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Diarymentarie
En su primera película, Jim McBride atenta contra su propia intimidad. Construye un diario filmado, pero ficcionado. En este, su alter ego es L. M. Kit Carson (que será el guionista de París, Texas , de Wenders), protagonista del film. Encargado de transmitir sus reflexiones existenciales y soliloquios sobre su novia y de realizar paseos por las calles sorprendiendo a la gente, nos contagia (a nosotros, espectadores voyeurs ) su obsesión por el cine filmándolo todo.
Esta obra de 1967, con una clara fascinación por Godard, Rivette, Watkins y el direct cinema de los hermanos Maysles, es uno de los primeros y mejores falsos documentales de la historia del cine.
David Holzman's Diary, Jim McBride, 1967. EUA, 74', b/n, sonora, VOSC, 16mm.
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Jim McBride
On David Holzman's Diary
Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary (1967) remains one of the quintessential films of the sixties. As fully as any of the commercial and independent films that encapsulate dimensions of the complex spirit of that tumultuous decade –Jordan Belson's Allures (1961), Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), Robert Nelson's Oh Dem Watermelons (1965), Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls (1966), Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967), William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971), Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969), John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed-In (aka Bed Peace , 1969), D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop (1969)- McBride's portrait of a young filmmaker trying to make a film out of his own life reveals the many intersecting social and aesthetic currents that made the sixties so unusual. Within the context of an expanding Vietnamese war and domestic racial turmoil, David Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson) pursues his evermore-frustrating attempt to be a voyeur of his own experience. When he films his girlfriend, Penny, as she sleeps in the nude, despite her departure and his attempts to get back together with her once she's moved out –until he is stopped by a policeman while he is covertly filming Penny in her apartment.
Throughout David Holzman's Diary , David's –and McBride's- fascination with film equipment and with film history is obvious. David talks to his “friends,” his Éclair camera and his Nagra tape recorder, while sitting in front of an editing table in a room decorated with a poster for Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), stills from Godard's Contempt (1964) and A Married Woman (1963), and photographs of Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Godard. David often quotes Godard's famous line, “What is film? Film is Truth, twenty-four-times-a-second.” We journey out onto the street with David and his camera rig as he explores his Upper West Side neighbourhood and when he is testing his new fish-eye lens. Indeed, it is David's downfall that is equipment and his determination to use to it to document his own experience lead him into a cul-de-sac: the film apparatus becomes a wall that imprisons him, leaving him, in the end, with nothing.
For most of those who see David Holzman's Diary without knowing anything about the film (when I use it in college courses, I am always careful to avoid revealing that there were a director and actors), David's adventure with his camera and his losing Penny are intimate and gripping. McBride creates a remarkably credible illusion that we are watching real life as it happens. As a result, when the final credits reveal that what they have seen is an enacted melodrama, and that there is no David Holzman except in their imagination, audiences are usually frustrated and disappointed, and astonished both at their own gullibility and at McBride's skill in fooling them. The lesson of David Holzman's Diary –that film is not Truth, twenty-four-times-a-second, at least not in the sense we might think- has always been and remains a powerful one.
The audience's disappointment that the narrative about David is fabricated is also ironic, in that so much of what we see in the film is an effective documentation of what it felt like to be in New York City in 1967. “David's” various experiments with his camera –his recording of an evening's television viewing, one frame per shot, for example- create a sense for everyday life, as do his walks along New York streets. Further, McBride's narrative about David was based largely on his own experiences and fascinations, and partly on avant-garde filmmaker Andrew Noren, whose early films are lost; I am judging from Kodak Ghost Poems - Part I, The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpus [1968], which David Holzman would love to have made). The connection between David Holzman and Noren is clear in L.M. Kit Carson's introduction to the published screenplay of David Holzman's Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970): “And Noren made movies just like this, confronting himself at random hours: the camera squatting on its tripod coldly grinding along watching Andrew and his girlfriend drink coffee, fuck, etc…. And when Jim talked to Noren now, Noren kept kicking Jim's imagination in the ass” (viii,ix).
For those of us who love the broadest range of American independent cinema and revere its landmark achievements, the past twenty-five years have rendered David Holzman's Diary poignant in a sense McBride never intended. While McBride's breakthrough film was seen in a few theatres, and in colleges and universities nationwide, it was by no means a commercial success. For a moment, it might have seemed to McBride that his inventive feature would provide him with ongoing opportunities to make films, but in fact, this was not the case. After Glen and Randa (1971), McBride stepped into obscurity and spent more than a decade struggling to make ends meet and to find a place for himself in the film industry. Finally, in 1983 he reemerged with a remake of Godard's Breathless (1959), starring Richard Gere; and he has continued to work in Hollywood, sometimes with a modicum of success – The Big Easy (1987), Great Balls of Fire! (1989)- but usually on more obscure projects. He has finally achieved something like a secure place in the industry, but it is his first film, more than any other he has made, a movie that until very recently he seems to have had little interest in and which he made for a cash outlay of around $2,500, that will keep his name and reputation as a serious filmmaker alive. David Holzman's Diary was admitted to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1991.
I spoke with McBride in New York City in December 1996. When McBride sent me corrections for the interview (in June 2003), he explained, “In a funny irony, I decided, about a year and a half ago, to go back to my roots, so to speak, and make a sequel to David Holzman's Diary , revisiting the now-aging filmmaker some thirty-odd years later. This time, I've written a script and have been trying to raise a relatively small amount of money ($2 to $3 million) to do it in high-definition video. So far, no takers, and I may end up doing it for far less money with a bunch of my students [at the American Film Institute Conservatory's Narrative Workshop].”
Extraído del libro: Scott MacDONALD , A Critical Cinema 4. Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. University of California Press. California, 2005; pp. 179 – 181. Introducción a la entrevista a Jim McBride.
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Bibliografía seleccionada sobre el film:
- BERSHEN, Wanda, “ David Holzman's Diary / Portrait of Jason .” In The American New Wave , 1958-1967, ed. Bruce Jenkins and Melinda Ward, 63-69. Catalogue for a touring show organized by Media Study/Buffalo and the Walker Art Center in 1982.
- CARSON, L.M.Kit, David Holzman's Diary: A Screenplay by L.M.Kit Carson from a Film by Jim McBride . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1970.
- GELMIS, Joseph, The Film Director As Superstar (interview with McBride). Garden City, Doubleday, New York, 1970.
- Motion Picture , “On Independent Film Distribution” (conversation with Ricky Leacock, Jonas Mekas, and Jim McBride - plus a letter from McBride). Motion Picture, no. 1 (spring/summer 1986); 16-17.
David Holzman's Diary, Jim McBride, 1967, 74', 16mm
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