Conversation Series Fall 2025 Sofa Issues

Friendship on Film

Rose Lewis with Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

 “I do feel like there’s a social ideology where it’s teleological, you’re moving from friendship where you learn relational dynamics to romantic relationships. But what if it’s not that kind of linear progression, right? What if friendship can be the foreground, rather than the thing that leads to something else?” – Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth

Friendship is the most generative site of collaboration within my own practice. Almost everything I do becomes more interesting when done with friends. Despite friendship’s primacy in my own life, we still inhabit a culture that privileges romantic connection over all else. I prize cultural depictions of other relationships, collegial, comradely, or complicated. I decided to discuss the question of friendship on film with one of my dearest friends. Note: This interview contains detailed discussion of Claudia Weill’s 1978 film Girlfriends–proceed with caution if you haven’t seen it and want to preserve the mysteries of its plot.

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Rose: I think that friendship is the main form of collaboration that I have, and of course you’re one of my very dearest friends of all time.

Zoe: Well make sure that your readers know that you and I were first and foremost class friends. I am your friend who’s also an academic and teaches film. We first met in an academic context. All of those discussions were collaborative discussions about texts.

Rose: Knowing that you’re teaching the Greta Gerwig class and that a lot of your academic work is around film, you seemed like an excellent person to talk to about filmic depictions of friendship. I know we have so many depictions of romantic relationships on film andI thought it would be really interesting to talk about other kinds of relationships. And I have a couple films depicting friendships that I love, but I would love to hear what you love. What are your favorites?

Zoe: I think one of my all time favorites was Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends, from 1978. I’ll tell you all about it because I think that it would be very relevant to an art student. It’s a “woman becoming an artist” movie. [The film centers on] this woman, Susan. She is similar to the director, Claudia Weil, who was a young, Jewish woman director.

[Susan] is becoming a photographer at first, mostly specializing in shots for a rabbi, like bat mitzvahs and weddings, but then branches out into her own avant garde photography. The movie opens with her taking these photographs of her roommate and friend, Anne, while Anne is sleeping. Anne is like, “stop taking these photos of me,” and Susan is like “the light! It’s just right!” 

The entire movie is their friendship and tension around Susan’s artistic ambitions taking center stage while Anne also wants to be a writer but then ends up getting married to this nothing of a man and moving to Vermont or upstate New York. 

The thing about Girlfriends is “how do I keep this bond with my girl friend, who pushes me forward while also navigating the desires around love, creative expression, earning money,” right? I think one of the big tensions is that Susan makes a living through her art, while Ann doesn’t. She’s supported by her husband.

There are some ideas about collaboration and compromise–Susan wants to paint the walls of their apartment red, a very intense, bright red and Anne is like, “I don’t want to do that.” Susan gets her way and is able to paint the walls of the apartment the color she wants because Anne has moved out. But it’s very sad for her, right? The compromise would’ve been better than having this relationship become kind of estranged.

Susan seems very headstrong and sure of herself, but then also has this [process of] finding herself, grappling with being without her close friend. It was very clear that she and Anne had a really special friendship that was important, sustaining, and inspiring to both of them.

The movie ends [as] the friendship is re-formed, on the same night that Susan has her big first gallery opening. Anne’s husband comes to the opening and Susan asks “where the hell is Anne?”

The husband says, “she stayed home to do some writing and she said you would understand.” So then Susan goes out to see Anne, and it turns out that Anne has had an abortion because she had had one child and thought “to become a writer, I need to stop having these kids. I can’t be mothering and trying to pursue writing and going back to school to do the writing.”

It becomes a really nice moment, with both of them sitting together and joking around. Anne says “I think you seem like you have it all together,” And Susan says, “what are you talking about? I don’t know what I’m doing as much as anyone.” 

Rose: I love hearing about movies and watching movies where abortion is not treated as some hugely tragic, traumatizing mistake that someone’s gone through, but as just a necessary and straightforward decision.

Zoe: Yeah. This is in 1978, right? Pretty cool movie! Greta Gerwig borrows a lot of parts of it for Frances Ha–really the premise of Frances Ha is Girlfriends. 

I feel like what both of these movies have in common is like the  [theme of] becoming an artist on your own terms. You’re mourning the seeming end of a friendship, but then it isn’t really the end, it’s actually a new stage or part of its development, which I think is interesting.

