David Holzman’s Diary | Streaming review

The key to great speculative fiction isn’t predicting technological developments so much as following the unbroken thread of human nature. With lightweight cameras, synchronized sound equipment and fast film stock giving birth to a new form of documentary whose practitioners vouched for the unmediated truth of their images, McBride correctly surmised in 1967 that it was only a matter of time before some mixed-up cinéaste turned the camera on himself.

Although the landmark David Holzman’s Diary is sometimes called a rebuttal of cinema verité, it actually embodies the term as coined by ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who said the camera revealed “the truth of cinema, and not the cinema of truth.” In explaining his decision to film himself, David (Carson) cites Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim that film is truth 24 times a second, reasoning that if he can get his life on film, he’ll be able to unravel its mysteries frame by frame. But as his artist friend (Mans) points out in an incisive critique delivered in front of a floor-to-ceiling mural, the moment David turns on the camera, “you stop living somehow.”

The single-mindedness with which David pursues his endeavor costs him his camera-shy girlfriend, leaving him to peer at his neighbors or stare into his own lens, looking for enlightenment that never comes. In a fit of rage, he finally turns on his own equipment, sighing, “You never tell me anything that means anything.” What the film couldn’t foresee was that future generations would simply absolve themselves of the imperative for insight and accept self-regard as its own reward. Never available on DVD in the U.S., Diary is streaming on Fandor.com in a new digital restoration that’s screening concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art—a prelude to the film’s mid-August Blu-ray release.