Written for American Independent Cinema; March 10, 2010
Bruce Conner’s Report (1967) and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) both appeared in a year when
Bruce Conner's 'Report'
cynicism about the media, politics, and the Vietnam War were high and cultural shifts were taking place all over the globe. The Kennedy assassination had shocked the country just four years before, and the growth of an underground press engendered views of traditional news media as puppets of the establishment. So it’s no surprise that questions of “truth” were percolating in the works of writers, artists, and filmmakers of the decade. David Holzman’s Diary and Report represent two films that examine the meaning of truth, and what it means to tell the truth in an age of anxiety, cynicism and change. In my examination of these two films – and the (often radically) different methods their makers use to tell the truth in them – I will look at the ways in which they both express their ideas of truth through their different methodologies, the cultural context out of which both films emerged, and the use and roles of the camera and technology in the films.
David Holzman playing with his new fisheye lens.
In David Holzman’s Diary, Jim McBride creates a “mockumentary,” a parody of the so-called vérité documentaries that had begun to appear at the beginning of the decade, first in France and later in the United States. Through parody, McBride accuses these films of not only taking themselves too seriously, but of actually obstructing the truth rather than exposing it. Cameras may be mechanical, he seems to be saying, but they are also subjective and all is subject to a documentarian’s bias. The film begins with the fictional filmmaker David Holzman pretentiously quoting Godard: “Film is truth 24 times per second,” and thus begins down a road that he hopes will reveal the “truth” about his messed-up life. Almost everything he does for the rest of the film reveals to the audience (if not to himself,) in scene after scene, that personal redemption through trying to capture the truth is simply not possible. Shortly after he “introduces” his camera, David effuses “I can stop it when I want to” and almost in the same breath, “I can get it all [on camera],” never realizing the contradiction (i.e. that if you can “stop it when you want to,” you are not “getting it all,” but editorializing.) David is almost childlike in his obsession with his camera, and one incongruous scene is devoted entirely to him showing off and playing with his new fisheye lens. In this scene, McBride, the real filmmaker, points out the masturbatory narcissism of documentary filmmakers by presenting the fictional filmmaker (Holzman) as childish and self-indulgent. Later in the film, McBride makes this analogy to masturbation quite clear by having David sitting on is bed telling his camera/audience that (actual) masturbation is “the real stuff…you can thing of anything, trains, bagels.” The filmmaker seems to be saying that in the end, most documentary films that purport to reveal a “truth” is all masturbation and only one version of the truth is revealed, usually one revealing the filmmaker’s narcissism. [continue reading this post...]
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