Temple Cinematheque: David Holzman's Diary

 This semester's Temple Cinemathèque film screening series in Annenberg Hall will begin next Friday, February 17th at 3 PM.

If you're free, please come and invite your friends.

"Temple Cinemathèque's groundbreaking indie film, David Holzman's Diary (1967 |73 min)

The film will be shown in 16mm and introduced by filmmaker and SCT Film Lab Coordinator, Len Guercio. The screening is free and all are invited.  There will be a post-film discussion on the subject of the mock documentary and its continued appeal in contemporary cinema."

Jim McBride's brilliant cinéma vérité-esque independent film follows the titular character (charmingly portrayed by L.M. Kit Carson) as he documents his life. As news from the Vietnam War and social unrest blares over the radio, Holzman unloads comic-neurotic monologues to his 16mm camera. When his relationship with Penny (Eileen Dietz) goes south, he retreats further into moving images, secretly recording his pretty neighbor and even turning his lens to the TV shows he watches. No longer able to deal with life outside celluloid, all of his ties to the real world begin to erode. DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY is one of the most influential films of the 1960s and (according to the New York Times) "a totally delightful satire" that "mocks those ghastly reels from the nineteen-sixties, when various filmmakers immortalized themselves or their friends by trying and failing to be spontaneous." Inducted in 1991 to the National Film Registry, the film was recently restored by the Pacific Film Archive.

Jaime Wolfe's essay for the Criterion laserdisc back in 1994: "Spiritual forebear to the contemporary low-budget American independent film movement (as well as to This Is Spinal Tap and a subsequent parade of 'mockumentaries'), it is also a detailed portrait of the specific time and place geographically known as New York City in the summer of 1967, and psychically felt as that morass of fraught concepts, idealisms, and dogma we call the Sixties…. Viewed in today's hypermediated environment, against a constantly blurring distinction between truth and fiction, David Holzman's confusions and concerns seem prescient and relevant as ever."

 http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/david-holzmans-diary

For more info, please contact:

Len Guercio
SCT Film Lab
111 Annenberg Hall
Temple University
215-204-8476
E-mail: lguercio@temple.edu