Barbara Loden’s Recovered Voice: From Wanda’s Mutism to ‘Pensiveness’

by: Isabelle Labrouillère , October 5, 2023

Wanda by Barbara Loden is all the more complex to grasp because this film, despite its critical acclaim on its release in 1971, remained confidential for a long time and struggled to reach its public. As put by Bérénice Reynaud, it ‘was never picked up for national distribution in the USA, and was first released on DVD in the United States as late as 2006’ (2004: 223).

A woman’s movie about an unremarkable woman, it is true that Wanda goes against the codes of American filmmaking whether it be classic or New Hollywood cinema. Indeed, on the one hand, Loden rejects the idea of a fiction that would offer a resolution in the form of the character’s salvation and be a consolation piece on the Hollywood model. On the other hand, even if it adheres to the search for new forms of writing after the end of the star system, the film refuses the heroization and glamourisation of essentially male rebel figures promoted by New Hollywood, in flagship productions such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967) or Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper 1969). [1] Neither, though, does Wanda meet the expectations of the feminist movements which, at the time of Second Wave Feminism, crystallised around politically committed manifesto films and female figures likely to be set up as models. While Wanda was released at the same time as The Woman’s Film—a documentary demonstrating how ordinary women come together to fight against the compartmentalisation and exclusion engendered by domestic life and the workplace—Loden’s film does not present a programmatic demonstration on which a collective proposal of resistance could be articulated. We are indeed far from what Teresa de Lauretis calls the ‘eccentric subject’ (1990: 115-150), understood as a subject that ‘constitutes itself through a process of struggle and interpretation, a rewriting of the self’ (Arlaud 2007: 144). [2] Until the end, Loden’s heroine remains dependent on the dominant patriarchal model, despite her departure from her family home and the abandonment of her maternal duties at the opening of the movie. This surely explains why Wanda, despite the critical acclaim it received when released, is not mentioned in any of the major feminist books, such as Ann Kaplan’s Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, or Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema.

Orchestrated around a quasi-mute anti-heroine who is omnipresent on the screen, Loden’s film is a land of contrasts whose meanders seem to reflect the hesitant path of a protagonist described by critics (but also by Loden and Kazan themselves) as a ‘wand[a]/erer,’ a ‘floater’ and other ‘drifters.’ The daily rewriting of the script, the choice of non-professional actors (besides Barbara Loden and Michael Higgins), and the improvisation of the dialogue occasionally give the movie a disjointed aspect which, added to Wanda’s impenetrability, make it an atypical object that does not fit in any pre-made reading grid. All these elements may partly explain why critics like (the notorious) Chuck Kleinhans do not hesitate to write that Wanda ‘is one of the most depressing and nihilistic films [he has] ever seen,’ and that ‘[t]he form, the ‘documentariness’ of the whole makes [the film] completely flat and opaque’ (1974: 14). While we cannot but disagree with this statement, it is indicative of the discomfort the viewer feels with this elusive figure: ‘The Wanda on the screen is all we know, and from Loden’s view, all we need to know.’ (1974: 14) The ‘documentariness’ of the film which some critics have ‘loosely and erroneously labelled as cinema verité’ (Backman Rogers 2021: 22) can in fact be seen as a way of justifying an ideological reading of the film, not only by relying on the characteristics of the genre but also, by extension, by insisting on the unpreparedness or even amateurism of the film’s production, not to say its director.

These different factors account for the process of erasure undergone by a film that is a source of misunderstanding and disappointed expectations. More than any other, Loden’s film is indeed an unclassifiable piece torn between irreconcilable injunctions at the time of its release: on the one hand, the desire to see in Wanda a feminine or even feminist figure likely to be set up as a model or counter-model, and on the other, a desire for legibility incompatible with the incomprehension generated by an atypical character of irreducible singularity. Thus, it was not until decades later, following the re-release of the film thanks to Marguerite Duras and Isabelle Huppert, that Karina Longworth made the following observation: ‘Barely seen on initial release and virtually ignored for years, Wanda has since been recognised as a feminist landmark of counter-Hollywood film’ (2011).

