11 David Holzman's Diary

Discuss releases by Second Run and the films on them.
Post Reply
Message
Author
User avatar
Matt
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 12:58 pm

#1 Post by Matt » Sat Jul 30, 2005 4:46 pm

David Holzman's Diary

Image

Shot in 1967, David Holzman's Diary is a milestone in contemporary film history. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it manages to simultaneously be very much of its time and very many years ahead of its time. The film tells the story of David Holzman, a young man infatuated with film and film-making. Newly unemployed and beset with doubts and worries, Holzman thinks that filming his everyday existence will 'bring life into focus'. Staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, Holzman's filming of his life starts to take over his life.

As a very special bonus extra, this Second Run release also includes director Jim McBride's personal 1969 documentary My Girlfriend's Wedding, where his camera turns on his ‘liberated' English girlfriend and her candid conversations about her life and her reasons for marrying another man.

Special Features

• Includes the first ever release on DVD of Jim McBride's My Girlfriend's Wedding, finally achieving the director's intention for these two films to be shown together.
• Newly filmed interview with director Jim McBride.
• New digital transfer with restored image and sound.
• Booklet featuring an essay on both films by US writer/critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.
• Optimal quality dual-layer disc.


....
Jaime Wolf's essay from the Criterion laserdisc edition:

Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary, made for less than $3000 over 5 days of principal photography, manages to be 20 years ahead of its time and perfectly of its time. Spiritual forebear to the contemporary low-budget American independent film movement (as well as to This Is Spinal Tap and a subsequent parade of "mockumentaries"), it is also a detailed portrait of the specific time and place geographically known as New York City in the summer of 1967, and psychically felt as that morass of fraught concepts, idealisms, and dogma we call the Sixties. It's hard to imagine how revolutionary the combination of location shooting, available light photography and a handheld camera might once have seemed, but during the 60s the exciting possibilities of an improvisatory narrative structure which promised to capture events as they unfolded were just being explored. The cameras of Rickey Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, Andy Warhol, Andrew Noren and the Maysles Brothers established a new relationship with their subjects: intimate, revelatory and personal, countering a documentary tradition in which human beings were primarily used to illustrate various social themes. And the very name cinema verite announced that these films had attained the goal of philosophic inquiry: truth. British theorists preferred the term Direct Cinema, implying that it was unmediated, unauthored, Real Life Transmitted Straight To You. Of course, however, it was neither Direct nor True, and these illusions are comically and poignantly exploited in David Holzman's Diary.

Booed at the 1968 San Francisco Film Festival when the end credits revealed it to be fiction, McBride's film illustrates the perils of a too-literal belief in the power of documentary. David Holzman's Diary is the first-person account of a newly unemployed and suddenly very draft-eligible young man, who feels life slipping out of his grasp. Filming himself, he believes, will help him to figure it all out. The ability to project images on a screen, to see them over and over, to edit them together --in short the very medium of film-- will reveal the Truth behind the random events of his existence.

But filming only causes things to become more muddled: his girlfriend leaves him, a friend criticizes him, he begins to do things in order to have material to film. Ultimately his equipment is stolen, leaving him despondent and unenlightened. It is a simple and inexorably logical descent, explicitly dramatizing what film critic Andrew Sarris called the application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to documentary filmmaking: the inevitable effect of the presence of an observer on the behavior of the observed. Holzman's obsessive cinephilia only exacerbates the situation. In part, he misunderstands his life to the precise degree to which it is not like a movie: bestowing the name of a Visconti heroine on the neighbor who doesn't know he watches (and films) her; quoting from Godard and Truffaut; offering to discuss Vincent Minelli when he runs out of personal material to report. Simultaneously, McBride sends up the masturbatory subtext of such self-involvement. When Holzman encounters the Thunderbird Lady (a serendipitous, unscripted scene during which L.M. Kit Carson became so unnerved that cameraman Michael Wadley took over as David Holzman), a self-proclaimed nude model who asks if he wants to fuck, he responds, "I think I'd rather make films."

