Still Life

Front matter

Anna

Backman _

Rogers

Contents

Part One: A Critical Reading of Wanda 1. Wanda’s Material History: Introductory Notes : 19 11. On Filming in the Negative and Refusal Cinema ` 26 nr. On Contemporary Criticism and Cultures of Redemption : 30 Iv. On Wanda, Who Is Not Barbara : 36 v. On Realism and Positive Images * 39 vi. On Filming the Everyday * 42 vit. On Hauntology, Happiness, and Cruel Optimism : 45 vu. On Depression, Melancholia, and a Cinema of Crisis * 54 1x. On The Limits of Genre ` 59

Part Three By Way of Conclusion: Wanda and Contemporary Feminism * 139 Bibliography : 145

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, thank you to Eileen Fradenburg Joy and Vincent WJ. van Gerven Oei of punctum books for being so supportive of this project and for allowing me to write the book on Wanda I needed to write.

Thank you to Jessica Ford and Jodi Brooks for inviting me to present this at the Cine-Feminisms symposium at the University of New South Wales in December 2019. Against a backdrop of raging bushfires and a landslide victory for the Conservative government in the United Kingdom (announced just as I commenced my keynote), you still managed to create a vital sense of community for all the women who shared that space over several days. You gave me the courage and energy to carry on my work— & not only in relation to Barbara Loden’ film.

Thank you also to Adrian Martin for his intellectual generosity and feedback on this project; to Lauren Elkin for the Criterion loan which enabled me to get my peepers on I am Wanda; to J.G for helping me to parse the complex emotions I have felt whilst finalising this work and preparing it to go out into the world; &, as always, to Olivia and Mia...without whom really nothing would ever feel possible. ... & finally:

Thank you to Héléne Delmaire both for her kindness and her extraordinary work...and for allowing me to use the exquisite portrait on the front cover of this book. Héléne’s work can be viewed on her website: https://www.helenedelmaire.com.

Really hopeless people do not expect miracles, nor do they summon up the energy to look for them.

— Anita Brookner, Look at Me

Part 1

|. Wanda’s Material History: Introductory Notes

Wanda’s history is a strange and convoluted one. In writing on it, I have undertaken a task that must both assume extensive knowledge of the film’s production on the part of those who are fellow champions of Barbara Loden and her work and must account for the viewer who has only peripheral knowledge of the film’s context and production based on, perhaps, a single encounter with its bruising poetics and aesthetics. This difficulty is amplified and compounded by the often abstruse and confused contemporary accounts of the film’s reception, which vary from suggestions that the film was dismissed and unaccounted for in the annals of feminist filmmaking in the 1970s and 1980s (which is, broadly speaking, true) and that it met with critical acclaim and was appreciated by film viewers (which is also, significantly, true).

Certainly, the film’s path to its current status as cult classic—cemented by its re-release through Criterion in late 2018 — has been one of many digressions and averted catastrophes. Moreover, the film’s circulation in the last fifty years has been erratic, which has further contributed to its semi-marginal status within cinematic history. Since the 1970s, though, the film has had important critical champions: Bérénice Reynaud played a crucial role in re-igniting interest in Wanda in the 1990s. With her astute eye and fastidious attention to the film's aesthetics, Reynaud almost single-handedly brought the film back into public discourse with her paradigm-shifting essay, For Wanda, first published in 2002. Her pioneering work initiated subsequent screenings in both festival and educational settings. In 2003, Isabelle Huppert took up the mantle and personally financed and oversaw the re-release of Wanda on pvp. This helped the film to gain significant traction once more within critical discourse and enabled further screenings — thus bringing the film to a new audience (especially within France). Latterly, Elena Gorfinkel, Maya Montanez Smukler, Adrian Martin, Amelie Hastie, and Sue Thornham have, between them, created a rich and complex body of scholarship on Wanda, which serves to deepen our understanding and appreciation of Loden’s considerable achievement both as director and performer. Their work is of cardinal importance to my own writing on the film. Additionally, there have been highly personal and affective accounts of the film’s poetics by Nathalie Léger and Kate Zambreno; in turn, Léger and Zambrenos work has become so braided that Zambreno has named one of her own pieces on the film, ‘Plagiarism’; Zambreno argues, I would suggest, not that Léger somehow absconded with her (at-the-time-unpublished) thoughts and went on to win a literary prize of which Zambreno feels she is more deserving, but rather that Wanda, as an encounter between spectator and screen, engenders an affectively political cinematic community.” Indeed, for a film that has not ı See Kate Zambreno ‘Plagiarism, in Screen Tests (London: Harper Perennial, 2019), 71-72.

