Monday, November 30, 2009

Jim McBride

still from David Holzman's Diary
one man crew setup from David Holzman's Diary
image from David Holzman's Diary
still picture from David Holzman's Diary
David Holzman's Diary
skirt chasing in David Holzman's Diary

David Holzman's Diary (1967), by Jim McBride, is not a documentary -- an actor, L.M. Kit Carson, plays a filmmaker who decides to film his own life and who frequently speaks directly to the camera (top still). The film is a tremendously funny and prescient spoof of filmmaking and "one-man crew" shooting (in the second still, Holzman holds the camera on one shoulder; a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder hangs from his other shoulder). It anticipates the "skirt-chasing" genre (Ross McElwee's Sherman's March is another example) of documentary autobiography -- David Holzman's camera spies on, annoys, chases, and generally objectifies several women.
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Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.