review for David Holzman's Diary on AllMovie

In his genuinely independent film shot on weekends with borrowed equipment, news-cameraman-turned-film director Jim McBride interrogated Jean-Luc Godard's claim that film is truth at 24 frames per second. A mock-documentary that mordantly sends up the notion of the 1960s Direct Cinema movement that a camera can record reality without interfering with it, the film presents the pre-scripted exploits of L.M. Kit Carson's Holzman, staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, that become increasingly chaotic as his filming of his life starts to take over his life. Media-made reality perverts what it tries to capture, as voyeurism replaces relationships with other people, including David's bond with his exasperated girlfriend. Holzman's periodic presence in front of his camera, or filming himself in a mirror, calls attention to the act of filming and to the person who shapes what is seen. One of a group of films in the late 1960s and early 1970s that dealt with Vietnam-era questions of media-made fact and fiction, including Medium Cool (1969) and The Last Movie (1971), David Holzman's Diary puts that tension in a personal context, revealing the impact of movie-made illusions outside media industries. McBride and Carson themselves moved to mainstream Hollywood with their 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.