2 As Elena Gorfinkel puts it: “Feminist cinephiles seek the filmmaker Barbara Loden in the ephemera of her existence, in the traces of her image, charting signs of the Wanda to come in the Loden before Wanda, of the traces and divining predisposition toward that gesture, described by Nathalie Léger’s in her Suite for Barbara Loden (2012), to tell the story of “a woman telling her own story through that of another woman” See Elena Gorfinkel, ‘Wanda’s Slowness: Enduring Insignificance; in On Women's Films: Across Worlds and Generations, eds. Ivonne Marguiles and Jeremi Szaniawski (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 29.

always been readily accessible (in every sense of that word), Wanda has attracted film critics, scholars, writers, and viewers who feel intimately entwined with its politics and thus have felt compelled to ensure it does not fade back into obscurity. Ross Lipman has written movingly about his discovery of the film’s original print and the incredible story of its recent revival (this is the near catastrophe I alluded to and on which I will elaborate further).? Before I proceed into the body of this essay, it might be helpful — especially for the uninitiated viewer — to have a brief summation of the world explored in Wanda and a few basic facts about its making.

Loden’s inspiration for her film came from a newspaper article about a woman, named Alma Malone, who had acted as sentinel and accomplice to a small-time bank robber. Upon being sentenced, she thanked the judge for sending her away for twenty years. The emotional complexity of a woman who would regard incarceration as a welcome reprieve from her daily life touched Loden as a working-class woman and intrigued her as an artist. The resulting film, which was in gestation for the best part of a decade, is set against a backdrop of an industrial and working-class environment that defines the people who live within its limits. In particular, the camera tracks the peripatetic and aimless movement of Wanda, an unemployed, impoverished woman who has left her husband and two children, but who lacks the perspicacity, means, and energy to alter her life. The films ethical core, in fact, is concerned with the possibility of change and upward mobility. Eventually, Wanda stumbles into a relationship with Mr Dennis, an abusive man, whom we sense is full of self-loathing and whose criminal aspirations (which he hopelessly believes will alter his own course in life) prove to be destructive for both characters. At once both a road movie and a heist film, it is also neither of these things in any ‘major’ sense. Rather, Loden uses genre subversively in order to indict specific American values through a womans perspective.

3 See Ross Lipman ‘Defogging Wanda, The Criterion Collection, March 25, 2019, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6237-defogging-wanda.

As a viewing experience, it is emotionally eviscerating and cannot be forgotten.

Loden started writing the script for Wanda in 1961, but it was not until 1966 when she met Harry Shuster (the president of a wildlife safari company, National Leisure, Inc.) whilst on holiday with her husband Elia Kazan, that the film received any form of financing. Shuster, a man with no prior knowledge of filmmaking, offered to volunteer time and money ($115,000) to carry the project through to fruition. Later in the process, Nicholas T. Proferes came on board as both cinematographer and editor; his association with the cinema-verité-inflected Direct Cinema movement and directors such as Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, The Maysles and D.A Pennebaker lead to the film being erroneously and loosely labelled as cinema verité. Production started in 1969 on a minimal budget. Whilst Loden and Michael Higgins (who plays Norman Dennis) were both highly accomplished performers, many non-actors were also employed. Wanda was filmed on location in Scranton and Carbondale, Pennsylvania and Waterbury, Connecticut. It was shot on ı6mm film and subsequently amplified to 35 mm for screening purposes.* Loder's own wardrobe cost $7, and she made sure that every member of the cast and crew was paid a decent living wage in line with union guidelines. These are not inconsequential details: they tell the story of a deeply ethical artist who was keen to acknowledge that the production of any film is, above all, an enterprise of collective labour.