For this reason, I first seek to demonstrate how most of the discourses around the film and its production conditions—from both critics and those who were involved in the movie—have contributed to the process of erasure undergone by Wanda. They have indeed promoted the idea that it expresses, through its heroine, a ‘nothingness of will’ (Delorme 2003: 71) and a singular voice, both antinomic to any dissenting project. These different discourses on the film (whether about its writing, shooting or reception) led, both at the time of its release and when it was rediscovered ten years later, to the concealment of the political dimension of the work in favour of a reading of the intimate which turned Wanda into a copy of Barbara Loden herself.

It is striking to note that what seems to be a biased conception of the character originates not only in the different discourses which Wanda was the object of at the time of its release and re-release, but also in Barbara Loden herself. Indeed, Loden’s confiscated speech finds itself transposed in the film through Wanda’s muteness and, in this sense, it seems necessary today to return to the history of the work and the ideology that underlies it in order to grasp the context prior to any re-understanding of the piece.

Deconstructing the axiom whereby the intimate is political, these different readings have promoted an approach to the film through the prism of the intimate, obscuring the relationship between Wanda’s individual history (like Loden’s) and the society in which she was born, despite Loden’s occasional efforts to reaffirm this connection. As Anna Backman Rogers, referring to the work of Julia Kristeva, rightly states, Wanda is a ‘depressed’ character who, as such, has lost her ability to speak and act in a world where, ‘[a]ctions [have] become unchained, signifiers no longer signify, [and where] the protagonist wanders in a state of shock or numbness, unable or unsure of how to respond to the landscape that surrounds her.’ (2021: 56-57) In my view, it is in this fundamental aspect of the work that lies the major difference between a character ‘out of step with an environment that surrounds [her] to the extent that it subsumes and overwhelms [her]’ (57) and a director denouncing the ravages of patriarchal consumer society (Loden 1971: 32).

For this reason, I also offer an analysis as close to the film as possible. [3] We will thus see that, neither model nor counter-model, Wanda is a film which challenges its spectators and their capacity to ‘observe, select, compare, and interpret,’ as per Jacques Rancière’s words in The Emancipated Spectator (2011: 13). The representation of the world in which Wanda evolves is thus in many ways reminiscent of Rancière’s ‘pensive image.’ The latter, by forcing the spectator to adopt an attitude of doubt and research, can become the place of a deep reflection on the world, because it avoids giving an interpretation through showing it (Houssa 2011: 34). The pensive image thus proposes an experience of ‘dissensus’ (Rancière), ‘an activated power of the unbound’ [4] (Wald Lasowski 2009: 9), which is a true political act. The spectator, now emancipated from the consensus of a pre-constructed imaginary, is thus confronted with a thought ‘that does not resemble it by any defined analogy’ (Rancière 2011: 122) within an encounter orchestrating the very conditions of its dialogic practice. The analysis of Barbara Loden’s film proposed in this article will therefore aim to bring to light the way in which, in the seminal sequence in particular, Wanda’s departure makes her an exemplary figure whose singularity is apprehended not only through her marginality—as is often the case— but with regard to a community in perdition with which she breaks. By revealing the dereliction of 1970s America’s ideals and deconstructing the spectators’ reference points, Wanda offers a truly political view of her time that is urgently needed today.

The complexity of Barbara Loden’s film is linked to a number of factors rooted in the very conditions of its creation. A return to the genetic history of the film thus reveals the insular nature of a piece organised around the marginality of its heroine. In the article ‘Barbara Loden Revisited,’ the director describes the genesis of the film in these terms:

I got the idea from a newspaper item years ago. In the Sunday Daily News, they used to have a feature called, ‘Did Justice Triumph?’ They had true stories about murders and criminals, and this was the story of a girl who was an accomplice to a bank robber. Though the robbery didn’t come off and she botched it up she was still sentenced to twenty years in prison with no appeal. And when the judge sentenced her, she thanked him. It seemed she was very glad to get the sentence. That’s what struck me in reading this account: why should this girl be glad to be put away? (Madison’s Women Media Collective 1974: 68)

