Barbara Loden's "Wanda"

Gorfinkel's essay, "On Wanda's Slowness," looks to "reframe and reposition the film concerning a genealogy of women's filmmaking, discourses of 'slow cinema,' and the specificity of performance. Gorfinkle asks, "How might we reframe the connotations of slow cinema's import if we retraced some of its aesthetic preoccupations vis-à-vis histories of women's cinema?" She states that Wanda must be contended with as an overlooked minor cinema of fatigue, seen in an aesthetic and political sense. "Wanda is anchored in female forms of refusal through passive resistance."

Wanda is a film about a working-class woman from a North East Pennsylvania coal-mining country of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and abandons her vocation of wife and mother. The shots used in the film are primarily mid-shots or tight close-ups with slow movement. Wanda also moves as if she is stilted and crowded and unable to take up space in this life. Instead, she chooses to drift through life, attaching herself to Mr. Dennis. Unfortunately, an unwavering and abusive man leverages Wanda's situation for his use.

Loden's film is interesting in this aspect because it comes at a time when Women's Lib demanded "positive" representations of women. In the 1970s, Feminist Filmmaking wanted positive pictures of women that offered and inspired some hope. However, the vision of Wanda left many critics upset. Gorkinkle writes that "Wanda drew on an aesthetic palate associated with the French New Wave, cinema verité, and independent cinemas of Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes. It is an experimental work whose main motive is to 'take a camera and film it. The film advances motifs of disparagement and dispossession in many of the drifter road films of the late 60s and 70s. "

Loden's aesthetic is distinct and set apart from these movements. Loden focuses instead on the value of women's work in a pessimistic structure. The way of performance within the location on set and her desire to remain a passenger in her human experience relate more to slow cinema and observational documentary.

Gorfinkel argues that the refusal, stubbornness, and passivity were problematic for feminist film criticism and film theory to get around.

But it was finally in 1968 that there was a "public demonstration of refusal." This meant that the culture's dependency on women's bodies changed. There were more visuals of things that were usually elipsed. Stuff like "vomiting pregnant women, the sink full of dirty dishes, the shitty diapers." made Wanda's unabashed refusal to serve her "womanly" duties testify to the advancement and hardships that women face in the U.S. Film industry. Nathalie Leger says that Wanda is a woman telling her own story through that of another woman."

Loden created the character after reading another woman's story in the newspaper about Alma Malone, who collaborated with a male partner in a bank robbery. When Alma was sentenced to 20 years in jail, she historically thanked the judge. Loden says, "I was fascinated by what kind of girl would be that passive and numb, so I developed that character."

Loden's life story is a familiar narrative of overcoming failure. Moving to NYC from North Carolina at the young age of 16 with only 100 dollars to her name, Lodan worked in the 1950s posing variously for pinups, modeling for story magazines, and dancing. She met her first husband, Larry Joachim, while performing at the Copacabana.

She was discovered by television's Ernie Kovacs, who cast her in The Ernie Kovacs Show. Gorfinkel points out that Barbara Loden was always a subject and an object; he writes, "her body was a medium and pliable material, instrument, and prop. " Loden herself has said that she never wanted to be an actress, stating that she felt they were "phony." Yet, she dabbled in working on getting over her reclusive shyness and inhibition and as a means of a way to lose her Southern accent by taking voice lessons. She worked with method instructor Paul Mann and began appearing in small off-Broadway and Broadway productions, although her first roles were supporting characters.

In 1957, she was cast by Elia Kazan in Wild River (1960). After beginning their relationship first as his mistress, they were married. Loden won a tony as Maggie under Kazan's direction for "After the Fall, " written about the tortured author Arthur Miller's relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately, Loden was frequently not chosen for the role and lost the part based on herself to Faye Dunaway in "The Arrangement." In "Fade In" (1968), Loden falls in love with a rancher played by Burt Reynolds. Burt asks her what she does, and Loden's character replies, "Can't you tell, I'm an actress, I play tortured women who have been hurt, so they drink to forget…." The film ends with her choosing her career over her city-country affair, an inscription of refusal.

Gorfinkel reminds us that "Wanda" came off the heels of those compromised acting roles of the 1960s. "It was a refusal of another order." By calling Wanda an "anti-movie," an antithetical film to the romanticized Bonnie and Clyde, Loden seized the means of her production. Loden then gained funding from Harry Schuster, a family friend, and used a skeleton crew for four people: Loden, an assistant, the actor, and lead. The film was shot over six weeks in Northeastern Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Loden says that she linked her production work to the reproductive labor of the housewife.

Wanda's opening shots track slowly across Scranton area coal mounds, surveying a landscape of extraction from the Earth's own resources. A photograph of an older woman is shown as if it were a Dorthea Lang or Robert Franks photograph of rural deprivation. The working class décor of "Slow Death," as Lauren Berlant has described, is the process of wearing out of populations. "Wanda is inelegant, crumped up, and unable to tolerate the details of this impoverished existence and its demands." Loden comments that "Wanda has no direction, 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." "Wanda" is a film about the life of a woman who has no resources, support, or hope. The film observes Wanda's humiliation without repose or salvation from its desolation.

Loden only shows the results of such a life and not the root causes of her oppression. The film presents the inverse, alternative image of feminist documentaries like Janie's Janie or the Woman's Film. Loden rejected delivering a solution stating that "It should be enough for an artist to present something as they see it." (Gorfinkel)

Wanda is the dark side antithesis of the early feminist documentary's self-consciousness and activism. Instead, it is an observational view of a woman's strike from maternal and care work. Loden says that Wanda might be herself if she had stayed in rural North Carolina. Instead, she used the Method through her experience of her impoverished upbringing in the rural south. She frequently indicated the film had semi-autobiographical elements and is a diorama of trauma summoning a volcanic personal catharsis to her mantra of "I'm just no good."

Loden leverages her corporal realism towards exploring passivity, a tamped down emotional register, and hesitation and unsureness, which is a sharp contrast to the Cassavetes' and Rowland's female heroine performances. Loden commented that she thought, "Antonioni's films are beautiful. I love watching them, but I never understand the women in them; I never felt a kinship with them."

Wanda's body is heavily regulated by Mr. Dennis, who takes over adjudicating Wanda's Worth and Value as she is insufficiently feminine, reminding me of the poem by Wanda Coleman entitled "Wanda Why Aren't You Dead."

wanda when are you gonna wear your hair down

Wanda. that's a whore's name

wanda why ain't you rich

wanda you know no man in his right mind want a read-made family

why don't you lose weight

wanday why are you so angry

how come your feet are so goddamn big

can't you afford to move out of this hell hole

if i were you were you were you

wanda what is it like being black

i hear you don't like black men

tell me if you're ac/dc. tell me you're a nympho. tell me you're into chains

wanda i don't think you really mean that

you're joking. girl, you crazy

wanda what makes you so angry

wanda i think you need this

wanda you have no humor in you you too serious

wanda i didn't know i was huritng oyu

that was an accident

wanda i know what you're thinking

wanda i don't think they'll take that off of you

wanda why are you so angry

i'm sorry i didn't remember that that that

that that that was so important to you

wanda you're ALWAYS on the attack

wanda wanda wanda i wonder

why you aint dead

Gorfinkel sums it up nicely by saying, "Wanda is always late, oversleeps, and cannot catch up. "