In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.
[4][5] L. M. Kit Carson plays David, a young white man living alone in his modest studio apartment on Manhattan's West 71st Street during July 1967.
Sitting on a chair with film equipment and posters behind him, and quoting Jean-Luc Godard, he says he has decided to make a video diary to try to document and understand his life.
After this introduction, what follows is a series of filmed diary entries that David makes over a period of several days, depicting his daily life, his surroundings, and his most personal thoughts and feelings.
In some scenes, David goes around filming his neighborhood, from various people and historical buildings to spontaneous moments such as police officers helping an apparent robbery victim.
In a scene about one-third of the way into the film, his friend Pepe gives an extended monologue on his critical assessment of the diary as it is shaping up so far, namely that David is making "a very bad work of art."
Over the several days of making his diary, and maybe following some of Pepe's advice, David becomes increasingly obsessed with filming Penny, without her permission, and even once when she's sleeping in the nude.
David's diary project hits bottom after he leaves town for a day, to attend a family funeral, and returns to find all of his film equipment stolen.
He reveals this in his last diary entry, which combines an audio recording of his voice with a series of photos David made of himself with rented or borrowed equipment.
Film critic Richard Brody writes that, "This ingenious, scruffy 1967 metafiction by Jim McBride is an exotic fruit grown in New York from the seed of the French New Wave.
"[7] Jaime Wolf writes that, "At once a fictional narrative within a recognizable documentary setting and a kind of essay on the conditions of filmmaking, David Holzman's Diary stands as one of the few American equivalents to the work which Godard was doing at the time.
Jaime N. Christley notes some other cinematic influences, saying that, "the real point of origin is either Peter Watkins's docudrama The War Game (which won the documentary Oscar for 1967) or Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread, depending on where you draw the fault lines.
"[10] James McBride identified his more immediate American context for making the film: I entered the world of movies when cinema vérité work like the Maysles brothers' and Richard Leacock's and D. A. Pennebaker's was new and exciting, and when a lot of underground filmmakers were trying to use the medium in a more poetic way, as an exercise in different kinds of liberation—you know, from personal liberation to liberation from the classical forms of filmmaking.
[19] In 1991, David Holzman's Diary was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
[21][22] In 1973, Chuck Kraemer predicted that David Holzman's Diary would be remembered as "the underground autobiographical cinema verité film of the sixties," and that "scholars of the nineties will revere it.
"[27] It shows David using these techniques in making a diary film, a format that is technically simple and affordable—a natural option for young creative filmmakers with limited resources.
Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro identify some additional techniques: "the direct address to the camera, the wandering narrative, the visual and aural disorder (muddy sound and blurred focus), and the compulsive use of dates to describe the day's filming.
Vincent Canby wrote that the film "highlights questions we all have about the quality of truth that can be captured by the cinema verité camera," and about the "awful possibilities for distortion" via the editing process.
This extended scene of a woman—a self-proclaimed nude model—sitting in her car and talking boldly and crudely to the cameraman, mostly about sex—is just too extreme for an actual unmediated encounter, even on the streets of New York.
"[41] Many writers have discussed the implications of David Holzman's Diary for truth beyond the area of documentary film—for cinema and photographic media more generally.
"[45] These were filmmakers who "established a new relationship with their subjects: intimate, revelatory and personal, countering a documentary tradition in which human beings were primarily used to illustrate various social themes.
[49] Other writings from recent years cite filmmaking techniques in David Holzman's Diary that were unusual at the time but have become more common, such as the direct address by characters to the camera, or the creative use of end credit sequences, usually in the form of entertaining behind-the-scenes outtakes captured while making fiction films.
Film critic Chuck Kraemer captures some of this complexity when he writes that David is, "every down-and-out filmmaker struggling for a vision, every sensitive New Yorker overwhelmed by the city's visual fecundity, every young man suffering lost love, every inchoate artist trying to sort out his life, to explain himself to himself, and to the world.
As Brody writes, David's city life depicts an "endless stream of Top Forty radio and a wondrous, hectic view of television.
And, as David Blakeslee writes, a lot of commercials, "Still capable after all these years, and even in this incomprehensibly compressed format of delivering their powerfully efficient subliminal messages.
As James Latham writes, David uses his film project partly to assert power over women; to spy on them, stalk them, and record them with or without permission, and thereby to potentially make those images public.
Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, for example, that these films examine "notions of the camera as a probing instrument, especially in relation to voyeurism and other forms of aggressive sexual appropriation as well as self-scrutiny.
"[59] More recent writings on David Holzman's Diary sometimes refer to how technology and culture have evolved since the 1960s, further blurring boundaries between private and public.
For example, David Blakeslee writes that when he watched the film recently on the Vimeo website, he knew practically nothing about it, except that "it could be seen as a precursor of sorts to the 21st century phenomenon of YouTube vloggers who chronicle their lives to varying degrees of mundane detail, seeking to pull viewers into whatever fascinating experiences or excruciating dilemmas they think would hold their attention.
McBride directed the 1987 New Orleans neo-noir film The Big Easy and the 1989 Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire!, as well as episodes of the television shows Six Feet Under and The Wonder Years.