And yet for all the self-obsession, the real world constantly intrudes upon the film: the Upper West Side, where Holzman lives; a barrage of images marking an evening spent in front of the television; news reports on the soundtrack, scattered between the hits on 77-WABC AM. These last provide counterpoint to, and even justification for, his neurotic anxiety riots in Newark, escalation in Vietnam, and the lyrical high point of the film, the roll call for a UN vote on an issue which is never disclosed, while Holzman's camera takes slow motion inventory of the inhabitants of a long bench in Needle Park. And happenstance, as in the Thunderbird Lady, an encounter with the police as they assist a robbery victim, or Wadley's acquisition of a new fisheye lens during filming, continually enriches the film in ways its basic script could not anticipate.

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. Unfortunately, the film was more influential than it was widely seen. After playing the festival circuit, David Holzman's Diary was not shown theatrically until 1973. By then cameraman Wadley had changed the spelling of his name to Wadleigh and directed Woodstock, while Carson and McBride had embarked on other projects separately and together. Over the years, their Holzmanesque preoccupations would continue to resurface in a unproduced adaptation of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, and their co-scripted, McBride-directed 1983 Breathless remake, starring Richard Gere. Back in 1973,

Chuck Kraemer of Boston's Real Paper predicted that David Holzman's Diary would be remembered as "the underground autobiographical cinema verité film of the sixties. . . . Scholars of the nineties will revere it." In 1992 the Library of Congress named the film to its National Film Registry, as one of 50 American films deemed historically significant and worthy of preservation in their original form. Viewed in today's hypermediated environment, against a constantly blurring distinction between truth and fiction, David Holzman's confusions and concerns seem prescient and relevant as ever.

User avatar
What A Disgrace
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 10:34 pm
Contact:

#2 Post by What A Disgrace » Thu Sep 29, 2005 9:07 am

According to Amazon.co.uk, both this and Intimate Lighting have been delayed until January 30. I'm not sure why Intimate Lighting is being delayed, however, Amazon clearly states that My Girlfriend's Wedding will be included with David Holzman's Diary, and the disc will cost two pounds more than the typical Second Run disc.

User avatar
Faux Hulot
Jack Of All Tirades
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 11:57 am
Location: Location, Location

#3 Post by Faux Hulot » Thu Sep 29, 2005 2:24 pm

What A Disgrace wrote:Amazon clearly states that My Girlfriend's Wedding will be included with David Holzman's Diary, and the disc will cost two pounds more than the typical Second Run disc.
That's great news! Wedding is a sort of sequel to Diary so they definitely belong together.

User avatar
Bikey
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:09 am

#4 Post by Bikey » Fri Sep 30, 2005 12:16 pm

Dear All,

Due to the combination of a minor communications breakdown and some over-eagerness on the part of our distributors, it appears that changed information about our release of David Holzman's Diary has appeared on some e-tailers listings.

Rumours can be useful but, in this case, the reason this release has been delayed is because we're trying to make this disc even more special. The volume of content might make this into a two-disc set and so there may need to be a minor price increase to cover this, although we're still trying to make it practicable at our standard price. However, all this is completely unconfirmed at the moment.

Rest assured that once the content and release date/price of DHD has been decided, you will be the first to know. We are trying to work it so that it can be our first release of the New Year.

Thanks,

Second Run DVD

User avatar
What A Disgrace
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 10:34 pm
Contact:

#5 Post by What A Disgrace » Sat Oct 01, 2005 12:58 pm

Bikey wrote:Dear All,

Due to the combination of a minor communications breakdown and some over-eagerness on the part of our distributors, it appears that changed information about our release of David Holzman's Diary has appeared on some e-tailers listings.