As often pointed out, Wanda’s character finds its source in a news item in which two outcasts were convicted following a failed robbery. In ‘The True Crime Story Behind a 1970 Cult Feminist Classic,’ Sarah Weinman revisits the meeting of Alma Malone and Don Reisinger, the aliases of the two bank robbers whose adventure, published in an article on 27 March 1960, would inspire Barbara Loden’s characters Wanda Goronski and Mr Dennis (2017). Loden’s interest in the case shows from the outset her fascination not with the action—Alma Malone is doubly marginal because of her liminal position in society and the hold-up which she did not instigate—but with the character herself who is both insignificant (her actions seem unmotivated) and yet enigmatic. What fascinates the director is not so much Alma Malone’s action as her reaction. [5] As the above quotation shows, it is not so much the failed robbery that is Loden’s focus, but rather the disproportionate sanction Alma receives and her even more surprising indifference.

The film’s starting point is thus made up of the anecdotal (the news item), and, within the anecdotal, the residual, the barely perceptible reaction of a woman who seems so cut off from the society around her that she receives the punishment as an adventitious manifestation.

It is thus the non-event that becomes the very subject of the film, meaning an absence of dramatisation, which should be understood here as the rejection not only of action (‘what kind of girl could be that passive’), but also of its visible consequences on the scenography of faces and bodies. Barbara Loden chooses from the outset to make a movie about a heroine so anaesthetised (‘passive and dumb’) that she threatens the very principle of fiction (action as a narrative agent) and the classical strategies of spectator identification. This endangerment is coupled with a questioning by Loden, who does not intend to offer an elucidation of Alma Malone’s motivations—such as a classic Hollywood fiction would offer according to the principles of causality which regulate its universe—but instead exposes the contours of her catatonia without explaining it.

It is thus not surprising that some feminist critics, then in search of what would later be called ‘empowerment’ figures, ‘didn’t think that women like Wanda should exist… [It was] said films should be shown about women who are achieving things and setting examples’ (Loden in Madison’s Women Media Collective 1974: 68). Asked to justify her choice of heroine in the same interview, Loden develops an argument around the idea that Wanda’s filiation has less to do with Alma Malone (‘after all, Wanda isn’t really about that girl’) than with her personal life:

I know a lot of women are insulted by Wanda because it shows women in a bad way. … those are people who wouldn’t want me to exist, and they would say that I was not valid or that I shouldn’t be heard. (1974: 68)

In this quote, the director weaves an opposition between the voice of these feminist critics (‘those are people’) and her own (‘I shouldn’t be heard’) and as such, invalidates Wanda’s exemplary value by making her not so much a representative of women’s community (‘it shows women in a bad way’ according to critics) as the individual expression of Loden herself. In seeking to clarify the reasons for Wanda’s inertia through an autobiographical reading of her singularity, Loden’s voice once again struggles to make itself heard (‘I shouldn’t be heard’) and to combat the ideological discourse that seeks, and fails, to apply a pre-existing reading grid to the film.

Indeed, during the film’s release in 1971, there existed a sort of consensus coming from radically opposed voices which contributed to the diffusing of the movie’s disruptive power. It is easy to understand why the representatives of Second Wave Feminism, at a time when they were trying to elaborate their own elements of language in order to develop a common discourse, could not grasp this aporetic figure. As Elena Gorfinkel put it, Wanda ‘can only be described. Description is the only way to get close to this figure, this kernel of an idea, which is the entire world: a woman unmoored’ (2018: 1). This mute character—whose vagrancy creates spaces of unbinding, holes in the narrative fabric—thus escapes the power of language over the real, typical of the categorisation and conceptualisation proper to the feminist enterprise. An ‘unmoored’ being, a stranger to the fluidity of the word, resistant to the social model and counter-model, Wanda questions us through her silences. The very expression of dissensus through its ability to state hypotheses and to open up spaces of uncertainty, Wanda will nonetheless be the object of discourses that will contribute to locking up its expressive potentiality, not by ignoring it but by making it an object of commentaries in the service of a thinly veiled ideology.

