A Film Canon

David Holzman's Diary is often canonised as a foundational mockumentary - but, despite its comic overtones, it's closer to reality television in outlook, just because the fact of it being entirely staged isn't presented as an index of fictionality so much as an extra level of reality, less a parody of a documentary than a documentary about the making of a documentary. As a result, David Holzman's (L.M. Kit Carson) attempt to create a cinematic 'diary' includes what's arguably the first reality television segment, in the form of his frame-by-frame condensation of a single night of viewing. Not only does this anticipate reality television as the voyeuristic thrill that comes from watching other people watch television - as if Holzman's proclivity for peering through windows were less for the sake of women as for the televisions he glimpses in the last, and most spectacular montage segment - but it identifies it with a new voyeuristic category, as polymorphous and unformulated as the ambiguously transsexual "model" who provides the film's most memorable interview. To some extent, this polymorphous quality is attributed to a disparity between sound and vision, a haphazard editing style, that is presented as peculiarly televisual, and comes to the fore in the static segments. In these, Holzman tends to simply look at the camera and speak to a recording device, producing a series of gratingly comic monologues that feel interminable, like speech and sight have been separated and spun round endless loops. By contrast, the mobile sections involve Holzman prosthetically attaching the sound and image devices to his body, and walking the streets of New York's Upper West Side - and it's here that the disparity between sound and vision feels more effective and uncanny, just because it's presented as a mild slippage, rather than a complete disjunction. It's also the most beautiful part of the film, as Holzman uses his prosthesis to envisage a televisual phantom-ride, capturing embodied rather than mechanical movement, flanerie as a movement-image - most spectacularly in an extended sequence in which he relocates the phantom-camera from the front of the train to the interior of the carriage, only to follow a commuter through an empty station and across a couple of blocks, McBride's low-budget alternation between glare and gloom perfectly attuned to the moment at which he emerges from underground. It's a film that can only end in one way - with Holzman's camera being stolen, forcing him to conclude with a series of still photographs and a voice recording - and remains a compelling reminder that life is boring, irritating and, above all, unscripted, as unbelievable as a very bad movie; or, at the very least, that it can only become compelling with repeat viewing, or at a second remove.