The friendships are not without their problems, but they are still sustaining and important. Each of these characters forms their identity relationally, with this other person in their twenties.

Rose: I think that there’s something really crucial in that, and I hope that young people these days still get to have the underemployed period in your twenties where you haven’t quite settled upon your great life’s career path and you get to focus on generative goofing off with your pals.

Zoe: Oh yeah, exactly. I think that that was important for both of us. And it was definitely important for [the character in] Girlfriends, you know, drifting around, taking these photos. And Frances, she’s crashing on a lot of couches at different points.

At some point she moves from being the backup dancer in the dance company’s troupe, basically kind of like Gerwig herself, right? Frances moves from dancer to choreographer, similar to how Greta Gerwig moves from actor to then screenwriter and director. 

I do feel like there’s a social ideology where it’s teleological, you’re moving from friendship where you learn relational dynamics to romantic relationships. But what if it’s not that kind of linear progression, right? What if friendship can be the foreground, rather than the thing that leads to something else? 

Rose: Right? Absolutely. It’s not like the more important category grows out of the other. 

Zoe: Yeah, exactly. And I think that both Girlfriends and Frances Ha make that really clear. 

Rose: A movie about friendship that I watched recently that I hadn’t even necessarily thought of through this lens before was The Sting. I re-watched it in memory of the maestro, Robert Redford. I think that what was so cool about that movie is that all of the characters’ motivations have to do with friendship. All of the guys that are coming together to take down the bad mobster are all doing it through their bonds of friendship. For all of the characters, their primary relationships are friendships, even though there are a few romances on screen. And I thought that was really beautiful. We’re talking so much about the male loneliness crisis these days, and what if the answer to the male loneliness crisis is that guys have got to form crime rings again? 

Zoe: Speaking of the male loneliness epidemic, [Tim Robinson’s Friendship] also did a good job skewering those guys, right? Satirizing the way in which they’re like, “I am so lonely.” Really? There is nothing that you could do perhaps differently? Perhaps you’re contributing to this loneliness epidemic.

Rose: I watched that movie on a plane and it was a really bizarre experience because I think that if I had watched it with a group of friends in a theater, the comedy notes of it would’ve hit the hardest. But I think because I had just been rushing through the Chicago airport at the end of this long odyssey that I had been on, visiting a whole bunch of different friends in a whole bunch of different cities, the tragedy of it really came through. The tragedy of his marriage, the tragedy of his very off-putting personality, all the many different ways in which he hasn’t really been able to fit in throughout his life. I just thought, “this is poignant.” 

Zoe: And also, who hasn’t had the experience of thinking, “man, this friend of mine, we are really tight,” and then you meet the rest of their friends and you think, “oh no.” He wants so badly to fit in with that group, but they’re into acapella. [He thinks], “Ooh. The other friends of this friend have me doubting the character of the person that I have chosen to all align myself with.”

A friendship movie that we’ve watched together and we both really like is Muriel’s Wedding. The title makes it seem like it’s going to be primarily about romantic relationships, but in fact it is about helping your wild and crazy friend when she faces hardship and disability and being like, “I wanna have my friend with me all the time.” Muriel gets married to this hunk, right? But ultimately that isn’t the thing that gives her pleasure or satisfaction. 

Rose: Yes. 

Zoe: Yeah. I feel like the turning point in that movie where the friend has the disabling event–oh my God, totally unexpected– shifts the course of the entire movie. These things that happened to our friends deeply affect us and absolutely shift the course of our lives as well. Friendship is just as deeply pivotal as romantic love, if not more so, for a lot of women.

Rose: And I think what’s particularly special about that movie is the way in which the friendships kind of move her personal development forward. She’s able to start developing her own sense of independence and identity through the support and strength of this much more empowered, liberated character.

Zoe: Exactly. But then she gets to actually have a caretaking role when that character becomes disabled and starts seeing the world differently. You know, she still has her spunk and spirit and such, but isn’t going out for a two-guy three-way. 

Rose: Yeah. I also just really love the scene where she accidentally unzips the beanbag chair when she’s trying to fool around with that guy.