It indeed seems vital for anyone wishing to propose a new reading of Wanda to adopt a historical/analytical approach (Kuhn 1994: 81). The analysis of the context of the piece thus allows us to better understand how certain ideological discourses produced around the film have contributed to warping its reception. As Annette Kuhn affirms, that is ‘the work of textual analysis to … [uncover] the work of ideology: precisely, that is, to render the invisible visible’ (1994: 79). However, it seems fruitful here to locate the markers of this ideology not only in the text, but within the paratexts and, more specifically, within what Gérard Genette has called ‘epitexts’ (1987: 346), which are the discourses and representations emitted around the work itself.

Thus, the analysis of the context of production and reception of the work, in line with a sociocritical approach, will aim to shed light on the way in which Wanda’s reception was shaped by those who accompanied Loden in making the film. However, my aim is not so much to examine the creative process itself in the manner of genetic criticism as the way in which one or more voices are articulated at the expense of another.

As a matter of fact, the explanations brought a posteriori to the film by those who were associated with its elaboration, have led not only to it being enclosed in a reductive ideological straitjacket but also to the theft of Loden’s authority on her own piece. Indeed, the testimonies given by Barbara Loden’s entourage, especially after her death, concerning the circumstances of the production, the shooting, and the movie itself, have contributed, on the one hand, to minimising her role as a filmmaker and, on the other, to reinforcing Wanda’s singularity and the insularity of the piece. These different prisms have thus participated in its being rendered invisible before, during, and especially after the film’s release.

After Barbara Loden’s death and partly thanks to Marguerite Duras’ enthusiasm about the film, the men who had been close to Loden or had participated in the film—particularly Elia Kazan and Nicholas Proferes—were given the opportunity to speak up. If their testimony is valuable, it is still biased and indirect, and is not exempt from contradictions. In ‘For Wanda,’ for example, Bérénice Reynaud notes that ‘[w]hile stressing ‘Wanda was Barbara’s film’ Nicholas Proferes explains that ‘it was really co-directed… Once in a while, she would look through the viewfinder. But most of the time she trusted me… I was responsible for the framing and the composition of 99% of the shots. Then we would look at the dailies together.’ (2002: 231). The ‘co-director’ of the film, then. Albeit one whom the credits place after Loden in its making—a first card reads: ‘Wanda a film by Barbara Loden’ followed by another reading ‘With Nicholas T. Proferes’ in the restored version—he seems to credit her only with directing the actors. Michael Higgins, who plays Mr Dennis in the movie, corroborates this: ‘Nick is greatly responsible for the movement of that picture. There are very few directors who do that. Of course, with a 35mm camera, you can’t do it’ (Reynaud 2002: 232).

Nicholas Proferes’ words discuss Loden’s work through the prism of her skills as an actress and echo her own comments which tend to erase her in her role as director by delegating to others the artistic responsibility for the piece. Thus, when she discusses the genesis of the film, she constantly emphasises her inexperience, to the point of refusing, at times, to set herself as an auctorial figure who has made deliberate artistic choices: ‘I didn’t know anything about the camera… I wasted money because I didn’t know what I was doing.’ She also affirms in the same vein: ‘Now I know why people make those so-called avant-garde films that jump around from one thing to another without any connection or purpose. Because it’s much easier’ (Reynaud 2002: 230).

The humility Loden demonstrates when she discusses her activity as a director seems to adhere to the undermining of her work which Elia Kazan has undertaken since the beginning of her career. Kazan, throughout numerous interviews, never ceases to oscillate between two contradictory attitudes: sometimes taking credit for Wanda, sometimes recognising his wife’s legitimacy in the project while seeking to diminish her merits. In the interview he gave to Marguerite Duras for Les cahiers du cinéma after Loden’s death, he asserted that he was the author of the first scenario: ‘It was me who wrote the first screenplay, as a favour, to give her something to work with … Then she rewrite [sic] it over and over again and it ended up being her screenplay instead of mine’ (2016: 13). The director, visibly frustrated by the effervescence created about Wanda by Marguerite Duras, did not cease to attenuate his wife’s artistic qualities, and erase the artist Barbara Loden in favour of the woman.

