1. ∆E times ∆t ≈ h
—Werner Heisenberg, The Principle of Indeterminacy, 1927
In other words, starting from the core of what is Real (the Basic Fact: ∆E or position, and ∆t or momentum), scientifically there is no Truth, only Half-Certainty—the wormy sign (≈) in this equation means “approximately” equal: That undoes it, and It.
2. 1960 Godard, Le Petit Soldat: “Photography is Truth. And cinema is Truth-24-times-a-second.”
3. About 3 years ago, late Winter 1967, Jim McBride and I went into a coffee shop on West 45th Street off Broadway.
4. About 3 years ago, late Winter 1967, Jim McBride and I sat in a coffee shop on West 45th Street off Broadway. Jim was eating, as usual, a cheeseburger.
At that time we were researching a book on cinéma-vérité for the New York Museum of Modern Art: The Truth on Film. We had just taped 3- and 6-hour interviews with Richard Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, Andy Warhol, D.A. Pennebaker, Andrew Noren, other cinéma-véritistes—all of them stumbling around the endless basic question in c-v, or filming-the-Real: Can you get It, the Real, the Truth, on film?
(From this question fell all the others: What is the Real once you get it on film? Still Real? Your Responsibility to Integrity of Real before Camera—i.e. how close can you frame into subject without violating? etc. Responsibility to Integrity of Camera before Real—i.e. how much can you rip off subject to get the unmasking you need within the 3-minute, 10-minute load of film? etc.)
Andrew Noren’s interview cut deepest for us into the bullshit about cinéma-vérité: there’s only one truthmovie, cinéma-vérité, a man can make, he said, and that’s the movie of himself—just turn the camera directly on his own life: “Me.” (And Noren made movies just like this, confronting himself at random hours: the camera squatting on its tripod coldly grinding along watching Andrew and his girl friend drink coffee, fucking, etc.—and in one remarkable shot when the screws on the camera-base are loose, the camera at last seems to be unable to watch any more and very slowly turns away from Andrew and his girl friend in a bathtub: V-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y t-u-r-n-s to look at the sunshiney paisley curtain flapping in and out a window—until Noren notices, grabs the camera and jerks it around to face him again.)
This un-camera-shy Noren—in America, where most filmmakers either fear or worship the camera—this Noren, who unscrewed the lens from the camera and pushed his fingers into the guts of the camera while it was running—he was onto something. We went back to argue with him and interview him twice more. McBride especially wanted to redo the tapes (you see, the year before, Jim had shot an uncompleted fictional movie about an obsessive moviemaker, like Noren, who keeps a film-diary). And when Jim talked to Noren now, Noren kept kicking Jim’s imagination in the ass.
5. About 3 years ago, late Winter 1967: McBride, eating his usual cheeseburger, handed me an outline he’d written for a movie about a filmmaker named David (no last name), a sane man and loser like most, who’d finally lost his life. “My life … haunts me,” Jim wrote David as saying; “My life … haunts me.” To stop This, David starts filming and taping the days and nights of his existence—he figures to get his life down on plastic, then It can’t get away anymore.
David assumed here: you get The Real, The Fact, The Truth on film. Film, after all, started 1877 with Muybridge trotting that horse past the row of cameras to get onfilm-proof that the fulltrotting horse lifts all 4 feet off the ground at once—proof! Gov. Leland Stanford of California won his bet about the horse’s hoofs using the Muybridge photo-series as proof, The Real, no doubt about it. Film is Real Light/Real Time/Real Space/Real Motion/Real Sound/Bad Color but—that’s The Real stuff, Film is Real; yes.
McBride finished his cheeseburger, said he’d now enough money to try the film-diary movie again. “Be a great movie,” I said, starting to suggest some actors for David. McBride suggested me.
6. “I want the facts, ma’am. Just the Facts. That’s all.”
—Jack Webb, age 32–49 on TV “Dragnet,” 1952–59 & ’67–‘70
7. “The Facts are nothing, sir!”
