It is often staged as an independent film-fairytale, a posthumous redemption for its director, who died from breast cancer at 48, having made only one feature film. The cloudless sky holds the scene like an endless blue tent. A small plane announces its appearance with a buzzing sound, performs its acrobatic loops above their heads. But the drama of abandonment never unfolds – epic suffering is not Wanda’s way. But I believe that there is more to Wanda than weakness and passivity, and that some of the film’s most remarkable scenes actually grapple with a conflict between longing and refusing, between assertion and aloofness. At the diner, she eats her plate of spaghetti with ravenous appetite. As dreams are left behind on the road, Wanda’s enthusiasm vanishes and gives way to a more familiar expression: squinting eyes, always on the verge of tears that never arrive. Click here to make a donation. She appears to fit the store’s demographic, and indeed succumbs to the allure of its window display. Barbara Loden is read backwards, the tumorous lump in her chest grows into a metaphor of repressed anger and creative force that finally turns against its host and destroys her body from within. The messy aftermath of a cheap spaghetti and meatball dinner at a random diner, washed down with gulps of Rolling Rock. Promptly, she is accused of biting off more than she could chew. Behind the wheel is the man she spent the night with. Wanda, by contrast, is free – yet she seems unable to seize the empty dance floor. Even though we are never given an explanation for why she broke from her previous life, the quest for reasons does not assert itself as a worthwhile narrative pursuit. Where some directors chase down a presumed truth, Loden retains an indifference in regard to her character’s past that is a source of the film’s openness. Wanda is not a document of all-consuming existentialist despair that proposes denial as the only sufficient answer to the question of Why bother? This is the yield of the shopping mall scene: something has drawn her to this place, just like something drew her to the whirly white sweetness of the soft serve. Wanda, Barbara Loden’s directorial debut in which she also played the title role, is receiving a wave of acclaim and attention that exceeds the film’s initial, more convoluted reception upon its first release in 1970. The camera tilts upwards, towards the trees. According to Lipman, Loden’s name was not mentioned on the labels, and the film was credited to its producer, Harry Shuster, instead. Perhaps Wanda’s state of drifting is a refusal to inhabit this version of her life, a passivity and indifference in the face of the shopping mall’s seductions, altogether an absence of desire on her part. Directed by Katja Raganelli • 1980 • United States Wanda is not a film that invites its audience to revel in life-affirming pleasures. With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. All of these scenes provoke a daunting question: Why bother? Years passed, marked by successes and failures. Its steps are determined by the oppressive thumping noise of mechanical machinery. Darkness has fallen, she tightly wraps her arms around her body as if she had no other place to put them. The film does not instigate a desire to strip its protagonist bare of her psychological mysteries. In the vacuum, something like a story unfolds: Wanda on the road with Mister Dennis, a petty, loveless criminal, a failed bank robbery, a shooting, a rape. To top off the misery, her wallet has vanished. She lived a life. There too, the protagonist hits the ground like a stone, a fall in the mud from which he never recovers. Pink nails meet the cone, their made-up beauty a residual sign of the life that Wanda left behind, filled with grating expectations of perfection that leave a weary core: color your nails, keep up appearances, deal with the dirty work of child care, the household, money issues. Objectification, harm, and violence draw the line that distinguishes Wanda’s absence of responsibilities from her potential “freedom.” It is the same shadow that Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) casts on its protagonist Mona, who has given up her job as a secretary for a moneyless life on the road. All of her doubt erupts in these tears. In 1975, Barbara Loden directed and starred in this half-hour educational film about a pioneer woman struggling to survive with her family on the Kansas Prairie. Who was Loden, really? She's directionless and futureless, an … Barbara Loden, Actress: Wanda. This might be what the Daily News deemed a “journey from no place to nowhere” – but the film is by no means “simply dull” because of it. She moves at the same determined speed as everyone around her, their decisive steps echo in the hallway. It seems that others see in her – a woman, alone – an “easy target” too: the man at the bar, who uses her as an opportunity to initiate a loveless sexual encounter at the price of a can of beer, Mister Dennis, as he unleashes his anger with a vicious slap to her face, or the guy who almost rapes her in his shiny red convertible. By capturing this loss of direction, Loden subtly weaves Wanda’s story into the given circumstances, now historical, that surround her. Barbara Loden’s Film Opens At Cinema II, Wanda Now: Reflections on Barbara Loden’s Feminist Masterpiece, Wanda. None of that is to be found here, beneath the gloomy sky of Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, where the cheerful detail appears so hopelessly misplaced that it only serves to amplify the bleakness of the cloudy day. The sheer surfaces of the shopping window reflect a ghostly vision of herself and map a washed out, real body onto the immaculate pretense of flesh. Alas, Wanda cannot take note of the beauty. Wanda Criterion Collection Edition #965 With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Thump! Seductive promises float through the mall: this is what you could be – beautiful, perfect – if only you put in more effort, more money, more lifetime. When she rushes to get dressed, every gesture betrays her efforts at efficiency: frilly underwear, rolling up her thighs, provides the first obstacle, the bra hook demands unnecessary fumbling. The responsibility to assess one’s reactions and personal inclinations to judge or identify is left with the viewer. The memory of his failed attempt to vanish inconspicuously from the motel room they shared for a night is fresh, but when he suddenly drives off, merges with the flow of small-town traffic, disappears, the maliciousness of his desertion nonetheless comes as a surprise. Below the table, wiry legs lapse into a three-second polka. Preparing food means picking garbage off the burger bun, cheap beer is chucked down in thirsty gulps. She would like to thank Tobias Rosen, in exchange with whom the early versions of this essay took form. This documentary by Katja Raganelli, filmed in 1980, features an interview with WANDA director Barbara Loden and brief interviews with cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes and acting teacher Paul Mann. Cheerful fiddle music sounds from an unknown source, and for a few long seconds, the familiar question of What now? At times, her body seems listless, dangly limbs slip away from the centre, awkward hands clutch an empty bag. The remedy that Loden offers to nihilist conclusions is, I believe, a curious combination of tenderness and persistence that imbues the film with its distinctive allure. Criminals Against Decoration: Modernism as a Heist, Claustrophobia and Intimacy in Alex Ross Perry’s, Thresholds of Work and Non-Work in Tulapop Saenjaroen’s, Cinema Without Borders: The 56th Melbourne International Film Festival, The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID, Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival, Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival, Stairways to Paradise: Youssef Chahine and, Waiting for Rain: Oppression and Resistance in Youssef Chahine’s, Whatever Happened to Wanda? 6 A grant from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, supported by the fashion brand Gucci, funded the restoration of the original material by Lipman and his colleagues at UCLA. Loden could appear as a determined young woman who dared to leave her hometown for New York and Hollywood, starred on the big screen, won a Tony award, received acclaim as the director of the Best Foreign Film at the 1970 Venice Film Festival, and was offered a teaching position at Columbia University’s film department.

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