Editing David Holzman's Diary (section)

=== Relations Between Fact and Fiction ===
This film's engagement with fact vs. fiction elicited some of its earliest and strongest critical reactions, namely from audience members who felt duped; angry that they were led to believe that David Holzman was an actual person and the film was a documentary. Viewers at the Flaherty Seminar screening were reportedly "outraged" at the film,<ref>{{cite book |editor-last1=Jacobs |editor-first1=Lewis |title=The Documentary Tradition |date=1968 |publisher=W.W. Norton & Co. |location=New York |page=483}}</ref> which also was "booed at the 1968 San Francisco Film Festival when the end credits revealed it to be fiction."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wolf |first1=Jaime |title=David Holzman's Diary |journal=The Criterion Collection |date=26 October 1994 |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/878-david-holzman-s-diary |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> A college newspaper review noted a sense of "great shock" at having "thought we'd found a truth about life from a film of lived life; instead, we got that meaning from a piece of imaginative art."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Kaplan |first1=Martin H. |title=The Dull and the Zippy David Holzman's Diary at Lowell Dining Hall, 8 p.m. Saturday and Dunster Dining Hall, 8 p.m. Sunday |journal=The Harvard Crimson |date=19 February 1971 |url=https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/2/19/the-dull-and-the-zippy-david/ |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> L. M. Kit Carson said that, given such reactions, when MoMA was to screen the film in 1968, the museum billed the film as a comedy rather than a documentary.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Carson |first1=L.M. Kit |title=A Voice-Over |journal=Film Library Quarterly |date=1969 |volume=2 |issue=3 |page=20}}</ref>

All this shock and anger may seem to be overreacting, but the film touched a nerve by being so convincing and waiting until the latest possible moment to reveal that it was all staged. The film was so convincing due to many techniques, including its consistent use of mobile camera and sound equipment, location filming, minimal editing, unknown actors, improvised dialogue, and highly personal subject matter, with the David character talking extensively about himself.  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."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Spence |first1=Louise |last2=Navarro |first2=Vinicius |title=Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning |date=2011 |publisher=Rutgers University Press |page=31}}</ref>  Altogether, they write, this carefully crafted film violated "the contract that binds documentary filmmakers to their audiences;" it did a lot of work to "upset our faith in documentary representation and presumptions that are often associated with non-fiction cinema."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Spence |first1=Louise |last2=Navarro |first2=Vinicius |title=Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning |date=2011 |publisher=Rutgers University Press |page=31}}</ref>

Further blurring lines between fiction and fact, this film explores how, even in actual documentaries, truth can be manipulated—consciously or unconsciously—before, during, and after 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.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Canby |first1=Vincent |title=Your Life Might Make a Good—or Bad—Movie |agency=The New York Times |date=9 December 1973}}</ref> In his critical monologue within the film, Pepe speaks to how the act of filming can change what's being filmed:

<blockquote>As soon as you start filming something, whatever happens in front of the camera is not reality any more. It becomes a work of art ... And you stop living somehow. And you get very self-conscious about anything you do. 'Should I put my hand here?' ... 'Should I place myself on this side of the frame?' And your decisions stop being moral decisions, and they become aesthetical decisions.</blockquote>

Putting this differently, Jaime Wolf writes that ''David Holzman's Diary'' applies what film critic [[Andrew Sarris]] described as the [[Uncertainty principle|Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle]] of documentary filmmaking, namely "the inevitable effect of the presence of an observer on the behavior of the observed."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wolf |first1=Jaime |title=David Holzman's Diary |journal=The Criterion Collection |date=26 October 1994 |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/878-david-holzman-s-diary |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> For better or worse, consciously or not, overtly or subtly, people often play to the camera, behaving differently than they otherwise would. Nowhere in this film is this more overt than in David's scene with the unnamed character dubbed by some as the "Thunderbird Lady." 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. Several critics noted her exaggerated performance for the camera, as well as the fact that she also altered what was going on behind the camera during this scene. L. M. Kit Carson reports that he "choked and dummied up"<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Carson |first1=L.M. Kit |title=A Voice-Over |journal=Film Library Quarterly |date=1969 |volume=2 |issue=3 |page=22}}</ref> and "became so unnerved"<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wolf |first1=Jaime |title=David Holzman's Diary |journal=The Criterion Collection |date=26 October 1994 |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/878-david-holzman-s-diary |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> at this bizarre interview situation that Michael Wadleigh had to take over and complete the interview for him, something barely noticeable in the final film.