Rumours can be useful but, in this case, the reason this release has been delayed is because we're trying to make this disc even more special. The volume of content might make this into a two-disc set and so there may need to be a minor price increase to cover this, although we're still trying to make it practicable at our standard price. However, all this is completely unconfirmed at the moment.

Rest assured that once the content and release date/price of DHD has been decided, you will be the first to know. We are trying to work it so that it can be our first release of the New Year.

Thanks,

Second Run DVD
Its nice to hear it from an inside source! Pictures From Life's Other Side would also be a fine supplement, to an already tantalizing (if mysterious so far) DVD.

According to Amazon's UK branch, Intimate Lighting, which was set to be released around the same time, has also been delayed. Is this a mistake on their part, or is it truly being delayed alongside David Holzman?

rs98762001
Joined: Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:04 pm

#6 Post by rs98762001 » Fri Dec 09, 2005 4:43 am

Okay, enough waiting already. When is this damn thing coming out?

This is one of those legendary unseen films I heard huge amounts about in film school, but nobody ever had a copy of it for us to watch. If anyone has seen it recently, does it still have contemporary relevance, or is very much a film of its era?

User avatar
Bikey
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:09 am

#7 Post by Bikey » Sat Dec 10, 2005 2:49 pm

RS,

I have it on good authority that David Holzman's Diary will be released at the end of January 2006. Alongside the film itself the disc will be packed with some fantastic extras. A full announcement will be made sometime within the next 7-10 days.

Regards,

Bikie

User avatar
Gordon
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:03 am

#8 Post by Gordon » Sat Dec 10, 2005 10:38 pm

It is listed at Play.com, with a 30th January release date:

http://www.play.com/play247.asp?pa=cart ... tle=731666

If it stays £9.99, it might be the bargain of the year!

User avatar
Gordon
Joined: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:03 am

#9 Post by Gordon » Sat Dec 17, 2005 5:35 am

From the newsletter:
David Holzmans Diary
A film by Jim McBride / USA 1967
(Second Run DVD 011)

"A landmark in independent filmmaking that feels as fresh as ever" - Cinemateque

"A delightful satire. Time has served it very well." - New York Times

Shot in 1967 on a miniscule budget, David Holzman's Diary is a milestone in contemporary film history. It manages to be simultaneously very much of its time and years ahead of its time.

In this genuinely independent film, news-cameraman-turned-film director Jim McBride sets out to interrogate Jean-Luc Godard's claim that "film is truth at 24 frames per second". The film tells the story of David Holzman (L.M. 'Kit' Carson), a young man infatuated with film and film-making. David feels that life is slipping out of his grasp and thinks that filming will 'bring life into focus' and may help 'expose himself to himself'. Over time, David's filming of his life starts to take over his life.

Arguably the first 'mockumentary', David Holzman's Diary has been little seen but hugely influential on filmmakers over the years. The film examines how we define our own reality and how our perceptions can alter that reality. It also pre-empts the contemporary world in which seemingly everyone is recording everything to do with their lives on camera.

David Holzman's Diary won the main prizes at the Mannheim and Pesaro Film Festivals and is name-checked by every new generation of American filmmakers. A ground-breaking film, it was selected for preservation by the US National Film Registry in1991.

As a very special extra, this Second Run release also includes McBride's intensely personal 1969 documentary My Girlfriend's Wedding. This time his camera turns on his 'liberated' English girlfriend and their candid conversations about her life and her decision to marry another man. Except that this time it's real...

We are also delighted to present an interview with Jim McBride as an additional extra.

