L. M. Kit Carson presages the YouTube Generation in DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY
DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (Jim McBride, 1967)
UnionDocs
322 Union Ave.
Thursday, June 20, 6:30
Festival runs June 17-20
www.northsidefestival.com
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 this week at Northside Film, on June 20 at 6:30 at UnionDocs. The four-day festival runs June 17-20 and includes some fifty films, from shorts in a DIY college competition to such full-length works as Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac with Elijah Wood, Aaron Schimberg’s Go Down Death, Jennie Livingston’s classic Paris Is Burning (with a live performance by House of Ladosha), Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, William Greaves’s 1968 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, and Nadia Szold’s Joy de V.