L. M. Kit Carson presages the YouTube Generation in DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY
DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (Jim McBride, 1967)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Friday, September 2, 7:15, and Saturday, September 3, 9:00
Series continues through September 4
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org
New York City native Jim McBride’s directorial debut, the seminal David Holzman’s Diary, presages the YouTube Generation and reality shows in its depiction of a man obsessed with capturing virtually every moment of his life on camera. L. M. Kit Carson stars as David Holzman, a twenty-five-year-old unemployed schlemiel who goes everywhere with his 16mm camera, photographing the streets of his Upper West Side neighborhood, his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), and the woman in the apartment across the street. He also often turns the camera on himself as he discusses his life and moviemaking, directly and indirectly referencing Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles, and Luchino Visconti. The black-and-white film is set up as if it’s a documentary, with choppy cuts and a barely audible soundtrack of a radio playing music and sharing the news of the day (July 1967). Holzman is happiest when he gets a new fish-eye lens and shows it off by carrying it through the streets above his head, offering a different perspective of the city. Like today’s world, McBride (The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire!) brings up issues of voyeurism and privacy, because to Holzman, it’s as if nothing really exists unless it’s on film or television (or, now, the internet). Thus, it makes sense that David Holzman’s Diary is screening as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity in the Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the International Center of Photography’s inaugural exhibition in its new downtown space on the Bowery, the multimedia “Public, Private, Secret.” The film series continues with Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason on September 2 & 4 and the short film program “Exhibitionism / Self-Fashioning” on September 3 & 4. The two-floor exhibition explores how we allow ourselves to be seen, and how we look at others, in public and private in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with works by Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Doug Rickard, Gillian Wearing, Garry Winogrand, Sophie Calle, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jill Magid, Phil Collins, Shelly Silver, Rashid Johnson, Martine Syms, Trevor Paglen, and others.