Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) feels at once strikingly fresh and familiar, which is perhaps the secret of its enduring popularity and helps to explain how I found myself sitting on the steps outside BAM’s Rose Cinema among throngs of potential viewers who, like me, were disappointed to find that its 6pm showing, the crowning moment of the two-week long series ‘A Different Picture’, had sold out. “This is unfair,” my friend observed as we reconfigured our plans for the evening; “There are so many people in there who aren’t even girls!” While her comment was good-humoured – if anything, the fact that a repertory screening would sell out at all, let alone one in a series dedicated to work by women, is cause for celebration – she touched on something real. Whenever Claudia Weill’s work is screened in New York, it seems, people note that she pioneered the style – quippy, confessional forays into women’s everyday lives – that would later characterise female-driven classics like Sex and the City. And even as titles like Sex and the City have earned their status as ‘classics’, it’s important not to lose site of their vanguard value, depicting female characters with a level of nuance and candour that can still, decades down the line, feel difficult to come by. Although Weill is best-known for her feature films (both made before 1980), this style is familiar to a younger generation of viewers, especially thanks to HBO’s Girls, which includes an episode directed by Weill (in addition to her influence on countless others). The popularity of these shows that take after Weill has drawn attention back to her own work – a fact that felt self-evident as we crowded outside BAM to buy tickets for the later screening.
Girlfriends is centred on the changing relationship between two young women, following Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) as she attempts to navigate a nascent career as a photographer while coping with changes in her relationship to Anne (Anita Skinner), her ostensible best friend who moves out and gets married. Drawing on Weill’s seven-year career as a documentary director, Girlfriends approaches a several-month period of Susan’s life with verité efficiency, lingering on moments of emotional import but tethered to the banality of the everyday. The progression of time is mostly telegraphed through moments external to her own experience: Anne begins to boast about the material signifiers of having “settled down”, while various love interests float into and out of Susan’s orbit; gallery shows open, hold receptions and close again. In an interview for the Institute for Contemporary Art, Weill explains that her primary ambition in directing the film was to deviate from the hot-and-breezy (but ultimately formulaic) female protagonist that’s so at home in a standard-issue rom-com, focusing instead on the best friend who’s been blighted “because she’s either overweight, not as gorgeous or not as oriented towards pleasing [men].”¹
This ambition – telling stories that speak to the multitude of experiences historically sidelined in favour of Hitchcock Blondes – lay behind every film that screened throughout the two-week series at BAM. ‘A Different Picture’ presented a broad range of works from both documentary and fiction, emphasising women’s contributions to the New Hollywood Era inaugurated around the outset of the 1970s, with the selection of films in this specific series spanning from 1967 to 1980. While most historical accounts of New Hollywood focus on the generation of newly-minted grads that emerged from film schools in New York and Los Angeles (a notably male cohort, populated by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg), the era was also a rich in independent films and a surprising number of these were helmed by women. At the confluence between the American film industry’s brief foray into director-driven cinema and the consciousness-raising achieved by second-wave feminism, this was a time period in which women gained ground to cinematically represent their stories.
Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (1979)
Of course, even despite these improving conditions, women’s marginalisation persisted both inside and outside the film industry. Speaking about the experience of making her second feature, It’s My Turn (also screened in the series), Claudia Weill described the sexism she often encountered while working at Columbia Pictures, noting that the production “was filled with #MeToo moments which I had little means of understanding or dealing with.”² As the long-urgent question of gender inequality in media has finally gained mainstream prominence thanks to efforts like #MeToo, the cinema of the New Hollywood era has taken on new meaning, reminding us that the issues only now filtering into the mainstream have plagued women and marginalised groups for decades. The mid-century fight against gender inequality, and especially its focus on sexual violence, serves as the basis of numerous films in the series, from Soft Fiction (1979) to Three Lives (1971). Although even within the more women-centric corners of independent cinema diversity can sometimes feel hard to come by, ‘A Different Picture’ featured a pleasing selection of non-normative narratives, from All Women Are Equal’s (1972) groundbreaking portrayal of transgender women to From Spikes to Spindles’s (1976) archival approach to Chinese-American identity. Both Terminal Island (1973) and Attica (1974) touch upon the prison-industrial complex and its oppression of prisoners, immigrant stories are explored in News from Home (1977) and Hester Street (1975), and labor politics drive Harlan County USA (1976) and I Am Somebody (1970). Overall, ‘A Different Picture’ worked hard to counteract the often narrow understanding of progress associated with second-wave feminism, exploring the intersection between gender inequality and different forms of marginalisation.
Although it’s difficult to succinctly identify the organising thesis of ‘A Different Picture’ – a visitor in a single weekend could be treated to a documentary about a coal miners’ strike, a silent walk through an empty New York hotel, and an LSD-fuelled exploitation bonanza – this is precisely the series’ strongest selling point. By refusing to centre on a single genre or organising theme, ‘A Different Picture’ emphasises how women’s contributions to film history challenge neat taxonomies, and proves, crucially, that female filmmakers have drawn on their marginalisation to offer work that pushes both artistic and social boundaries since long before trends like #MeToo brought these issues into the everyday public discourse.
1 “About Girlfriends: Jemma Desai in Conversation with Claudia Weill.” Institute for Contemporary Art. 17 Apr 2014. 2 Weill, Claudia. “From Girlfriends to Girls and Beyond.” Talkhouse. 18 May 2018.
‘A Different Picture: Women Filmmakers in the New Hollywood Era, 1967-1980’ ran at BAM from May 2-20 2018.
