Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Wanda, the lone feature film starring and directed by New York stage actress Barbara Loden who was famous for being married to Elia Kazan but was herself a radiant source of pure golden light, was released in 1970 and somehow created a ripple in the fabric of space-time the implications of which are not yet at all clear. I had a friend a few decades my senior who originated from the Bronx and he once told me that when Loden starred in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall in 1964 nearly the whole city of New York was astonished and agog. Nobody had ever had what she appeared to have, whatever the blazes it was. Barbara Loden has impassively produced some acolytes whose devotion is like that of the great monumentalists of past centuries and of other cultures (their legacy nowhere more firmly established in modernity than in the cumulative cinematic-hermeneutic complexitive monument of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, whom none are likely to surpass). French writer Nathalie Léger has crafted a fine and fascinating document about potentially fatal arts and culture obsessions with her cult book Suite for Barbara Loden. The author is on a grand mission but any personal growth she undergoes is conducted in baby steps, micromillimeters. “What it is it that attracts me so to Wanada?” poses Léger, before proceeding as one would were one so-to-speak flexing: “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” People with high standards seem always to be disproportionately blind to the personal side of their personal conundrums (and I myself stand guilty as charged, lest there be doubt). I know why I love the character Wanada much more and with greater burning intensity than I could ever love the actress and director Barbara Loden, who would doubtlessly leave me speechless in an encounter, and not only because she’s long dead. The reason for this is that using methods not entirely clear on the face of it, Wanada emerges for me as a close personal friend or member of the extended family. My favourite thing about the motion picture Wanda is for sure the character Wanda. I grin wide at her on my widescreen television as she makes her messy hair do funny stuff when she swings her neck and her eye(s). Loden was a sophisticated fellow traveler of the New York underground and avant-garde circles. She studied the ‘method’ with the best teachers then plying that trade—it’s why we suspect that Loden is just as much Wanda at the craft services table or when laying her head down on the pillow at night as when the camera is rolling and the magic has to happen—but she also learned all D.A. Pennebaker had to teach about light and cheap 16mm equipment and guerrilla shooting methodologies. Shot primarily in the bleakest blue-grey pockets of industrial Pennsylvania on newsreel-grade film stock, is it any wonder that Wanda feels like the only film ever made in which a performer-director has deprogrammed themselves in order to become a pure and elemental alternative self and then gone and made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about that person? Of the weirdly adorable and often energetic Wanda and the ease with which she merges with or signs immediate binding contracts with choices so bad most of us probably haven’t previously considered that such choices might even present themselves to a person in the natural course of things; this hellbent and thoroughly confused friend named Wanda who I met at the movies somehow reminds me of the often divinely surgical Hélène Cixous and her mythopoetic synopsis of Cervantes and Don Quixote in Death Shall Be Dethroned: “one sleepwalks through one’s life right to the day one wakes up dead.” When in grave doubt regarding things once taken for granted it is best to shut up and listen, whether you are at church or at home doing dishes...and contemplating the hum of the furnace...
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