In fact, from the beginning of her acting career, Kazan undertook a true undermining of her work, by, on the one hand, sending Loden back to her modest origins so as to highlight the limited range of her acting, and, on the other, by locking her in a generic class, that of the working class, associating Loden to the category of ‘white trash’ in the words of Proferes. As an example: Kazan attributes the success of Loden, whom he directed in the stage adaptation of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, a role for which she received a Tony Award, more to his talents as a filmmaker and an actors’ director than to Loden’s mastery of her acting. He indeed says that he ‘was sure that Loden ‘fitted the role ‘because he ‘knew her past in detail, and … knew Marilyn’s personal history as well. They’d both been ‘floaters’ and come out of almost identical childhood experiences, which had left them neurotic, often desperate, and in passion difficult to control’ (Kazan 1988: 668). Kazan’s words aim to bring himself back to the centre of attention by making Loden a duplicate of Marilyn Monroe and her art as an actress the residual trace of a psychological dysfunction. This strategy, which is part of an attempt to recuperate Loden, has been set by Kazan from the very beginning of her career in the cinema and then in the theatre, at a time when, as his hidden mistress, she occupied a satellite position in a domestic and creative space of which he was the nodal point. This will to model, even fictionalise, the real—which culminated with the publication of his roman à clef The Arrangement in 1967—is a way for the director to hold control over his wife’s work and life by becoming the author of her biography.

Later on, in 1980, an identical tactic was used by Kazan when questioned by Marguerite Duras about Loden as a director. He described Wanda as follows:

In this movie, she plays a character we have in America, and who I suppose exists in France and everywhere that we call floating, a wanderer. … Barbara Loden understood this character very, very well because when she was young she was a bit like that, she would go here and there. She once told me a very sad thing; she told me: ‘I have always needed a man to protect me.’ I will say that most women in our society are familiar with this, understand this, need this, but are not honest enough to say it. (Duras & Kazan 2016: 12)

In the above quote, besides the unbearably paternalistic nature of the words, a primary element draws my attention. It concerns the way in which, once again, the director strives to neutralise Loden’s performance by insisting on the limited range of her acting. According to him, Loden, conditioned by her background, can only portray drifters, no matter what point of her career she is in, whether in front of or behind the camera. Kazan once more endeavours to draw a direct line between the individual and the actress, as if to better erase the aesthetic work of the persona, the art/ifice inherent ‘in the production of art’ (Álvarez López & Martin 2016: 44). Clearly, this conception of acting can be read in the light of the teachings of the Actor’s Studio and the Method which ‘expected the actor to bring into play his affective memory in order to locate everything in his past and his inner experience that could be of use to his character’ (Ciment 2010: XII-XIII). However, Kazan considers neither the actress’s work of composition, nor the operation of distancing and reappropriation that the mise-en-scène implies. His testimony is part of a systematic invalidation of Loden’s work by ignoring the mechanisms of plastic transposition and resilience that she uses to transfer her story to the screen.

From perfectly honed elements of discourse, Kazan thus fashions, like Pygmalion, an image of Loden that makes her an actress incapable of proposing a score, a performance which would not be indexed on her own reality, all while associating her with an archetype—that of the wanderer which he reminds is a universal figure (‘a character we have in America, and who I suppose exists in France and everywhere’). This discourse, riddled with contradictions, insists on the autobiographical character of a singular work and composition which would make Wanda a cinematic extension of Loden, while denying the individuality of the character which he identifies with a generic category. Kazan’s words can thus be read through the lens of what Ruth Amossy calls ‘stereotyping,’ meaning ‘the activity that cuts out or identifies, in the proliferation of reality or text, a fixed collective model’ (Amossy 1991: 21). [6] Throughout the interviews, Kazan develops a whole rhetoric aimed at enlightening Loden’s journey with his expertise as director and privileged witness, in order to make Wanda a mirror image of Loden, confining the latter to a ‘pre-fabricated image,’ a ‘standardised object’ (Amossy 1991: 21). Now, Kazan will not cease to repeat this reading strategy, as when he evokes the changes in Loden following the Venice Critics’ Prize:

