David Holzman's Diary
Vietnam - Here and There • 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 Vietnam - Here and There
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Sad Song of Yellow Skin
Directed by Michael Rubbo • Documentary • 1971 • 58 minutes
A film about the people of Saigon as seen through the experiences of three young American journalists who, in 1970, explored in their own way the consequences of war and of the American presence. It is not a film about the Vietnam war, ...
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Stray Dog
Directed by Debra Granik • Documentary • 2016 • 102 minutes
From Debra Granik, director of the Oscar-nominated 'Winter's Bone', comes this portrait of a motorcycle-riding, freedom-loving, Vietnam veteran cast in the mold of an outlaw biker. But there's much more to burly, bearded Ronnie 'Stray D...
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Seadrift
Directed by Tim Tsai • Documentary • With The Nguyen, Bang "Cherry" Nguyen, Steve Pham, Ron Galloway, Diane Wilson, Beth Aplin-Martin • 2019 • 69 minutes
In 1979, a Vietnamese refugee shoots and kills a white crab fisherman at the public town docks in Seadrift, TX. What began as a dispute over f...
