, including a reflexive examination of documentary expression and cinematic
truth, and an analysis of the identity and private life of an anxious young man whose life is in limbo. This essay has mapped some of these
implications in the hope that further inquiry will provide an even fuller account of this film's insights on the late 1960s and its relevance for
today.

Works Cited

Arnold, James. "The Present State of the Documentary." The Documentary Tradition. Ed. Lewis Jacobs. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
[1968], 1979.

Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston: Beacon P, 2004.

Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Canby, Vincent. "Your Life Might Make A Good--or Bad--Movie." The New York Times (9 Dec. 1973): 40.

Carson, L.M. Kit. "A Voice-Over." Film Library Quarterly 2.3 (1969): 20-22.

Citron, Michelle. "Fleeing from Documentary: Autobiographical Film/Video and the 'Ethics of Responsibility.'" Feminism and Documentary.
Ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. 271-86.

Derrickson, Stephen. "David Holzman's Diary." Cinema Texas Program Notes 23.2 (1 Nov. 1982): 57-60.

"Dialogue on Film: Jim McBride." American Film 12.10 (Sept. 1987): 11-13.

Hight, Craig and Jane Roscoe. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002.

Hogue, P. "Images." Film Comment 29.6 (Nov./Dec. 1993): 2-4.

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5/3/2020 "Your life is not a very good script": David Holzman's diary and documentary expression in late-1960s America and beyond. - Free Online …
James, David E. Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989.

Kernan, Margot. Radical Voices: A Film Course Study Guide. New York: Grove P Films, 1973.11-12.

Kraemer, Chuck. "David Holzman's Diary." The Real Paper (14 March 1973): n.p.

MacDonald, Scott. Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.

"Newsreel," Film Quarterly 22.2 (1969): 43-48.

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Noguez, Dominique. "Film Journal, Film-Collage, Film Essai." Revue Beige du Cinema 19 (Spring 1987): 42.

Orvell, Miles. "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation: American Dream and Roger and Me." Film Quarterly 48.2 (Winter 1994-
1995): 10-18.

Sayre, Nora. "David Holzman's Diary Spoofs Cinema verite.'" The New York Times (7 Dec. 1973): 34.

Sklar, Robert. "When Looks Could Kill: American Cinema of the Sixties." Cineaste 16.1-2 (Dec. 1987): 50-53.

Notes

Thanks to Michael Mulcahy and Robert Sklar for their feedback on this article.

(1) Citron 271-72.

(2) See, for example, Bagdikian.

(3) "Dialogue on Film: Jim McBride," 11.

(4) Orvell 10. In referring to the interactive and reflexive qualities of the film, Orvell cites the theoretical work of Bill Nichols in Representing
Reality.

(5) Kraemer, n.p. Kraemer's emphasis. After playing the festival circuit, the film was not shown theatrically until 1973. The principals
involved with the film have experienced similar obscurity, with director Jim McBride probably achieving the most commercial success in
directing such Hollywood films as Breathless (1983) and The Big Easy (1987). L.M. Kit Carson has appeared mostly in small roles in small
films, for example as a critic in Roman Coppola's CQ (2001), a film which explicitly dialogues with David Holzman's Diary.

(6) This quote appears in program notes for a BFI film series, "The Wild Bunch: American Cinema 1967-1980," located under
www.bfi.org.uk.

(7) As in classical cinema verite, McBride's film has numerous scenes of people being interviewed or addressing the camera directly,
including Holzman himself, but it also has many observational scenes that mimic direct cinema. While the film arguably critiques both
modes of filmmaking, this critique actually seems stronger in regard to direct cinema, which tends to be more naively committed to notions
of simply recording truths than the more interactive mode of verite, which assumes that the presence of the camera actually can cause
people to act in ways that are truer to their nature than might otherwise be the case. This distinction between these approaches to
documentary is important, but also somewhat relative, as "Both cinema verite and direct cinema are ways of seeing, of understanding, and
of conveying the filmmaker's perception of the world. [In] practical terms, more often than not the 'truth' is what occurs to filmmakers during
the moments of observing, shooting, and editing: not the truth, but a filmmaker's truth" (Barsam 304 [Barsam's emphasis]).

(8) More generally, this was a period when various alternative practices developed and entered the mainstream. In terms of journalism, for
example, a possible intertext with David Holzman's Diary is the "new journalism" of the 1960s, which blended traditional "objective" news
reporting with more novelistic and mixed-mode approaches, as with Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood (published in 1965
and released as a film in 1967). Another related approach of the new journalism was to blur distinctions between observer and participant,
as with Tom Wolfe's, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1967) and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).