User avatar
Bikey
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:09 am

#10 Post by Bikey » Wed Jan 25, 2006 7:15 pm

From Time Out (London) this week(no link I'm afraid):

DVD Of The Week

The admirably adventurous Second Run label has done it again and unearthed a gem largely forgotten in the era of megabudget overkill. This time the treasure in question is the no-budget 16mm journal of the titular cienphile, shot mostly as straight-to-camera monologue in NYC in 1967 - the summer of love, but not for Holzman, whose Godard-like desire to keep capturing his lover on film put paid to their relationship; what we see are the director-cameraman-confessor's miserable attempts to win her back. All very honest, then - save that the whole thing was lie, with LM Kit Carson (now a cult hero to some) playing Holzman, Mike Wadleigh (who went on to make Woodstock) operating the camera and director Jim McBride - later known for conventional fare like the 'Breathless' remake and 'The Big Easy' - relishing the opportunity to parody the verite bunch with one of the first mockumentaries. McBride himself can be seen not only in a recently shot, entertaining and illuminating interview but also in 'My Girlfriends Wedding', another confessional piece made to double up with 'Diary' and to give punters their money's worth. Again, as McBride's anonymous English girlfriend comments on the contents of her handbag prior to marrying a Yippie for Green Card purposes, the raw, naked truths revealed are both startling and suggestive of a very different moral universe - except that this time they're for real, which makes them even more frightening (Geoff Andrew).

User avatar
Bikey
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:09 am

#11 Post by Bikey » Sun Feb 05, 2006 7:04 am

The 'first utterly essential DVD of the year' from DVD Times:

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=60230

and DVD Beaver:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview ... review.htm

Cinéslob
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2005 5:31 pm

#12 Post by Cinéslob » Mon Feb 06, 2006 8:00 pm

Bikey wrote:The 'first utterly essential DVD of the year' from DVD Times:

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=60230

and DVD Beaver:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview ... review.htm

Although I have just this very evening placed an order for the 'first utterly essential DVD of the year' along with Intimate Lighting, I would be intrigued to know why, Bikey, a progressive transfer was not possible for David Holzman's Diary. Whilst one can appreciate the clandestine origins of this feature, I have to say that the Beaver screencaps do disappoint, if only ever so slightly (although that's not to imply that you're trying to pull a Facets-like hatchet job on us!). However, if a non-progressive transfer is the best we can hope for for this film, then I have little doubt this is an essential DVD indeed!

User avatar
Gregory
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 4:07 pm

#13 Post by Gregory » Tue Feb 21, 2006 5:32 pm

Cinéslob wrote:Although I have just this very evening placed an order for the 'first utterly essential DVD of the year' along with Intimate Lighting, I would be intrigued to know why, Bikey, a progressive transfer was not possible for David Holzman's Diary.
I'd also be interested in the answer to this question.

User avatar
Bikey
Joined: Wed Aug 17, 2005 4:09 am

#14 Post by Bikey » Fri Apr 14, 2006 8:33 am

Please find below a nice review from Brad Stevens in this months Sight & Sound (which is worth buying for the Coburn reappraisal alone).

Review by Brad Stevens.

It seems reasonable to claim that America's independent cinema has its roots
in two masterpieces made almost a decade apart: John Cassavetes' SHADOWS
(1958-1959) and Jim McBride's DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY (1967). These were not
the first American indie films, nor were they the only distinguished ones
made during this period. But in terms of their subsequent impact, they
clearly tower over everything else.

Cassavetes is today regarded as the spiritual godfather of independent
directors, his influence undeniable. Yet there is a sense in which DAVID
HOLZMAN'S DIARY has been even more influential. McBride's debut feature
chronicles a few days in the life of David Holzman (L. M. Kit Carson), an
unemployed New Yorker in his early twenties who, with the threat of
conscription hanging over him, decides to keep a filmed record of his
activities, hoping that by examining the resulting footage "I should get it
all. I should get the meaning, I should understand it". What we see would
appear to consist solely of footage shot by David (though, as Jonathan
Rosenbaum points out in his excellent sleeve notes, there's a little
cheating at the end), and rumour has it that some viewers believed they were
watching an actual film-diary rather than a carefully crafted work of
fiction.

