David Holzman's Diary

1967 mockumentary

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A New Yorker decides to document his life on film, and this is the result.

Early in this--right after the titular character's girlfriend has broken up with him (or maybe before)--Holzman's friend tries to tell him that this whole thing isn't going to work because it will be filled with all these "half-truths" and that "aesthetic decisions" are going to get in the way. And this takes on an interesting dada quality precisely because the friend is right. Holzman doesn't have anything going on in his life that would make him worthy of having a documentary about him. And the late L.M. Kit Carson--very recently late actually--walks a thin line between interesting character and guy who you just don't understand, a guy who you sort of want to like and a character you almost want to take a swing at. This is a faux-documentary, back before faux-documentaries were cool, and it's fascinating to me that filmmaker Jim McBride was able to turn the genre on its head before it was really even a genre. It's more clever--and maybe more sad--than it is funny, but Carson excels in what I imagine was a really difficult performance. There's a character arc in this, but you have to squint and turn your head to one side to see it. I imagine Holzman's biggest problems in this are caused by his drinking of Pepsi from a Coca Cola glass, the sort of thing that might lead an individual into following women a couple blocks from a subway or filming people through windows. The guy's a definitely creepster, and you can tell he's an expert by the way he talks about the "widow thumb and the four daughters," the kind of masturbation analogy that can only be made by a bona-fide creepster. By the end, the character's become difficult to figure out, just like the best characters in fiction, but you feel a little sorry for him during a rambling monologue near the end where he alternates between an angry "What do you want?" and also-angry "You made me do things!", both directed at an audience who will in no way have a clue what he's talking about. I'm not quite sure what he's demanding of the audience here or what this is saying about making movies or the process involved in this sort of thing. Four really great scenes in this: 1) a scene where the faux-documentary apparently loses its faux as Carson interviews a sex-crazed woman, 2) a blurred night of television, 3) a scene where he dicks around with a brand-new lens, 4) a great extended shot of a bunch of old people sitting on a bench. There are also some great black and white shots of the city as it lived in the mid-1960s.