David begins his diary by quoting Godard's famous statement that the medium of cinema is "truth twenty-four times a second." However, as Edward Copeland has observed, David does not mention that Godard's full quote ends with, "and every cut is a lie."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Copeland |first1=Edward |title=Mock 'n' Roll |journal=Edward Copeland's Tangents |date=29 July 2011 |url=https://eddieonfilm.blogspot.com/2010/07/mock-n-roll.html |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> 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. Emanuel Levy writes that ''David Holzman's Diary'' is an example of "the impossibility of achieving complete objectivity on screen."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Levy |first1=Emanuel |title=David Holzman's Diary (1968): Jim McBride's Impressive Directing Debut Starring Kit Carson |date=12 May 2012 |url=http://emanuellevy.com/review/david-holzmans-diary-1968/ |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> ''TV Guide'' describes the film as, "One of cinema's most pointed statements about the impossibility of objectivity in film."<ref>{{cite web |title=David Holzman's Diary |url=https://www.tvguide.com/movies/david-holzmans-diary/review/112266/ |website=TV Guide |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> Similarly, Justin Stewart calls the film "a hoaxed blast of 'reality' whose main subject is the impossibility of objective documentation."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Stewart |first1=Justin |title=Interview: Jim McBride |journal=Film Comment |date=31 January 2013 |url=https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-jim-mcbride/ |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref>

Many writers have described ''David Holzman's Diary'' as a satire of documentary films or filmmakers. For example, that the film "takes funny jabs" at the self-importance or seriousness of practitioners of the new "personal cinema."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Schwartz |first1=Dennis |title=Amusing cinéma vérité faux documentary |journal=Ozus' World Movie Reviews |date=5 July 2011 |url=http://homepages.sover.net/~ozus/davidholzmansdiary.htm |access-date=5 July 2018 |archive-date=29 August 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180829024731/http://homepages.sover.net/~ozus/davidholzmansdiary.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> 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."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Wolf |first1=Jaime |title=David Holzman's Diary |journal=The Criterion Collection |date=26 October 1994 |url=https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/878-david-holzman-s-diary |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> Filmmakers including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Andrew Noren, and the Maysles brothers. Regarding the extent to which his film mocks such filmmakers, McBride says he was not criticizing specific works or people; instead, he was jabbing at ideas—popular ideas about film and truth:

<blockquote>There was this general feeling or idea that there was this kind of truth that could be revealed that had never been revealed before. This was very enticing to me, but at the same time it was also silly, the idea that there is some kind of objective truth that can be revealed. And so I got this idea to make a film about a guy who thought he could find out the truth about himself and about his life by filming it, and not succeed.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Stewart |first1=Justin |title=Interview: Jim McBride |journal=Film Comment |date=31 January 2013 |url=https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-jim-mcbride/ |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref></blockquote>

More recent writings on ''David Holzman's Diary'' sometimes group the film with subsequent fiction films that likewise posed as documentaries, including ''[[The Blair Witch Project]]'' and films by [[Christopher Guest]] such as ''[[This is Spinal Tap]]''. Dave Kehr describes ''David Holzman's Diary'' as, "much more convincing than [[Woody Allen]]'s ''[[Zelig]]''."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Kehr |first1=Dave |title=David Holzman's Diary |url=https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/david-holzmans-diary/Film?oid=1061408 |newspaper=Chicago Reader |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref>  Jaime N. Christley groups it with ''[[Catfish (film)|Catfish]]'' and ''[[Exit Through the Gift Shop]]''.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Christley |first1=Jaime N. |title=David Holzman's Diary |journal=Slant |date=13 June 2011 |url=https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/david-holzmans-diary |access-date=5 July 2018}}</ref> 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.