Critically, Wanda was met with both praise and bewilderment on the festival circuit (as we will see in more detail further on). Shuster decided to distribute the film through his

4 For extensive discussion of both Wanda’s print and ratio, see again Lipman's account of his work on the restoration of Wanda, Defogging Wanda. Interestingly, Lipman notes that contemporary distribution prints of Wanda were of inferior quality and did not reflect Loden’s own intentions with regard to the filnYs chromatic palette. His restoration of Wanda, facilitated by The Film Foundation in collaboration with Gucci (and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010), is, in fact, truer to Loden’s own vision for the film.

own company, Bardene International Films. It played at both Cinema II in New York and The Plaza in Westwood in Los Angeles for a very limited period and did not receive further international distribution. However, shored up by the critical appraisal she had received (in particular the Critics Prize at the Venice Film Festival), Loden developed a new sense of purpose as an artist and spoke of her plans to make a further film entitled Love Means Always Having to Say You're Sorry. It has also been widely reported that she planned to adapt Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening for the screen. Though at a different end of the social and economic spectrum, Chopin’s Edna Pontellier —a depressed woman, dispossessed of herself, who leaves her domestic role in order to pursue her own life — has much in common with the figure of Wanda. However, none of these plans came to fruition. Despite making two short educational films in 1975, The Boy Who Liked Deer and The Frontier Experience, Loden would never make another feature film. She died of breast cancer at the age of only forty-eight. In his autobiography, Elia Kazan reported that Loden died in a great deal of pain and went out of this world crying ‘shit, shit, shit!’ After her death, he would also overstate considerably his involvement in the making of Wanda;° whether consciously intended or not, this certainly had the effect of undermining Loden’s own authorship — despite her own gracious acknowledgment of his support and expertise in several interviews.’ For decades, Loden

5 Ihighly recommend Carina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This. An episode of her Dead Blondes’ series is devoted to Loden, in which she reiterates this story. See http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2017/4/17/barbara-loden-dead-blondes-episode-12

6 See ‘Wanda Now: Reflections on Barbara Loden’s Feminist Masterpiece; especially Illeana Douglas’s entry. Available at https://www.criterion.com/ current/posts/5811-wanda-now-reflections-on-barbara-loden-s-feminist-masterpiece.

7 Loden is especially generous towards Kazan in her interview with Michel Ciment in Positif: ‘my husband also encouraged me. He showed me that if you want to do something, you should go ahead and do it. He threw me into the water and I swam (translation mine). However, she explicitly states that he did not have anything to do with the filming of Wanda: “He remained a secondary character within the narrative of Kazan's successful career. She is, in fact, often still written and spoken of in terms of her relationship to Kazan, a man who felt increasingly insecure in their marriage as Loden gained in confidence and autonomy with regard to her own artistry. This was something Loden already understood in relation to female subjectivity defined through exclusively (and exclusionary) phallocentric terms: that women do not merely function as mirrors for male subjectivity and desires but also as containers for the mores and ‘ills’ of patriarchal societies at large, and that an inability to express one’s rage — to turn it outwards towards that which holds women in harm's wake, towards that which eviscerates them of their own subjectivity — will result in self-obliteration. Wanda is, in my view, a woman who is profoundly aware that she is being used as a container — her passivity is quite possibly not only a survival mechanism, but also a cultivated act of resistance which, nonetheless, cannot lead anywhere (her bargain is always skewered). In 1975 during the height of the second wave feminist movement, in an interview with Michel Ciment for Positif, she said: ‘women tend to define themselves in terms of men. Wanda can only survive if she is attached to a man and to his ambition. She does not think that she can live otherwise. This is actually a very widespread attitude amongst women, at least in America. I don't know what it is like elsewhere. But women’s identities are defined through the men they are with’* We can only imagine the primal truths her version of The Awakening would have delivered. We can only imagine the feelings of blockage, inequity, and rage at not being able to leave behind a legacy such as that of her husband. Those reported (and possibly apocryphal) final didn't help me with that. From the beginning of filming, we found we were in total disagreement. He is very attuned to solidity and strength in terms of structure and continuity. He is very methodical and prepares everything in advance. I am not the same kind of personality at all. He thinks Iam a bit of a fantasist. When he says to me “what are you going to do now?’, I respond “we'll see what happens” (translation mine). See Michel Ciment, ‘Entretien avec Barbara Loden; Positif, April 1975, 34.

8 Ibid., 36 (translation mine).

words of Loden’s contain a multitude of women’s stifled voices, stories, and experiences. Wanda stands as Loden’s sole attempt to name this: to find the words and images to say it.

