David Holzman's Diary

Released Mar 14, 1973

1h 14m

Comedy

List

92%

Tomatometer

12 Reviews

76%

Audience Score

500+ Ratings

In writer-director Jim McBride's deadpan spoof of pretentious 1960s cinema verité documentaries, idealistic but easily confused young filmmaker David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) decides to document every waking moment of his life in an attempt to understand himself and his world. Unsurprisingly, the people around Holzman, from his easily irritated girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), to the strangers whose own lives he begins spying upon, don't appreciate his newfound obsession.

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Richard Brody

New Yorker

This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave.

Aug 29, 2016

Full Review

Joshua Rothkopf

Time Out

Essential.

Rated: 5/5

Jun 15, 2011

Full Review

Jaime N. Christley

Slant Magazine

What makes it so effective as a puzzle film is the way it provokes us to piece together, mentally, the life that David must have had before we met him.

Rated: 4/4

Jun 13, 2011

Full Review

Roger Moore

Movie Nation

May not be as funny and off-the-wall transgressive as it once was. But it's still a marvel, a movie that one can look at now and see the building blocks for the "realistic" "My movie is about ME" DIY cinema and "influencer" videos to come

Rated: 3/4

May 2, 2023

Full Review

David Nusair

Reel Film Reviews

...littered with a lamentable assortment of painfully padded-out sequences that are virtually impossible to justify.

Rated: 2/4

Jul 25, 2020

Full Review

Emanuel Levy

EmanuelLevy.Com

Jim McBride's impressive debut, a poignantly funny, improvisational "documentray," became a landmark cult film over the years.

Rated: A-

May 12, 2012

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William L

Shut up about filmmakers, David. We all know about Godard and Truffaut. As David Holzman, Carson puts the pathetic into sympathetic, a cinephile that wants to fill the hole in his life created by unfortunate circumstances and failure with artistic insight. However, in this tragicomic meta-documetary, he has a problem - he has only a surface-level understanding of the filmmakers that he idolizes, and his life isn't particularly interesting. So instead of revealing some insightful personal truth or universal understanding, he ends up with depression. One of the most polarizing attributes of David Holzman's Diary is its protrayal of the relationship between film and reality, posing as a convincingly real documentary before pulling the rug out from under the audience in the final seconds, revealing that every aspect of the film was orchestrated. Though may have found it disingenuous, it does create interesting conversations about the 'trustworthiness' of film. Every film ever created, even documentaries, was made with a perspective in mind and inherent biases, and dramas that probe the depths of the human condition were designed in a way to evoke particular reactions. Though the film itself is often rather dull despite its short runtime, you can't fault it for taking a stab at some thematic depth (and for a film that has left virtually no impression on popular culture, it's one that has been endlessly pulled apart by critics). (3/5)

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

07/10/21

Full Review

s r

1001 movies to see before you die. An interesting reflection on life and artistry in NYC. It's not one I need to see again. It was on Tubi.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Young film student David Holzman decides to film his entire life in order to capture the truth about it. It doesn't quite work out. A groundbreaking independent flick that's most likely the first fake documentary (not counting a film like "Nanook of the North", which is a documentary with highly constructed events depicted). It plays very well 50 years later when it's vision of the effect of a ubiquitous camera is now reality.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/01/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Unsettling, bizzare, creepy as all hell - a sort of horror film in very early video blog form.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

01/30/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Like a shot in the arm, this pseudo-cinema-verite experimental film from director Jim McBride is exhilerating and refreshing about the possibilities of the form. The set-up is this: David Holzman is confused about his life's meaning and decides to record everything on film (not video, this is 1967) so he can rewatch it and work things out. However, his girlfriend Penny is not so keen on this process. Tackling all sorts of themes but primarily voyeurism (as you might suspect) and laced with a sly sense of humor, McBride and stand-in Kit Carson show us New York City life and some real characters. For me, having been born in NYC in 1967, there's an added relevance, but for all cinema devotees, it is great to see the various experiments with sound and vision (including a montage of every shot on a TV screen during one evening - with Star Trek prominent) and the various pokes in the eye that McBride offers up as he weaves together fiction and reality and experimentation (hello Kiarostami!).

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

02/04/23

Full Review

Audience Member

About what one would expect from an underground college film from the late 60s, awesome in theory & boring in execution.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

02/15/23

Full Review

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Jim McBride

Director

L.M. Kit Carson

David Holzman

Eileen Dietz

Penny Wohl

Louise Levine

Sandra

Lorenzo Mans

Pepe

Fern McBride

Girl on the subway

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Synopsis

In writer-director Jim McBride's deadpan spoof of pretentious 1960s cinema verité documentaries, idealistic but easily confused young filmmaker David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) decides to document every waking moment of his life in an attempt to understand himself and his world. Unsurprisingly, the people around Holzman, from his easily irritated girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), to the strangers whose own lives he begins spying upon, don't appreciate his newfound obsession.

Director: Jim McBride
Genre: Comedy
Original Language: English
Release Date (Theaters): Mar 14, 1973, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Jan 25, 2017
Runtime: 1h 14m

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