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

Post Script, Summer, 2007 by James Latham

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
   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.