David Holzman's Diary
Kino Lorber • 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 Kino Lorber
-
Dawson City: Frozen Time
Directed by Bill Morrison • Documentary • 2017 • 120 minutes
This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Located just south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson Ci...
-
Diplomacy
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • Drama • With André Dussollier, Niels Arestrup, Burghart Klaußner • 2014 • 85 minutes
As the Allies march toward Paris in the summer of 1944, Hitler gives orders that the French capital should not fall into enemy hands, or if it does, then ‘only as a field of rubb...
-
The Exiles
Directed by Kent Mackenzie • Documentary • With Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tom Reynolds
• 1961 • 72 minutesThe Exiles chronicles a night in the life of young Native Americans who fled reservation life to roam the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Outside filmmaker Kent Mackenzie crafted ...
