‘David Holzman’s Diary’: The movie that inspired Brian De Palma to pick up a camera
With several shades of Alfred Hitchcock and a keen penchant for thrilling and suspenseful narratives, Brian De Palma is rightfully championed as one of the most significant American filmmakers of all time. His careful and dedicated commitment to the craft of directing has seen De Palma carve out a unique niche for himself in the realm of crime cinema.
A true master in the language of the cinematic medium, as expressed in genuine masterpieces like Scarface, Carrie, Blow Out, and The Untouchables, De Palma has forever immortalised himself into the pantheon of the film industry’s all-time greats, and several of his works are justifiably considered true classics.
But like any filmmaker, De Palma needed to start somewhere, and long before his debut feature film, 1968’s Murder a la Mod, the New Jersey-born filmmaker made his first foray into amateur moviemaking. When De Palma revealed his favourite guilty pleasure movies in a feature with Film Comment, he explained how he’d been inspired by a mockumentary called David Holzman’s Diary.
“Now, the whole concept of David Holzman’s Diary was of a guy making a film diary and trying to examine his life by photographing it,” De Palma once said of the James McBride film. “When I first got my 8mm sound camera, I’d carry it around like David Holzman and try to film everything I did and look at it.”
David Holzman’s Diary, released in 1967, is considered a work of metacinema. Produced on a small budget over a handful of days, the experimental movie comes across as an autobiographical documentary, revealing snippets of the life and personality of its fictional title character and explores the nature of filmmaking and cinema in sum.
De Palma continued, explaining how he’d been inspired by the film, “My friends and I had cameras all the time and we were all film directors. I filmed a whole section of my life – people I was going out with, my friends. I just shot everything. I directed the scenes, too. And it all came from David Holzman’s Diary.”
McBride’s film serves as a progenitor of the mockumentary genre and comments satirically on the nature of documentary, which had been burgeoning in the 1960s. David Holzman’s Diary not only challenged the conventions of traditional storytelling, but it also made Brian De Palma want to pick up the camera for the first time, and with Scarface, Carrie and Blow Out arriving in consequence, one can’t give McBride any higher praise.
