Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
RECENT RESTORATION – ENCORE SCREENINGS! JIM MCBRIDE’S ‘MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING’
November 19 – November 21
In December of last year, Anthology premiered its new restoration of Jim McBride’s MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING, his extraordinary follow-up to DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY and the second film in what would become an informal trilogy of diary films, whether fabricated or genuine. Among the first “mockumentaries” on record, DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY was a prescient forecast of navel-gazing, narcissistic, first-person cinema – which makes MY GIRLFRIEND’S WEDDING all the more remarkable, insofar as it engages 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.
Since our restoration premiere engagement last December was cut short by the Omicron wave, we’ve decided to offer a weekend of encore screenings, so that McBride’s extraordinary film receives the attention it so richly deserves. As we did in December, we’ll supplement the film with its predecessor and sequel, DAVID HOLZMAN’S DIARY (1967) and PICTURES FROM LIFE’S OTHER SIDE (1971).
Programmed by John Klacsmann and Jed Rapfogel. Special thanks to Jim McBride and Tracy Tynan.