When I first met her, she had little choice but to depend on her sexual appeal. But after Wanda she no longer needed to be that way, no longer wore clothes that dramatised her lure, no longer came on as a frail, uncertain woman who depended on men who had the power… I realised I was losing her, but I was also losing interest in her struggle … She was careless about managing the house, let it fall apart, and I am an old-fashioned man. (1988: 794)

In these words, Kazan redirects and deflects the discussion about his wife’s film by showing not how Loden may have been a ‘pioneer female filmmaker’ (Reynaud 2002: 231), but how her emancipation from the male gaze undermined her image as a woman (‘no longer came on as a frail, uncertain woman’) and her status as mistress of the house (‘She was careless about managing the house’). This old-fashioned man, in his own words, revives the patriarchal ideology of the society of the time, as he himself expressed in his own works. [7] The fact that Kazan takes up almost verbatim the terms used in court by Wanda’s husband to denounce his wife’s attitude and obtain a divorce at her expense is indeed remarkable here. [8] As Annette Kuhn reminds us in Women’s Pictures, ‘Female characters in films might be considered in terms of roles and stereotypes, for example, and stereotyped women’s roles—the vamp, the girl next door, the mother and so on—assessed according to their ‘truthfulness,’ the extent to which they either reflected, or constituted a smoothing over of, contradictions and conflicts of the ‘real’ lives of women.’ (1994: 73) Barbara Loden, whom Kazan describes as incapable of playing against type, unfit for a compositional role, is nevertheless portrayed here as ‘performing gender’ (Butler 1999: 15) before renouncing it (‘no longer wore clothes that dramatised her lure’). Such attitude on her part thus reflects her momentary mobilisation of imitation strategies of a norm in the composition of a persona. While Kazan locks her in the sclerotic compartmentalisation of type, his words involuntarily construct the image of an elusive and labile personality proving, in the words of Judith Butler, that reality is not as fixed as we usually think (2005: 15).

Hence, at the very moment Loden escapes him—whereas Wanda is a figure ‘never resolved, never retrievable, who defies all reduction’ (Delorme 1975: 71) —Kazan claims to dissolve her character’s irrefragable mystery by making her movie a film à clef. Even Chuck Kleinhans unwittingly acknowledges the experimental nature of the narrative by affirming that ‘the film maker hides her analysis behind the structuring of the film’ (1974: 14). Where Loden sees in ‘filmic representation … a way to express the “unspoken of”’ (Reynaud 2002: 231), Kazan, a fervent representative of Hollywood cinema, constructs a classical narrative consisting of restoring a causal relationship between the discontinuous events of the movie. He goes even further: instead of making the artist a key to the character, he operates a radical reversal by making the character the key to understanding the artist.

Unfortunately, Loden’s erasure as an actress and director will, for diametrically opposed reasons, be nurtured by voices other than her husband’s. For instance, Marguerite Duras pays tribute to Wanda’s miracle in these terms: ‘The miracle for me isn’t in the acting. It’s that she seems even more herself in the movie, so it seems to me—I didn’t know her—than she must have been in life’ (Duras & Kazan 2016: 12, italics mine). She also adds in the same sense: ‘Usually there is a distance between the representation and the text, and the subject, and the action. Here, this distance is entirely cancelled—there is an immediate and definitive coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.’ (Delorme 2003: 71, italics mine). Even Nathalie Léger’s compelling essay Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden (2012) reaffirms the correspondence between the character and the author. As Adèle Cassigneul puts it, ‘[i]n Léger’s autofictitious reading-writing of the film, Loden disappears into Wanda and Wanda-who-is-Barbara becomes Miss None, an empty, see-through creature’ (2022). [9]

These different perspectives, which support an autobiographical reading of the work, tend to make Wanda a demonetized double of Loden and proceed to the con/fusion between the individual and the filmic persona. Even though in an interview with Michel Ciment, Loden dissociates herself from her heroine—’Wanda does not have the same data as me. … She uses the means she can. I used others’ (Ciment 1975: 3)—she will tend to corroborate this reading as when she tells the Los Angeles Times: ‘I used to be a lot like that, … I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become’ (Weinman 2017).