(9) political films include Primary (1960) and music documentaries include Lonely Boy (1962), Don't Look Back (1966), Monterey Pop
(1968), Gimme Shelter (1970), and Woodstock (1970). Probably with the music documentaries in mind, David James has criticized late-
1960s American documentary for failing to engage with the many pressing social issues of the time, saying that most of the genre's
practitioners, "like Drew Associates at Time-Life, were themselves lodged in the bosom of the mass media" (213).

(10) Citron 272.

(11) Carson 21. Some additional underground private sphere documentaries from the late sixties and early seventies include Noren's
Adventures q[ the Exquisite Corpse (1968); Carolee Schneemann's Autobiographical Trilogy (Fuses, 1967; Plumb Line, 1971; Kitch's Last
Meal, 1973-8); and Jonas Mekas' Walden (1971), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1975).

(12) MacDonald 5.

(13) For instance, viewers at a 1968 Flaherty Seminar screening reportedly were "outraged" at being duped (Arnold 483). In contrast, L.M.
Kit Carson writes that the film was billed at its MoMA premiere as "one of the most important American comedies ever made," hence less

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likely to fool viewers (Carson 20). Still, the film's transgression of audience trust by posing as something that it is not understandably left
some people feeling fooled or even violated.

(14) Derrickson 59.

(15) This scene may have served as an intertext for the 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono experimental documentary Rape, in which a
young woman similarly is followed through the streets of London by an aggressive camera.

(16) Andrew Noren stood naked before the camera in one such scene in his film The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.

(17) Canby 40.

(18) L.M. Kit Carson writes that David Holzman's Diary developed as a result of his research into a book on the theory and practice of
cinema verite to be titled The Truth on Film. This research, which included lengthy interviews with Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker,
Andy Warhol, and the Maysles Brothers, led Carson and McBride to begin asking a lot of questions about cinematic truth that would
become themes in the film: "what happens to the real world when it is put on film: is it made less real? more real? or is it made something
altogether different, which is what?" (20).

(19) Citron 282. Citron's emphasis.

(20) Sklar 52.

(21) "Newsreel," 43-48.

(22) Sklar 52.

(23) The Thin Blue Line is more complex partly because of its ambivalence about truth. The film leads the viewer to question certain
evidence, accept others, and ponder the idea of truth and visible evidence. Its repeatedly re-enacted images and sounds subtly
corroborate the story of Randall Adams and undermine the story of David Harris, while also calling into question the very idea of any
objective truth. The film interrogates how fiction became reality for the police, but doesn't ask the viewer to think about how director Errol
Morris himself constructed his case.

(24) Kraemer n.p.

(25) Such broadcasts may help undermine the notion that spectators were necessarily duped into believing this film is an authentic
documentary, as the Vietnam report seems too coincidental, or selected, to have been a random background noise. David James notes a
more overt "internal" sign that David Holzman's Diary is fictional, namely that the shots at the end of the film that depict photographs of the
Holzman character could not have been filmed by him, as all his camera equipment had just been stolen (287-88). (However, audiences
could simply infer that Holzman borrowed or rented equipment in order to finish the film.) An additional factor to consider, and which merits
research, is whether contemporaneous advertising for David Holzman's Diary revealed other clues to the film's fictional status, such as
references to Jim McBride as the writer / director of the film.

(26) From a radical 1960s perspective, Holzman's film documents a figure who ostensibly has the least pressing need to be documented,
but who nonetheless has his own identity issues that he seeks to resolve with a film diary. Indeed, the film may be read as revealing the
growing "feminization" of the American male (or anxieties about it) from strong/silent types to expressive, introspective, self-conscious,
flawed, and vulnerable types--from Alan Ladd to Alan Alda.

(27) Indeed, L.M. Kit Carson wrote that, "during the interview with the 'nude model' I choked and dummied up, altogether stunned by the
woman; and [cameraman] Wadley calmly took over as Holzman" (22).

(28) Although a number of parallels could be drawn between David Holzman's Diary and a film like Janie's Janie (1971), these parallels
could not illustrate how McBride responded to such films, although perhaps he could be seen as an influence on them, or at least
participating in common trends. Private sphere feminist documentaries of the early 1970s often employed the diary format to help women
articulate their thoughts and feelings as a means to attain empowerment and self-knowledge, a project David Holzman undertakes but
fails to accomplish.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Post Script, Inc.

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