David Holzman's Diary
Experimental
•
1h 13m
Directed by Jim McBride • Drama • With Eileen Dietz, Kit Carson • 1967 • 73 minutes
David Holzman's Diary is one of the most influential films of the 1960s, an "ingenious puzzle movie" (Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader) that charts the self-destruction of a media-saturated youth. As news from the Vietnam War and social unrest blares over the radio, David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) unloads comic-neurotic monologues to his 16mm camera. When his relationship with Penny (Eileen Dietz) goes south, he retreats further into moving images, secretly recording his pretty neighbor and even turning his lens to the TV shows he watches. No longer able to deal with life outside celluloid, all of his ties to the real world begin to erode. The "totally delightful satire" (NY Times) of a narcissistic artist is also a well-crafted fiction about the deceptions of cinematic illusionism. Early on, Holzman quotes Jean-Luc Godard's famous dictum that "the cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second." As director Jim McBride teaches and Holzman soon learns, it lies just as often.
"This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave." —Richard Brody
Up Next in Experimental
-
Down in Shadowland
Directed by Tom DiCillo • Documentary • 2017 • 71 minutes
Tom DiCillo’s (Living in Oblivion and Box of Moonlight) latest film, Down in Shadowland, was made over the course of 7 years. It is perhaps the most independent of this independent director’s films. He made the film entirely by himself, m...
-
The Point of Least Resistance
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Drama • 1981 • 29 minutes
THE POINT OF LEAST RESISTANCE is Fischli and Weiss' first film together. A rat and a bear are out to make a lot of money in the Los Angeles art world. So when they find a corpse in a gallery, hoping it will be the means to e...
-
The Way Things Go
Directed by Peter Fischli & David Weiss • Documentary • 1987 • 30 minutes
Inside a warehouse, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946—2012) built an enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long made out of common household items—tea kettles, tires, old shoes, balloons, wo...
