...emotional pain; 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 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...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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