Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
JIM MCBRIDE’S DIARIES
December 15 – December 21
Filmmaker in person Dec 16-18!
In 2009, Anthology hosted the filmmaker Jim McBride for what was, at that time, the most comprehensive retrospective of his work to date. That series included the movie that first made McBride’s reputation – the still ingenious DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY, a prescient forecast of navel-gazing, narcissistic, first-person cinema that is among the first “mockumentaries” on record – alongside some of the other films that distinguish McBride’s body of work as one of the most unpredictable, wide-ranging, and consistently inventive in American independent cinema. Arguably the revelation of the series was his very rarely screened follow-up to DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY – MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING, which is remarkable, among many other reasons, for engaging in precisely the kind of obsessive, uncomfortably revealing filmic self-analysis that HOLZMAN so incisively parodies. But it does so with an unparalleled degree of candidness, honesty, and sharp humor. In its own, more implicit way, MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING is every bit as aware of the issues and limitations involved with the personal documentary – but in shedding HOLZMAN’s mockumentary conceit it qualifies as the riskier, more multifaceted film.
MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING was, in 2009, a film in urgent need of preservation, surviving only in the form of McBride’s own vintage 16mm print. In 2017, Anthology located the lost 16mm camera original and restored the film with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation, resulting in the first new prints produced since the film was released in 1969.
To celebrate this new restoration, we will be presenting a week-long revival run of MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING (its first extended NYC engagement since the 1973 premiere run at the Whitney Museum of American Art), alongside screenings of DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY and the third film in what eventually became his de facto diary trilogy, the equally extraordinary PICTURES FROM LIFE’S OTHER SIDE.
Programmed by John Klacsmann and Jed Rapfogel.
Jim McBride will be here in person Thursday-Saturday, December 16-18!