It can therefore be suggested that the convergence of these different voices (Kazan’s, Proferes,’ Higgins,’ Duras’ and Loden’s own), which undermine the Loden-actress-director relation in favour of a Loden-Wanda fusion, partly explains the silence the film has long been condemned to. The paratexts produced on the movie have had the effect not only of never separating the woman from the artist, but also, in Kazan’s case, of crossing out and erasing the aesthetic gesture under the shadow of a subject which would only have the right to be cited as fictionalised and shaped by his discourse. Indeed, the director’s goal is not to focus on Loden’s status as a woman to demonstrate how, as such, her cinema ‘[does] not merely run parallel to dominant cinema, but take[s] a reactive stance that is oppositional in terms of form, content, production and exhibition … as forms of feminist opposition to mainstream filmmaking’ (Hollinger 2021: 67). Described as seeking the endorsement of the male gaze, Barbara Loden is deprived of the status of director committed to new modalities of writing in opposition to the dominant ideology. It is thus not only in ‘Wanda’s narrative space … [that] men cast a giant shadow’ (Reynaud 226), it is also within the context of the film as well as the artistic and domestic space which Loden occupies.

All these elements allow us to better understand the contours of the obliteration which Wanda was subjected to from the moment of its release. The feminist movement of the 1970s—then in search of positive figures likely to unite around a common struggle—accused Barbara Loden of representing a ‘passive’ woman whose entire life remained subordinate to the male gaze and men’s actions. One might even think that, despite the invaluable assistance of Marguerite Duras in the distribution of the film, the recognition of a filiation between Wanda, Loden, and Duras herself only increased the insularity of the work and its heroine; ‘Wanda is a film about someone,’ as Duras said to Kazan (2003: 75). However, more than any other, Kazan’s comments mobilise a reading matrix destined not so much to measure Wanda by the yardstick of Loden, but Loden by the yardstick of Wanda. Kazan, while speaking up, forces Loden into silence, and this silence, in the movie as in life, ‘doesn’t leave room for other formulations to emerge’ (Kaplan 1990: 94).

This is why it seems urgent to return to the film itself to show that, if Wanda herself cannot be reduced to a typology, Barbara Loden invites us, through her character’s non-vectorised path, to engage in a reflection about the world. Indeed, it would be wrong, according to me, to think that Wanda’s opacity and the absence of project that characterises her, disqualify the political reach of Loden’s film.

We can thus argue that the director proposes, with Wanda, a representation of the real which ‘avoids giving an interpretation by showing it’ (Houssa 2011: 34), in the manner of Jacques Rancière’s pensive image. If, as we believe, the intimate is political in Wanda, it is essential to ‘hollow out the seeming obviousness, the seeming immediacy’ of the image ‘from within’ (Rancière 2001: 124), in the manner of the emancipated spectator facing the pensive image. Thus, from the opening sequence in the movie, which is the action trigger par excellence, the issue seems to lie more in the ‘description’ than in the ‘narration’ (Rancière 2011: 123) or, to be more exact, in the close weaving between the micro-events succeeding on the screen and what is played out in the background. From the very first shots, the director sketches out the decaying community spaces that form the projected shadow of the patriarchal society Wanda intends to escape from.

When Loden pans her camera from right to left before focusing on the modest house where Wanda’s sister’s family resides (her husband, their two kids, and, seemingly, her mother-in-law), she offers a glimpse of two communities: the outer one of workers, operating excavators loaded with tons of coal, and the inner one of housewives strongly anchored to the domestic perimeter. The fixed, discontinuous shots which, in the house, follow the fluid movement of the pan shot sweeping through the quarry, set up the modalities of a discourse where isolated women are assigned residence.

If the men look like paltry versions of Sisyphus in the immensity of the slag heap, they are nonetheless a body, framed in movement within long shots: their activity opens up the frame, stretches the shooting scale and induces the camera to move, even if the limited area of the quarry only opens up to the white opacity of the sky. Once inside, the community of workers gives way to the nuclear family enlarged by the presence of Wanda and an old lady. The sequence thus disseminates a series of discreet signs leading us to believe that its members aspire to gather around common values or even ideals.