This volume is divided into three sections. The first part attempts to situate Wanda within both a historical and contemporary context through a relevant theoretical framework that serves my understanding of this extraordinary film. In short, my aim is to make Wanda speak to our own political and social moment through depressive affect; for my contention is that Wanda, though ostensibly about female and working-class experience, is a film that is finely calibrated and attuned to the affective state of depression as both a public and political source of feeling; Loden herself commented that this was at the core of her understanding and performance of Wanda as a character, telling Ciment: T was like the living dead. ...I lived like a zombie for a long time, until 30 years old...I feel very attuned to Wanda emotionally.’ The second part constitutes a shot-by-shot reading of the film. This kind of ‘close’ reading, which was especially popular amongst film scholars for a while, has, in my view, rarely been extended towards films made by women.” I have tried to recount my own understanding of these images over repeated viewings (this may be a fool’s errand, but I am willing to run this risk because I believe that every single shot of this remarkable film is worthy of attention).” I have done this so as to build an inventory of how the film accrues in meaning through its highly

9 Ibid., 34, 36 (translation mine).

10 Raymond Durgnats film criticism is, perhaps, the most exemplary of this style. See Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at ‘Psycho’ (2002; repr. London: BF1/Bloomsbury, 2010). I am, however, in no way comparing my efforts here with those of Durgnat, but I am inspired by his approach. This is amongst my most favourite pieces of writing on film.

11 It is my long-held belief that the seemingly rather simple act of paying attention constitutes a form of feminism that can effect profound alteration in the world. I am not alone in feeling this: ‘the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives’ See Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Quality Paper Book, 1984), 36.

particular form and subtle use of gesture. For what it is worth, I have interspersed this text with my own affective response to and reading of these scenes as set out in detail (thus as a highly subjective form of inductive reasoning). My intention here is to disavow wholly the notion that Wanda is any way, shape or form, a film of arbitrary happenstance (objects are profoundly meaningful in this film and tell a life-story), verité, or continual improvisation (much as Loden may have been inspired by such guerrilla tactics as an alternate film history). Finally, I conclude with an assessment of Wanda’s status as a specifically feminist work of art and what this might mean for a contemporary feminist politics.

Il. On Filming in the Negative and Refusal Cinema

To attempt to write on Wanda, Loden’s sole feature-length film, is a task that seems to be limned by failure from the outset. It is impossible, in fact, to produce a text on this major minor film that is not, in itself, ripe with aporia, cracks, fissures, and ambiguities (this is, in fact, the entire subject of Légers book on Loden).” This film, which I first saw in Stockholm, Sweden in the Autumn of 2012 has disturbed and upset me to such an extent that I still carry Wanda with me; this, I believe, is a relatively common or shared feeling amongst those who are moved by Lodens vision — to the extent that the film appears to yield an arcane and highly particular sense of ownership over an implicit connection to both the director and her film.” Yet, this

12 Nathalie Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden, trans. Cécile Menon (St. Louis: Dorothy Project, 2012).

13 It is especially intriguing from a psychoanalytic perspective that writers and scholars alike seem to confuse Loden with the character of Wanda (to the extent that it is sometimes read as purely autobiographical) and to feel that they are haunted by one another’s understanding of the film. I find Zambrenos recuperation of Léger’s extended essay as ‘plagiarism’ especially telling in this respect. In Léger’s manuscript, Loden’s life bleeds into Wanda’s and, by extension, into that of the author (who in turn invokes her own mother’s history to shore up the narrative she is writing). Loden film affected me beyond my own grief-laden and abjectly lonely circumstances during that Autumn and the years that followed: Wanda entered and has remained within me as a presciently political film that speaks to our current state of crisis; Wanda is a film I have thought about every single day since I first saw it and it continues to teach me things. This is then, above all, an essay about discovering and living with Wanda in this very particular contemporary political moment. Whilst what follows is, of course, deeply personal (as I think most forms of writing necessarily must be), this is not an essay about my own subjective connection to the film (both Léger and Zambreno have acquitted themselves admirably of this task).'* Further, this is not a traditional work of archival film history that attempts to situate the film merely within its contemporary context. In short, Wanda is so radical in its alterity that, I believe it deserves careful and studious attention to its images without comparison or recourse to its peers in this particular case. Further, this is not a biography of Barbara Loden.” The facts of her life, such as we know of them, are at once both nebulous and precise enough to allow any writer to adumbrate her as a mysterious, enigmatic, and perplexing figure who can fit into any narrative the writer is willing to weave (there are multiple examples of this). In my view, if we are to understand the scale of Loder's accomplishment as a filmmaker, as an artist, we should not reduce her art to the facts of her existence as a complex and contradictory person; importantly, Loden herself was adamant about this in several interviews, claiming that the material connections between herself commented that she had discovered in psychoanalysis that she was always playing ‘the victim and the orphan' so that her understanding of Wanda was, in effect, a necessarily personal and emotional one. Yet she was also always careful to distinguish herself from Wanda; that is, Loden herself always adopted the empathic rather than purely personal point of view as an artist. See Ciment, ‘Entretien avec Barbara Loden; 37 (translation mine).