—Norman Mailer, age 47, Defense Witness in the Chicago-7 Conspiracy Trial, 1970
8. As John Kennedy’s brains explode in the millisecond between frames 312 and 313, Porky Pig as Jack Ruby pops out of the bull’s eye—stuttering like a fool—and (sweeping his white-gloved, 3-fingered gun across the TV screen) he points to the “Real” Paul-McCartney in Us: Richard M. Nixon (who flashes Porky a last uncomprehending glare of recognition). It’s all there, the Facts right on frames 312 through 316 of Mr. Abraham Zapruder’s 8mm cinéma-vérité truthmovie. Have you seen It all?
9. Q. Most of the people who see David Holzman’s Diary are fooled into believing it. In fact, at the San Francisco Film Festival, when the credits appeared at the end of the movie, the disappointed audience booed because what they thought Real turned out to be just a movie. Do you want DHD esthetically to fake people out?
A. Someone asks this question every time. There are several answers.
FIRST.
All art’s a decoy. Not Real. Not Fact. Not The Truth; but pulls you to The Real, The Truth. Obvious: You don’t sit in a painting of a chair (not Real); you keep your distance, and maybe think about (The Real) Mr. Chair.
But a movie, motion-pictures-with-sound, apparently is Real: the little kangaroo you see hopping across in front of Robert Mitchum in The Sundowners—that’s Kangaroo in person, Real—no statue, no word; but a kangaroo. The movie medium holds The Real for decoy: A real tree for a Real tree—it’s a Realdecoy, yes. But still every movie ever made’s a fake-out.
SECOND.
However, from the beginning, The Real and David Holzman’s Diary began to rush together, mix, twist, join more than usual for a movie.
Here: We had to shoot the movie in 5 days around Easter 1967 (no money for more footage: $2,500 was the budget; and I had to return to school in Texas after the Easter weekend). So time pressure and the need to make every 28¢-foot of film good, drove McBride, Mike Wadleigh, the cinematographer, and me like maniacs—we had to become David Holzman and never slip out of David or we’d lose the movie. For example, while interviewing the Thunderbird-Lady, I choked and couldn’t say a word (altogether stunned by the woman—and she was driving off), but Wadleigh took over the questions, and he improvised perfectly as David—the switch from me to Wadleigh off-camera goes unnoticed by audiences. For example, I began to live like David Holzman: Sleeping alone in the apartment with the camera equipment, not eating—after a few days I lost a girl friend of 2 years (like David did) because she began to hate the movie-making (like David’s movie-girl, she exited on a subway late one night, her last line: “You’re crazy”).
Then: This was intense concentration; but not closed concentration, so The Real could break into what we were doing very easily. This wasn’t a tight tiny fiction movie-world we tried to hold together inside the frame, cutting off the real-world. (We didn’t chase pigs, out of the barnyard because they were too piggy for a movie, as they did in Cuernavaca on Butch Cassidy). “For me, the idea in filming is just to keep looking,” Richard Leacock said in his interview, “Don’t go after what you’ve set up and that’s all. Because if you don’t keep open, you’ll miss something every time. And you’ll never see it again.” (And we replayed these interview tapes over and over during that time, studying and editing them.) So we kept looking, as in cinéma-vérité, to whatever the moment might turn up, to grab the chance, the unrepeatable: Wadleigh buys a new fish-eye lens, we tape it on the camera and invent a scene for it; McBride wants a sequence where an old man collapses on the sidewalk—before we can stage this, some kids mug a bum and we shoot that instead. We kept open: All of a sudden we were mucking with The Real; and The Real mucked right along with us.
THIRD.
“Truth and Life merge,” Jim McBride always steps up to the microphone and says in answer to this question. And smiles. And that’s all.
10. A year later, walking out, after a Diary screening, Pennebaker said to me (funny smile): “You’ve killed cinéma-vérité. No more truthmovies.” No. Truthmovies are just beginning.
Eclipse Day
March 7, 1970
Irving, Texas