The influence of DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY is most obvious in a string of
mock-documentaries ranging from THIS IS SPINAL TAP to THE BLAIR WITCH
PROJECT. Brian De Palma is best known for his homages to Alfred Hitchcock,
but he actually started out making films haunted by the DAVID HOLZMAN
experience, notably GREETINGS (1968), HI, MOM! (1969), and even the later
HOME MOVIES (1979). According to De Palma, "When I got my first 8mm sound
camera, I'd carry it around like David Holzman and try to film everything I
did and look at it...I filmed a whole section of my life - people I was
going out with, my friends. I just shot everything. I directed the scenes,
too. And it all came from DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY" (FILM COMMENT, June 1987,
p. 52). Milton Moses Ginsberg, who subsequently became McBride's editor,
made his own variation on DAVID HOLZMAN, entitled COMING APART (1969). More
recently, Roman Coppola decided to run DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY and another
late-60s 'classic', Roger Vadim's BARBARELLA (1968), through the blender -
what emerged was CQ (2001), an intriguing film in which L. M. Kit Carson has
a small role. But perhaps the most revealing (and, inadvertently, the
funniest) of these variations is Jon Jost's SPEAKING DIRECTLY: SOME AMERICAN
NOTES (1973), a 'straight' remake by a director who had surely not seen
McBride's film, and thus managed to unselfconsciously reproduce precisely
the narcissism it parodied, right down to the scene in which the director's
best friend delivers a critique of the project.

DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY might have been conceived as a follow-up to Michael
Powell's PEEPING TOM (indeed, it was McBride who first brought PEEPING TOM
to the attention of Martin Scorsese, later one of its most passionate
champions), the debt to Powell's film being clearly evident in a sequence
showing David following a woman (played by Jim McBride's wife at that time,
Fern McBride) he sees on the subway.

Although McBride's subsequent career is widely considered to be
disappointing, his oeuvre is remarkably coherent - even his first season
episode of SIX FEET UNDER contains recognizably personal touches, including
a reference to DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY, and he is currently developing a DAVID
HOLZMAN sequel (to star William Hurt). McBride's central concern is with the
need to look beneath the surface of mundane reality. David Holzman's problem
is that he tries to comprehend his life by considering only the most
superficial aspects of it, those parts which can be caught on celluloid.
Needless to say, this project is doomed to failure, the film's distinctive
tone suggesting that, while we seem to be observing David's world in its
totality, his life exists elsewhere, frustratingly out of reach for both us
and him. As David observes, "My life, though ordinary enough, seems to haunt
me". The key scene has David interviewing a woman who drives up in a
Thunderbird and engages him in conversation - a scene that was totally
improvised when the woman noticed cinematographer Michael Wadley (who would
later direct WOODSTOCK under the name Michael Wadleigh) filming on the
street and started talking to him. The resulting footage completely elides
the distinction between reality and fiction - a distinction further elided
when McBride later discovered that the woman was actually a transsexual.
Here, as elsewhere, David's faith in the world of appearances, and in his
ability to access a neutral truth by studying the images he preserves, is
revealed to be a laughable self-delusion.

The impact made by McBride's debut feature is all the more impressive
considering how difficult it has been to see: despite being inducted into
the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, it has spent the last three
decades in something of a distribution limbo, particularly as far as the UK
is concerned. So Second Run, an enterprising new label, are to be
congratulated for finally giving the film its DVD premiere. Their transfer
is splendid: some digital repair work has been carried out to make the print
as clean as possible, but rest assured, it still looks rough and
'amateurish', just as intended. The extras include McBride's rarely-shown
second feature MY GIRLFRIEND'S WEDDING (1968), a 62-minute documentary
about the director's British girlfriend and her decision to obtain a green
card by marrying a man she has just met. This 'real' documentary about a
fake marriage functions as a companion piece to DAVID HOLZMAN, continuing
the earlier film's exploration of that thin line separating truth from
fiction. The disc also contains a useful recent interview with McBride.

Post Reply