Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden

Loden directs herself as Wanda Goronski, a working-class woman who leaves her husband, unceremoniously relinquishes custody of her children, and wanders the bleak landscape of Pennsylvanian coal-mining country until she falls in with a misogynist thief conducting a half-botched robbery. “Wanda has no direction,” Loden told an interviewer. “She’s just passing through life, mainly from man to man. But it’s not a woman’s film or a woman’s problem. Wanda is an object, something handled, dropped. That’s the story.”

Inspiration came from a news item Loden had read in 1960. Sentenced to twenty years for taking part in a burglary, Alma Malone thanked the judge. “I was fascinated by what kind of girl would be that passive and numb,” said Loden. Introducing a screening in London in 2018, Gorfinkel observed that “Wanda fulfills a wish that many women could not dare profess but felt as their secret encumbrance, abandoning what seemed an incontrovertible fate, a biological ordinance. Wanda, marvel of all, extracts herself from this wretched life. Quietly, in her leaving and in her resignation to being judged as ‘no good,’ Wanda demands something else, a something else that is as yet unknown to her. What is this if not a form of strike?”

Gorfinkel has now curated Wanda and Beyond: The World of Barbara Loden, a season the BFI will present from June 1 through 29. It’s a four-part event. One strand will trace Loden’s career leading up to Wanda with screenings of two films she appeared in directed by her second husband, Elia Kazan: Wild River (1960) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). Loden costars with Burt Reynolds in Fade In, the first film credited to the pseudonymous Alan Smithee. Completed in 1968, Fade In finally debuted on television in 1973. This strand will also feature a batch of educational shorts Loden directed, including The Frontier Experience (1975), with a screenplay by Joan Micklin Silver (Hester Street, Crossing Delancey).

In 2018, critic and author Molly Haskell recalled that she’d met Loden “around the time she made Wanda: we were on several panels together, and bonded as women and Southerners. It was an exciting time on the filmmaking scene as women were questioning traditional roles, straining against the shackles of domesticity without having quite arrived at firm notions of self-determination. A flurry of movies—call them the neo-woman’s films or the mad housewife genre—addressed women’s roles with a kind of probing, baffled ambivalence.” A sampling—Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969) with Shirley Knight, Eleanor and Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) with Carrie Snodgress, and John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974) with Gena Rowlands—make up the second strand.

The third strand spotlights films that Loden cited as influences, including Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion (1936), Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950), and Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). And the fourth strand is dedicated to films that bear signs of an ongoing sisterhood with Wanda such as Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985), Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds (1991), and Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass (1994).

We should also mention that Sabzian and Cinema RITCS will present a screening of Wanda in Brussels on May 13. The film “gets under your skin,” warns actor and filmmaker Illeana Douglas. “The grimy hotel rooms, bar rooms, and bathrooms scattered across Pennsylvania, and the unbathed rawness of Barbara Loden’s gut-wrenching performance will not leave you, no matter how many showers you take.”

Wanda won the International Critics Award when it premiered in Venice, but even after a run in the U.S., memory of the film faded, In 1978, Loden was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later, she died at the age of forty-eight, unaware that Wanda would be championed by Marguerite Duras and Isabelle Huppert and eventually restored and revived. When we released Wanda on Blu-ray in 2019, Amy Taubin wrote that “Wanda can now be appreciated as a portrait of a kind of woman who, being no man’s fantasy, had almost never been seen on the screen before.”