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My Girlfriend’s Wedding (1969). In many respects, the best “critique” of David Holzman’s Diary that I know is McBride’s 63-minute follow-up to it. Initially conceived as an accompanying short, the film wound up with a running time of only ten minutes shorter, and the distributor of both films promptly went bankrupt, so this DVD may represent the first semi-permanent pairing of the two films. It’s taken a long time, but I think it’s been worth the wait.
Girlfriend’s value as a critique of its predecessor isn’t just because it inverts some of David Holzman’s theoretical premises–by being a real personal documentary with some of the characteristics of a fiction, chronicling McBride’s excited and enraptured discovery of his attractive new girlfriend Clarissa. (”At the time I made it,” he told me when I interviewed him for the French magazine Positif in the early 70s, “I was fond of referring to it as a fiction film, because it was very much my personal idea of what Clarissa was like, and not at all an objective or truthful view.”)
In fact, the dialectic it forms with David Holzman operates on several clearly conscious levels, starting with its possessive title, which is now in the first person, as well as an overt early reference to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (which figured at the very end of the previous film) and a reintroduction of the same Éclair 16 mm camera. The English girlfriend in question, in flight from her upper-class background, is indeed the ostensible focus, as is her irreverent decision to marry a Yippie activist she met only a week ago in order to remain in the states. (Perhaps for legal reasons—which also presumably accounts for some of the blipped-out names—the fact that McBride was married to though separated from someone else at the time goes unmentioned.) But in the very first shot we can also hear and then see McBride as he asks Clarissa to hold up a mirror facing him and Wadley, prompting her until she gets it right—-an apt metaphor for much of what follows. And there’s a similar sense of displacement in the way he asks her to identify the contents of her purse; for much as Holzman loves to inventory his own possessions, including his attractive girlfriend Penny (Eileen Dietz), in front of his own camera, McBride is asking Clarissa to describe her own possessions while implicitly showing her off as a possession of his.
Some of the other rhyme effects between the films are less immediately obvious, but no less telling for that. The counterpart to David’s fragmented record of an entire evening spent watching television —-one frame per shot change adding up to 3,115 separate shots in less than a minute —- is Jim’s far more exuberant home-movie montage chronicling his drive with Clarissa from New York to San Francisco. And this points in turn to a radically redefined relation to both life and politics expressed in the two films. David virtually begins by telling us he just lost his (nameless) job and has been reclassified A-1 by his draft board, but the issue of being unemployed and potentially drafted into the Vietnam war never comes up directly again after that. By contrast, the issue of Clarissa having a job (as a coffeehouse waitress) and the impact of her father’s war experience are discussed at some length, and there’s hardly anything else in the film that isn’t politically inflected. If David Holzman explores how to think about various matters, My Girlfriend’s Wedding fearlessly explores and even proposes how to live.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jim McBride - (1969) My Girlfriend's Wedding.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 2mn
Size: 982 MiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 1 999 Kbps
BPP: 0.241
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
https://nitro.download/view/ACD7C7E11A9BFF1/Jim_McBride_-_(1969)_My_Girlfriend’s_Wedding.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None
The post Jim McBride – My Girlfriend’s Wedding (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.