Documenting Feeling in Claudia Weill’s ‘Girlfriends’
Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends begins in the half-light of an unfurnished apartment. Sirens from the streets below are met with camera shutters, as Susan (Melanie Mayron), a photographer, takes delicate portraits of Anne (Anita Skinner) while she sleeps. They back and forth; Anne asks what Susan is doing, Susan remarks on the wonderful lighting, Anne asks if she dreamt, harmlessly irritated, (the type of irritation one can only muster in slumber). We then arrive at the film's opening credits, to an assemblage of black and white photographs of the two women, a strip of transient expressions sacrament to a photo-booth.
Girlfriends is an often forgotten artefact of North American cinema, specifically that of New York. The titular 'girlfriends' are Susan and Anne, two best friends who cohabit the same apartment. Anne moves out and gets married, whilst Susan, a budding photographer who works weddings and bar mitzvahs, sustains a rather isolated lifestyle in pursuit of artistic success; balancing her isolation, assuredly self-willed, with fleeting relationships and precarious job prospects.
The premise of Weill’s film is uncomplicated; a microcosm of New York’s commercial and personal eco-systems, their interconnectivity felt most explicitly by Susan. Vicki Polon’s screenplay attests this. The raw, naturalistic cadence of her writing is both reticent and open; “my parents never talked to each other”, Anne describes to Susan one hazy, coffee-filled morning. It is precisely the deliverance of these words, in exchange with Susan’s dry yet considered responses, at the root of the film’s most tender offerings. Confessing glimpses of oneself in a mutual exchange, offerings so scarce that their timidity hangs in the air as sweet aroma.
Absolutely in correspondence with the humbly low-budget filmmaking, Susan is a woman we barely yet intimately know in simultaneity. We are never completely granted access to her subjectivity, rather, we revel in the next best position. Occupying Susan’s world alongside her, we decode her responses to caricatures at parties and galleries, clients, Anne getting married and eventually becoming pregnant. While we come to ‘know’ Susan quite intimately, her emotions remain incredulous. Perhaps this dance between unpredictability and knowability is food for empathy. We feel for Susan as her life unfurls into seclusion, with a detached sense of hopefulness that her solitude is preferential - though we are never quite certain. She’ll be okay, we tell ourselves, with the hope these words materialise into reality.
It’s unsurprising that Girlfriends’ stripped-back texture accommodates empathy; its humanity is not contrived nor superfluous, it preserves the real in a freehand arrangement. Earlier in the decade, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays urged a similar style. Maria, the novel’s conscious centre, is scarce, with her experiences only just threaded together. Chapters are bracingly short, their rapid accumulation somatic.
Didion and Polon recognise that to unmoor a tether between character and audience, in a way that never compromises a realistic distance between the two, form is critical. Empathy owes to its reception, and to the source’s composition and accessibility.
Susan is visually jettisoned from a sense of community. Audio of a wedding speech overlays Susan alone in her apartment, painting the walls red. She is edited in clear oscillation with marriage, metaphorically from its romantic union, and as disparate from the ceremony of people. Before long, we cut to Susan arriving at a party of bohemian lay-about, artist types. She acclimates to the room full mostly of strangers; she meets Eric, an eventual romantic interest whose laconic flirtation is sufficient to get Susan back to his apartment. Conversations had in their meeting are charmingly ‘real’, but real in such a way divergent from actuality, possessing their own cinematic flourish. This is not to be taken for granted, however. Together, Weill and Polon elevate realism to its enhancement, to its best moments. Girlfriends feels at once real but controlled, as if a conversation rehearsed over and over in one’s mind has, for once, gone to plan.
After submitting photographs to a magazine, Susan contends their misuse: they are “cropped! Changed! Not mine anymore!” At her exhibition, not all her photographs make the cut; all are de-contextualised in their arrangement. Her life, too, feels indeterminate; “I’m gonna be old before I can do what I want then I’ll forget what it was.” Susan confesses this to Rabbi Gold (Eli Wallach), an emotional confidant who customarily provides her with work photographing weddings and bar mitzvahs. They play chess together and she offloads her crises, making for some of the most sensitive exchanges throughout the film.
Documentation is at the heart of the film, and Susan’s world. Susan’s character reconciles the film's portrayal of documentation and creating art with its own processes of such; she epitomises the art of capturing the precarity and impermanence of all things, reinforcing the film’s own perspective on Susan’s unstable trajectory.
Grappling with the purity of an artist’s work, construed by editing and curation, is not the film’s primary concern. Certainly, Susan’s career as a photographer has its own meta-relation to the film itself as a visual form, but more vitally, as owed entirely to the film’s self-awareness, Susan welcomes the drift of the world around her. Susan allows the gallery curator to decide the organisation of her photographs. Though she feels malaise and sadness for her distance with Anne, her frustrations with Eric, her imperfectly executed exhibition, she traverses these moments with a sense of composure, with acceptance.
Weill understands how to document this feeling, and how to saturate the intricately whimsical with the warmth and munificence of honest characterisation. Stanley Kubrick wrote on the film; "I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood - American films - that I've seen in a long time is Claudia Weill's Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn't a success, I don't know why; it should have been. Certainly, I thought it was a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else...”
There is a sense of autobiography integral to Weill’s filmmaking. Initially a documentarian, Weill described to Criterion her departure from the medium, preferring to “start with a script”. She remarks; “I’d like to start the story and then figure out how to tell that, rather than discovering the story.” After obtaining a $10,000 filmmaker’s grant, Weill hired Polon to write the screenplay for Girlfriends. She wanted to centre a Jewish, funny, unmarried woman in her film, quietly defying the representation of homogeneously married women, in and beyond cinematic tradition.
Chiefly, Weill wanted Girlfriends to focus on the person who isn’t afforded a dream life, rather, the person who has to ‘create one for themselves’. One can only hope for an audience to this self-creation. Girlfriends finds tenderness in this desire, and in the very processes of changing, documenting, feeling; it sees something sacred in encountering oneself as an agent of all these things, even if no one is looking.
