Claudia Weill

 Claudia Weill

Claudia Weill
1) graduated from Harvard in the late 1960s and was only the third woman to become a member of the
    Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981.
2) She is probably best known for her 1978 film Girlfriends, even though she went on to have
3) a career in directing television shows, including an episode of Girls.
4) Girlfriends is the story of a photographer (Melanie Mayron)
    who shoots baby pictures and Bar Mitzvahs while trying to get a gallery show.

Film reviewer Katie Goh
reflects on the legacy of Girlfriends in a 2018 retrospective article:

"Girlfriends is a love story about two flatmates: the struggling photographer Susan (Melanie Mayron) and her best friend, the would-be poet Anne (Anita Skinner). Their symbiotic way of life is cut short when Anne tells her flatmate that she’s getting married, moving out of the apartment, and starting a new life with her husband. The rest of the film is about their break-up, as Susan struggles with her emerging career and a new flatmate and has meaningless flings with men, all while missing her best friend. Meanwhile, Anne discovers domestic bliss isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and struggles to play the parts of wife and mother while her passion for writing is continually pushed to the side by family life.

The two women’s narratives – career women and housewife – represent post-sixties womanhood. While second wave feminism meant that more women were seeking independence and careers in the city, they were still expected to settle down once they married. Caught between the two only available choices and narratives, Susan and Anne discover they don’t fit either.

Best friends living in the big city has become a well-worn cliché. While critics hailed Dunham’s Girls as a feminist remodelling of Sex and the City, really is a third-wave, millennial younger sister to Weill’s film. Speaking about Girlfriends’ influence, Dunham said it, 'feels like my oldest influence, yet I saw it for the first time less than a year ago […] from the first shot, I was transfixed. By the complex relationships, the subtlety, the odd comedy that was awkward long before awkward was cool.' Dunham was so inspired that Weill ended up directing an episode of Girls in 2013, her first directing job since 2001...

Girlfriends was radical when it was released in 1978 and remains so 40 years on. A female director making a film about two women and their choices, careers, and fears as well as tackling issues like abortion, sexual harassment, and casual flings isn’t a common occurrence even by today’s standards. Weill pioneered an entire subgenre of independent women in the city and Girlfriends is an overlooked classic."

Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978):

I only found one film clip and it wasn't the one seen in class of the two flatmates talking Click Here

Claudia Weill criterion interview on Girlfriends Click Here

Article on the film Click Here