On the left we have Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture (2010); the pilot to her HBO series Girls as I like to think of it. Dunham plays Aura, a 22 year old college graduate who moves back in with her photographer mother, Siri and over-achieving teen sister, Nadine in NYC. The film features her real life mother, photographer, Laurie Simmons; real life sister, Grace Dunham; and the TriBeCa loft Lena actually grew up in. The title is a nod to the subject matter of Simmons' (and her character Siri's) photography, as well as the overwhelming feeling of being a recent graduate who studied art and does not know where they fit in the world. Boy can I relate to that one [cough cough].. photography BFA.. [cough cough]. Aura is a video performance artist who does not know how to reconcile the life she lived in college with the life she lead(s) with her family. The film could be close to an autobiography for Dunham. She studied creative writing at Oberlin College and graduated in 2008. Certainly Siri is for all intents and purposes Laurie Simmons. I can't speak to whether their personalities match, but they make the same art, and they both have creative daughters.
On the right we have The Woodmans (2010); a documentary directed by Scott Willis that celebrates the life of the late Francesca Woodman and her surviving parents and brother. Francesca was a young promising photographer, who suffered from depression and committed suicide in 1981 at 22 years old. The daughter of the ceramicist Betty Woodman, and painter George Woodman, making art came naturally to Francesca. Her black and white photographs and videos more often than not exposed her nude body, but the backdrop of dilapidated rooms and painful looking props made her nudity about vulnerability, death, and feminism. The documentary features Francesca's journal entries, photography, videos, testimonies from classmates, friends, and family, which reveal her complicated life.
While I completely understand the apparent triviality of comparing Dunham's portrayals of post-college doldrums to a deeply complicated young woman who ended her own life, I could not help but see very real parallels to Dunham's character and Francesca. Let's compare Aura to Francesca. Let's compare a fictional (maybe?) character to a person who lived and breathed.
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| Left: Video still of Aura's performance art, Right: Francesca Woodman, Untitled: Boulder, Colorado, 1976 |
Both had a rough time directly after graduating. Aura's line, "I'm in a post graduate delirium." is a typical Dunhamism about having no direction once you're plucked from the shelter of school life. She announces it as if this is a state of being that she is completely aware of and demands others to understand. Aura is unsure about her ability to be popular on YouTube. Francesca committed suicide a little over 2 years after graduating from RISD, those close to her citing that she was crushed by perceived failures in her art world status. Obviously both felt stuck.
Both lived with their parents in NYC. Francesca moved into her parent's apartment after a suicide attempt shortly before her death.
Both have Jewish mothers and Christian fathers.
Both have artistically successful mothers. As mentioned before, Siri is a famous photographer in Tiny Furniture, and seems to be modeled after Laurie Simmons herself. At the end of Tiny Furniture, Aura asks Siri, "will I ever be as successful as you?" heavily hinting that Aura idolizes her mother and is concerned about her own future and her future alongside her mother as a fellow artist. Similarly Betty Woodman is and was a successful ceramicist. During The Woodmans it is implied that Francesca was preoccupied with notoriety and success, and had standards that were calibrated by her parent's own successes.
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| Left: Laurie Simmons photographing tiny furniture, Right: Betty Woodman, ceramicist |
Both young women experienced the distance artists create around themselves. They know the barriers their mothers put up. Aura makes multiple attempts to sleep in Siri's bed, but without Siri present - sometimes even with her present- this is a strictly prohibited act. Aura says, "I'm really mature. But every time I come into your room, I wanna sleep in your bed." This establishes her neediness. And stating that you are mature is not very convincing.
Francesca lived in an environment where she was expected to be fiercely independent at an early age, and was often left alone in foreign museums on family vacations. Though Francesca was independent of her parents, she was known to have intense needy relationships with men and her female friends.
Both know the barriers they put up themselves. There is a scene in Tiny Furniture when Aura's old pre-college life becomes her new life again, and her college life is down-graded to old life status. Aura's performance video is in an exhibition thanks to her childhood friend Charlotte (Jemima Kirke). They have been carrying on since Arua moved home, which has made returning the phone calls of her best friend from college, Frankie, impossible. In a last ditch attempt to get through to Aura, Frankie arrives at the art opening only to find that her presence is no match for Charlotte and a sous chef who can't be bothered.
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| Other weird parallel: Jemima Kirke (pictured right) is a painter and went to RISD just like Francesca |
At several moments in Tiny Furniture Aura reads from Siri's diary, circa her 20's, and it is reminiscent of passages from Francesca's diary which are read during the documentary. They both mention insecurities about womanhood and needing to make art; feeling impotent and unsure. Those moments make Tiny Furniture seem like a movie about Francesca's life if she lived into her 50s and had children. Obviously Francesca and Laurie Simmons, aka Siri, have astronomically different photographic techniques (black & white organic and messy imagery of nudes in eerie or unsafe looking environments vs. vivid color photos of doll house furniture, paper dolls; everything dolls and domesticity), but both tackle feminism and female roles in their work.
In this general way a comparison can be made between these women; their age, sex, artistic medium. However, it shows that a story like Francesca Woodman's is a painfully relatable story for female artists across generations. The stories Lena Dunham writes are painfully relatable as well. We see from Tiny Furniture that Aura and her mother are not too dissimilar, and maybe Siri is a beacon of hope, that all people have awkward stages but they can find their place. When Aura asks, "will I ever be as successful as you?" Siri flippantly responds "Oh that won't be hard."