14 Kate Zambreno, Screen Tests (London: Harper Collins, 2019), 71-72, 222-76.

15 For an excellent and comprehensive overview of Loden’s background, I recommend Gorfinkel's essay “Wanda's Slowness; 29-33.

her and the character of Wanda had been overstated and misconstrued: rather, she felt a deeply-held emotional allegiance to this character.‘ Beyond this, though, the appeal to biographical circumstances is of limited use, I believe, in assessing any womans work — and it is an elision we make all too often with regard to female artists. It is an appeal that has, to date, in my view, marred assessment of this remarkable film; indeed, Thornham comments that the identification of ‘Loden as a director with her protagonist’ is responsible for the promulgation of a dominant reading of the film ‘in terms of the pathologized body of Loden herself?” In this, I concur with Thornham whole-heartedly. In what follows, it is Wanda as a visionary, unique, and, I would argue, peerless piece of filmmaking to which I will turn. In particular, it is Wanda's politics and aesthetics with which I am concerned.

I have already defined this extended essay by stating what I will not do, which is perhaps fitting for a film that in and of itself is unrelentingly and determinedly fixated on the poetics and aesthetics of failure. For Wanda is not only a film that centres on characters who are refused, rejected, and treated as detritus: it is a film that at its very core, as Gorfinkel, Thornham, and Zambreno have argued astutely, is formed by a politics of negativity, refusal, and rejection. The ethical import of Wanda lies in this aesthetics of denial, of the margin, its exploration of the under-

16 See both the audio recording of Loden speaking to students at the American Film Institute in 1971, and the excerpt from The Dick Cavett Show, both available as extra features on the Criterion release of Wanda. She reiterates this in Katja Raganelli’s documentary I Am Wanda in which she speaks at length about her upbringing and background and is careful to differentiate her experience from that of Wanda (Alma Malone). This is also available on the Criterion edition of the film.

17 Sue Thornham, What IfI Had Been the Hero? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 66.

18 Please see especially Gorfinkel, ‘Wanda’s Slowness; as well as Thornham, What If I Had Been the Hero?, 64-67 and Zambreno, Screen Tests, 222-76. It is also worth noting that Kazan described Loden as ‘white trash’ in his own writing and spoke of the character of Wanda in metaphorical terms that likened her to society’s flotsam and jetsam.

side, its use of slowness, its persistent use of counter-images and in-between-images and its invocation of crisis.” There is a seamless continuity between form and content in Wanda that is so skilfully and unobtrusively deployed that its moments of disruption, void, frustration, impossibility, exhaustion, and refusal must seep into any attempt to write on its images. To write on Wanda is to allow oneself to step into that impasse: the result of which is this essay.

I am neither the first scholar, critic, or writer to broach this task, nor, I am quite sure, will I be the last. For a film that has been so neglected by a public audience, Wanda has amassed astonishingly voluminous amounts of column inches, book chapters, articles, and attempts to think alongside it and fathom its meaning. I contend that so much has, in fact, been written on Wanda despite the relative difficulty (up until 2018) of seeing it that it has passed over into the realm of myth.” That myth, which is beset not only by notions of the ‘miraculous’ and ‘sacred’ (a characterisation spun by Marguerite Duras to describe Loden’s faultless performance of Wanda) but also by apocrypha (which the men in her life, who outlived Loden, certainly played a hand in promulgating), has occluded careful and studious attendance to its distinctive formal properties and by extension, its politics of the image.” There is indeed a ‘miracle’ in Wanda, but I contend it has nothing whatsoever to do with an imbrica-

19 Conversely, Raymond Carney, in his analysis of the film has suggested that Wanda is a film edited to effect ‘extreme rush and haste’: see Ray Carney, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). For intricate analysis of the negative politics and slowness of Wanda, please see especially Gorfinkel ‘Wanda’s Slowness; 27-48, and Zambreno, Screen Tests, 222-76.

