During the first half of the 20th century, female-centered narratives gracing American screens tended to appear in the context of the “woman’s film,” a genre designed by Hollywood studios to capture female audiences, elevated to peak popularity by directors such as George Cukor and Douglas Sirk. While many of these films contained a subversive streak, the tropes of the genre were indicative of broad cultural attitudes about women and their place in society. Often tinged with melodrama, woman’s films tended to focus on marriage, motherhood, and domestic life, and frequently culminated with its female protagonists sacrificing their own needs and desires for some other cause.
By the early ’60s, with the culture shifting and women’s lib on the horizon, the genre had largely faded. However, during the 1970s, films such as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (1978) revived the woman’s film, reinventing the genre for a generation of women with access to the pill, greater integration in the workplace, and more diverse notions of femininity.
Among these films, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) stands out, not only as one of the few actually directed by a woman, but for its intimate depiction of female friendship. The movie follows Susan (Melanie Mayron) and Anne (Anita Skinner) — roommates, aspiring artists, and best friends — whose relationship becomes strained after Anne gets married. Feeling abandoned, Susan is left to make her own way through a career and a cast of friends and lovers, including Eli Wallach and a baby-faced Christopher Guest.
“It was important to me that Susan be the girl that’s not normally the protagonist — not the pretty, blonde, breezy one that everybody adores,” Weill said of her protagonist. “She is that girl’s best friend… The best friend is always funnier and men are usually less attracted to her because she’s either overweight, not as gorgeous or not as oriented towards pleasing them. I was very interested in making a movie about that girl because that’s who I am and making films was just my way of figuring life out.”
An early practitioner of awkward humor, Weill compliments the naturalism and openness of the performances with a comic deadpan sensibility. In his glowing review for The New Yorker, Richard Brody praised the director’s precise placement of the camera, noting that “Weill is psychically close to her protagonist…but doesn’t stay so visually close as to short-circuit her humor — both the self-deprecating kind and the kind, achieved with a hint of critical detachment, that Weill sees in her.”
Indeed, the film was admired by no less that Stanley Kubrick, who called it “one of the very rare American’s films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe…It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else.”
Largely ignored at the time of its release, Girlfriends’ reputation has grown over the years as a feminist classic in its own right, as well as an important antecedent to films like Frances Ha and Lady Bird, and shows such as Girls and Broad City.
Girlfriends plays at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on May 9 as part of the film series A Girl’s Best Friend: Female Friendship on Film. That series kicks off on May 2 with Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and the inseparable Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw. This dazzling, hilarious, and surprisingly subversive musical screens in conjunction with a Cinema Classics Seminar, exploring the film’s history, legacy, and gender politics.
The series continues on May 16 with 9 to 5, featuring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as a trio of harassed office workers who take revenge on their “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” of a boss. Fortunately, 9 to 5 remains as hilarious today as it was at the time of its 1980 release. Unfortunately, it remains just as relevant. All attendees will get a free cocktail provided by The Grog Grill, along with a special souvenir coffee mug.
We’ll conclude the series on May 23 with the iconic Thelma & Louise, also presented in conjunction with a Cinema Classics Seminar. Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri’s Academy Award-winning classic gives a distinctively feminist spin to the road movie, as its two protagonists (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) journey out of their constrictive lives and into self-realization and freedom, toward an unforgettable catharsis.
See you at the movies!
