Claudia
1987, 7:50
video clip coming soon

Claudia is an examination of the possibility that anything as marginal to society as lesbian sex can be placed within a context of a normal life, domestic architecture and mundane perspective - not an an exercise in invisibility, but as an examination of everyday life itself.

Two women are on a bed, a camera has been set up but there is no camera operator, and they have greed to have sex for the camera - on this particular day, the only reason they will have sex is for the camera. The everyday is represented by shots of the neighborhood. The idea is to look at sex itself objectively, to separate real sex from representational notions of eroticism, pornography and romance. The representation of lesbian sex becomes the stand-in for all sexual representation, and is presented as the only sex available for drawing conclusions or understanding the thesis.

“And what of girls, lesbians, the ultimate stereotypes? Claudia opens with a distant bay, oil derricks in a chemical haze, landscape littered with industrial debris. An “establishing shot,” establishing nothing but itself: A hallucinatory science fiction beauty in which to indulge. Car in the driveway, mundane but for the sublime glide along its metal. Woman’s body on a bed. Indecipherable murmurings, some sex. As if it’s forbidden, impossible, to see your own body, “Girl,” searching the mirror for something you call your “self.”   -Laurie Weeks