20 See Cristina Alvarez Lopez and Adrian Martin, ‘Wanda} Film Critic: Adrian Martin, 2019, http://www.filmcritic.com.au/reviews/w/wanda.html and ‘Nothing of the Sort: Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970); Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema 4, no. 8 (2016), http://www.ocec.eu/cinemacomparativecinema/ index.php/ca/inicio-eng/33-n-8-english/451-contents-n-8.

21 See Marguerite Duras and Elia Kazan, ‘Conversation on Wanda by Barbara Loder (originally printed in Cahiers du cinema, 2003), Cinema Comparat/ ive Cinema, n.d., http://www.ocec.eu/cinemacomparativecinema/index. php/en/33-n-8-english/446-conversation-on-wanda-by-barbara-loden.

tion of Loden with Wanda as a fictional character —a reading that has persistently helped to marginalise Loden’s agency as a filmmaker and artist.

No. The miracle in Wanda is that this film has survived, despite decades of neglect (having finally been re-discovered by Ross Lipman in a film lab, the contents of which were about to be discarded), to emerge into the fuliginous light of an era that may just be ready to strain at grasping its harsh and brutal truths.” Truths that reveal the implication of the psychic in the social and the experiential in political structures; this is a film that dares to suggest that the social and ethical functions of art should not necessarily be redemptive — that salvation is a cheap and spurious form of consolation that few can afford in this world. This film, made by a woman who knew all-toowell what it means to be defined through and by her material circumstances (and her relationships to men), that is so relentlessly ferocious in its refusal to assuage and comfort the viewer was always a film, as Gorfinkel contends, that was made for the future.* Wanda does not brook the comforts of positivity, of aspiration or even the luxury of selfhood. This film is so radical in its feminist-anti-capitalist politics of refusal that we are still struggling to keep up with it. It delineates precisely how the personal is political and why this matters now more than ever. Wanda, this film about a woman who refuses to be saved or to save herself, who lacks the means and energy to alter anything in her life, who lives in a permanent state of blockage, impasse, and failure is, I suggest, the film of our contemporary moment.

Ill. On Contemporary Criticism and Cultures of Redemption Upon its release, Wanda met with a relatively ambivalent critical reception. In my view, Estelle Changas’s review from 1971 is the sole example that is attuned to the film’s highly particu-

22 See Lipman, Defogging Wanda! 23 See Gorfinkel, ‘Wanda’s Slowness; 45.

lar melancholic register and resonance. Changas saw clearly that Loden’s project in Wanda is precisely to open up a site of contestation and critique in which one is forced to reckon with the very notion of choice, of self-fashioning, as a privilege. She writes: Loden plays against all the optimism surrounding the odyssey myth. Her protagonist has absolutely no prospect of survival and Loden refuses to compromise her grim vision of life with any trace of sentimentality” That Changas does not chastise Loden for refusing to offer a solution sets her apart from other contemporary critics who merely viewed Wanda as a depressing, muted, and nihilistic affair (chiefly, Chuck Kleinhans and Pauline Kael).* Moreover, Changas identified the ‘problem of feminism’ which the film opens up and for which it was so readily criticised and dismissed: Wanda is so burdened with the horror of belonging to the abject, outcast race of impoverished Americans that she hasn't the luxury to lament her role as a female. Loden is concerned with a more basic, universal question than sexual politics—the stark deprivation of the abandoned poor. The film seems almost anachronistic because it evokes the Depression thirties;” the ravaged faces of its Appalachian coal field inhabitants resemble those of dust-bowl dwellers.”

24 Estelle Changas, “Wanda; Film Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 50.

25 See Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Wanda and Marilyn Times Five: Seeing Through Cinema Verite, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 1 (May-June 1974): 14-15. In her review of the film printed in March 1971, Kael writes that Wanda is: ‘so dumb we can't tell what has made her miserable....She's an attractive girl but such a sad, ignorant slut that there’s nowhere for her and the picture to go but down, and since, as writer-director, Miss Loden never departs from the misery of the two stunted characters, there are no contrasts. The movie is very touching, but its truths — Wanda's small voice, her helplessness — are too minor and muted for a full-length film! Interestingly, Kael does acknowledge that Wanda is a film that is devoid of clichés and, as such, identifies something fundamental about Loden’s political aesthetic. Kael's original review is available here: https://archives. newyorker.com/newyorker/1971-03-20/flipbook/136t.