The Rumination of David Holzman's Diary (1967)
The Rumination of David Holzman's Diary (1967)
David Holzman's Diary is such an immense piece of work in terms of showcasing the awkward tension and the humour it derives from a character who is deeply clueless about his own behaviour, yet you get such a fascinating insight into his mind and his pontification and just how he seems to dig himself into deeper and deeper holes. It's that central juxtaposition that this whole movie plays with which is just so compelling and honestly I think it's both as funny as it is outright anguishing. The whole movie just feels like that and I think what's more is that, even when I wasn't laughing at this film, I was just fixated on it just with what it reveals about Holzman.
Holzman presents this central dichotomy of being a type of guy who wants to get close to women but, at the same time, can only approach it in terms of projection and imposition. This also isolates him from people and there's so many moments in this where he's not so much around them so much as he's just showing and commenting on photographs and the speculation over "what he could have done that was wrong." and so forth. Except we also see what he does, and it includes following women around until they tell him to stop doing it, filming women while they're nude, only to be attacked by them - and so many moments like this. In his hopeless attempts to be "observant" with his camera, he inevitably becomes voyeuristic in nature, which is self-evident. He keeps filming a woman through her windows, under the whole guise that she's not aware of what he's doing. The lack of consent is self-evident even in the footage that he's willing to show.
The best scene in this film, of course, is the Thunderbird Lady scene, which I think is both hilarious but I think it also really helps to ground the film by juxtaposing endless scenes of Holzman victimising various women and his pontification, to this stumbling and awkward interview he has with a woman who is clearly not taking any of his behaviour. In fact, she actually uses it as an opportunity to propose various sexual advances and (rightly) assumes that he's wanting to get laid, but at the same time this makes him extremely nervous, just with how it massively disrupts the structures of imposition he seems to keen on. Also a scene that takes on extra dimensions, given some of the dialogue, along with the fact that the person he's interviewing is a transgender woman. She's smiling and confident and at one point accuses a guy harassing her of "looking like a lesbian." You get the impression she's dealt with this so many times before and knows how to handle it. She's someone who flatly refuses to be victimised by this creep.
Something that I also find fascinating is how it comments on the very nature of cinema, and ju.st how he has this attachment where he sees this project as something that "has to have this deep, intrinsic meaning... but for what?" and the whole movie exists as some sort of abounding rumination exercise with him - he endlessly engages with things that he thinks he's deriving meaning from, but he clearly isn't. At one point in the film, we have this extended tirade about how "what happens in front of the camera is not reality anymore, it becomes part of something else." and I guess that does make senses with how cinema becomes an abstraction and a simulation, an interpretation of reality. It's not what's happening in front of you because, the moment after it's created, it is no longer what is happening in front of you. It becomes its own world, and I guess what really stands out is how Holzman tries but fails to find meaning in it. It's film not as a reflective but rather a ruminative medium. I guess also it asks a lot of questions with whether or not you can truly separate yourself from your obsessions as long as you segregate them - clueless as to how it informs your day-to-day behaviour.
In a way it winds up immortalising him for things that would otherwise be someone's shameful secrets. But why would they be shameful secrets? After all, he's clearly very shameless, and deeper implications unfold with the fact that this is what he's okay with showcasing people, this is what he finds okay with filming. The fact that this film is presented as a documentary of a guy who just "records his life" is even more hysterical just because of the implication that he's naturally just like this. You get the impression of even more days and nights in this guy's life that are just like this. He's fired from his job near the beginning of this film, but we never find out what his job was nor the reasons he was fired, just the fact that he was. And throughout the film we just get such an impression of him that even with what he constructs, innately, he is not truthful. His attempts at reconciling, such as with fumbling, instantly rejected phone calls, really feel more like an extension of his imposing behaviour and rumination more than anything else. He has to impose his own delusional context onto things in order for his actions to make sense to himself.
And yeah, I think this is a movie that really benefits from its writing and how it's all constructed. This is one of those films where the shoestring budget just feels wholly irrelevant with the story it's trying to tell. I definitely do think that some shots in this film, namely the shots with Holzman holding the camera over himself as a self-portrait, do kind of stand out in their own way. An unmistakable aspect of this film is how it inevitably does turn into a period piece capturing a very specific part of life in New York during the 1960s. How the camera is positioned in certain shots really shows a lot, in my view, and at points it can be quite inventive. Handheld shots abound in this film because handheld shots are what you'd most expect Holzman to be using. At one point, Holzman just films his TV screen and speeds up the footage only to add it into the film. Does it have any sort of intrinsic meaning behind it? Perhaps it's just boredom honestly. But it does become so funny how so many things, even with David's feeble attempts at imposition, ultimately just fly out of his control and, through his inability to precisely contextualise what's going on, becomes very revealing in a way. He feels authentically like a creep, with all the cluelessness and imposition that abounds with that. It's all just so wrong in explicit yet also pernicious ways.
It's very interesting and I think the way that actor L. M. Kit Carson plays it feels so authentic in that regard - he really does sell the cluelessness and confusion of his character so well, and really so much of this film blends together documentary footage with fictional elements in a way that's just seamless. The Thunderbird Lady, for instance, is more-or-less documentary footage but then it fits so well into the film's central narrative that the context surrounding it all just adds so much more to it. What really stands out about this film is just how it's a type of movie that really showcases the novelty of what would happen if someone were to film their everyday life and all their exploits. And at the same time, I definitely think this movie is a cautionary tale as to precisely a certain type of person who would become obsessed with doing just that. That people are always so willing to share their embarrassing secrets simply out of virtue that they haven't precisely contextualised just what's wrong with it in the first place. Obfuscation of the context surrounding their awful behaviour, refusing to see it for what it is, that results in the proliferation of said behaviour. It's embarrassing but also cyclic. He never learns, and what's so staggering is the dissonance with how elusive it is to him versus how self-evident it should be. Blatant but elusive through a cluelessness with regards to its context.
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