LM Kit Carson (1967)
LONG BEFORE THERE WAS a Spinal Tap, there was L.M. Kit Carson, armed with an Eclair 16 camera, walking around Manhattan looking for his life in Jim McBride’s 1967 faux documentary, David Holzman’s Diary. Screened haphazardly in the late ’60s, the film was discussed on campuses, but for the most part it’s remained a hard-to-find classic. This month, that will change and David Holzman and his wry-on-film diary, in a digi-restored version, will be served up at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The first screening is scheduled for 15 June 2011 at 7pm in theatre 2.
MOMA launched its film series in 1968 with David Holzman’s Diary. The reprise screenings will run through 20 June. For information: +1 212 708 9400.
‘One of the great New York movies…’
By ANTHONY NEILD [Digital Fix] – David Holzman’s Diary is really quite a dark work. The central conceit is that our eponymous “hero” films his day-to-day life as a means of understanding or controlling it, the results being a genuinely disquieting character study. Indeed, whilst the “mockumentary” stylings have become somewhat prescient, especially in an age of video and now DV (the latest addition to the subgenre being Julian Richards’ well executed, but otherwise lacking The Last Horror Movie), there’s nothing remotely faddish or dated about the film. In many ways the conceit merely allows David Holzman’s Diary to come into being; the real hook, if you will, is Holzman himself.
And certainly he’s a fascinating figure. As played by L.M. Kit Carson (later to make an endearing idiosyncratic documentary on Dennis Hopper) he exudes New York hipster cool, complete with Monkees hairstyle and Jean-Luc Godard quotes at the ready. Yet whilst this suckers us in, there’s plenty going on beyond the modish appearance…as much as anything else David Holzman’s Diary is one of the great New York movies.
Continued at The Digital Fix |
‘Greatest movie ever made by a Dallasite…’
By PETER SIMEK [D Magazine] – The greatest movie ever shot in Dallas is probably still Bottle Rocket. The honor of the greatest movie ever made by a Dallasite, however, may have go to David Holzman’s Diary. Shot in 1967 on a grant from the Museum of Modern Art, the legend behind the film is that filmmakers Jim McBride and L.M. Kit Carson took the cash they were supposed to use to conduct a study of cinéma vérité and instead produced an ingenious spoof of the genre during Carson’s senior year spring break from the University of Dallas. A mock-doc/proto-YouTube confessional, Holzman blurs the line between reality and fiction, and in doing so, draws into contention the idea that an image caught on camera can ever be considered non-fiction…
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