Zoe: You and I watched that movie during the time that I was in Portland following that very traumatic, difficult life event for me. And I do think it was a good reaffirmation of our friendship through this comedic work of art. 

Rose: Yes! I loved our little mini film fest we did when you were staying with me. There were so many times where I would say “oh, you know, I haven’t seen this,” and then you would say, “oh, you know, I watched that recently, but here’s a related title.” I feel like one of the great pleasures of talking to you about movies is that pretty much any movie that I could name, you have seen it, and have a very cogent thought about it.

Zoe: I do love to do that for my students, my own little Zoe Criterion. If I’m teaching Cleo from Five to Seven, I can say “If you liked this more Left Bank, French New Wave, film, maybe you should watch Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

I found out recently, when teaching The 400 Blows, there’s a very tragic scene where his friend bikes away to go visit him at the juvenile detention center and then isn’t let in to visit him, and you just see the child banging on the glass. You can’t hear what’s happening, but you can see the friend being told to go and then biking away. I guess Truffaut’s friend who did the cinematography for The 400 Blows actually did that–it was semi-autobiographical. The collaborations that one has with one’s friends are definitely different, structurally and in terms of power, than the collaborations one has with one’s lover and partners.

Rose: Speaking of Truffaut, and 400 Blows,  of course one of the great friendship classics is Jules et Jim.

It’s so funny. When I first watched that in high school, it blew my mind. I love it so much. I re-watched it in college and I still really loved it, but at that point I was also struck by how strange it is and the dynamic these guys have with each other and the different ways that they’re expressing themselves. And in the final moments when they’re realizing what’s happened to Catherine, the only thing they can say is, “well, there’s her car”. 

Zoe: Yes, I remember seeing that, I think like at the Paramount in Austin on some French new wave double feature. And I’ve only seen it that one time, but I definitely can remember the final shot of the car wreck, and thinking [so much of the film is about] sustaining homosocial bonds, right?

Rose: Very Barbara Kruger, in that they construct intimate rituals to allow them to touch the skin of other men.

Zoe: Yes! Like [Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick, Between Men! In teaching Girlfriends, I also contextualize it with the male buddy comedy where the viewer thinks, “this is to the exclusion of women.”

This has been such a good conversation, dude. You know I love to rant and rave about movies, so, I would do this anytime.

Rose: It’s one of my favorite things to talk to you about. I’m so happy that we got to do this. Whenever you come up in conversation with my mom, she always says, “I remember when you said, mom, I met someone who’s smarter than me.”

Zoe: Not true! I just talk really quickly, like Martin Scorsese. I just talk fast because I’m from the east coast, which in Texas is to my detriment, but elsewhere people do think it’s a smart person thing.

Rose: I definitely think it’s a smart person thing. And I love the comparison with Marty, one of the greatest. I actually got my appreciation for Martin Scorsese before I’d even seen any of his work. He was interviewed extensively in a documentary about Joe Strummer, about their friendship and how they had met when he briefly cast the Clash in as background actors in The King of Comedy.

I loved the way that he talked about  his early experiences of punk and being in New York at the time that that was all happening. [He got] to know The Clash when they were first coming to America. They were obsessed with this image of New York that had partly come to them through his movies.

That was just such a beautiful basis on which to form a friendship and a collaboration. I thought that was really lovely.

Rose Lewis is an artist, musician, and general busybody based in Portland, OR. Her work is deeply rooted in the DIY tradition of the global punk community and encompasses media including drawing, printmaking, zine-making, show booking, painting in oil and watercolor, writing, electric guitar, and soup. Find her work at rose-lewis.space.

Dr. Zoe Bursztajn-Illingworth is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas State University. Prior to her arrival at Texas State, she held a Mellon grant-funded postdoctoral fellowship in digital humanities at the University of Texas where she received her PhD in 2022. Zoe’s research examines the nexus of contemporary cinema, new media, and literature, particularly poetry and theories of the lyric. Her current book project examines poetry-savvy narrative films, many of which also foreground new media forms, in the twenty-first century. The project contributes to discussions of intermediality, the lyric’s ongoing adaptability and survival, and new approaches to theorizing formalism in film and literature.

She is also interested in digital humanities projects that increase public access to archival holdings and contextualize media artifacts.