Thus, the first shot inside the house shows us an elderly woman praying the rosary in front of a kind of votive altar on which are placed, beside two photos set up as a diptych representing a soldier in uniform, a cross and red candles. The next shot, which shows us this woman from a different angle through a connecting door separating the room from a bedroom, reveals an American flag sticker, on one of the French windowpanes. In a few quasi-impressionist touches, the sequence sketches the story of a Catholic family, probably immigrant (Wanda’s last name is Goronski, but we do not know her sister’s), which has adopted the patriotic values promoted by American society. In appearance, this family presents all the defining signs of a community understood as ‘a unified body of individuals,’ for instance, ‘people with common interests living in a particular area’ ‘or a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.’ [10]

However, these religious symbols, much like the emblems of American society spread out here and there, appear from the outset to be demonetised signs leading to the alienation of individuals. In the first shot, the grandmother facing the window keeps praying with the rosary before a horizon obscured by mountains of coal. In the next shot, while her silhouette is captured in the doorway, her face disappears behind the American flag sticker stuck to the door tile. By obscuring the woman’s head, the mise-en-scène erases her face, which, Jacques Aumont reminds us, is the seat of identity (1992: 15). These different elements show to what extent the American society of the 1970s is a space of unbinding which, while erecting symbols intended to promote the illusion of a common ideology (around the family, the fatherland or religion for instance) in the service of a white patriarchal consumer society, relies on the atomisation of its most fragile members. From the opening sequence, by locating this space of decay within the average American family, Barbara Loden gives a scathing rebuttal to Elia Kazan’s attempt to make the drifter community a phenomenon inherent to all human society [11] rather than a symptom, an ineluctable outcome of white, patriarchal capitalist societies. As Anna Backman Rogers states: ‘To choose to film the everyday … is, for [Loden], to render the personal as political: to examine a system that functions through cycles of consumption and disposal by attending carefully to what and who is discarded’ (2021: 43).

Here, indeed, the common interest is expressed at the cost of the individual and of women in particular. In the span of a few shots, Loden’s camera discloses the domestic space shared by these women who only seem to co-exist. Far from standing together, the women evolve in a restricted space in which their functions are exercised: prayer and the managing of the elders for the grandmother—seemingly a widow—in the couple’s care, the bedroom, and the kitchen for her sister. As for Wanda, now useless after having deserted her home, she must be content with occupying the sofa by the front door, a place of circulation which her temporary installation contravenes. The only exchange (of glances and words) we witness happens between Wanda and her sister and is conditioned by the husband’s wish to see Wanda leave their home even though he addresses his wife in total denial of her sister’s presence in the adjacent room.

The filmic device thus sketches from the start the outline of a paradoxical space: even though all the rooms communicate—as indicated in each new shot by the repetition of a fragment of the previous shot—the house, while being a place of promiscuity, is presented as a place of division and obliteration. The repetition of objects and bodies from one shot to the next thus produces an effect of visual repletion echoed by the auditory saturation which the omnipresence of the noisy activity of the quarry off-screen and the cries of a baby inside produce. Yet, in this house with cardboard walls, while no intimacy seems possible (the communication doors are French windows that stay open and no separation isolates the living room in which Wanda sleeps), each individual remains withdrawn.

If there is a link between these women whom we discover almost in a row, one after the other, it is that of inscription in a lineage resembling predestination. Thus, the thread unravelled by the camera between them establishes a kind a heredity, taking us from the oldest to the youngest: each being destined to espouse the life of the previous one, she is a minimal declination of the other. In this respect, the shot which shows Wanda, at the end of the sequence, looking out of the window is all the more striking as it is the almost exact repetition of the reverse shot revealing the quarry which the old woman in the opening blankly stares at. Same scale of shooting, same trucks hauling coal, same mountains of coal blocking the horizon. The filmic device, through the comparison of these two shots, places Wanda in the steps of the previous generations in a ‘transformation from the banal into the impersonal’ (Rancière 2011: 124). By ‘stitching up’ the shots, the actions and the bodies within the same scene and space, the editing weaves the metaphor of women’s imprisonment in the grip of deindividuation. As the ironic presence of patriotic symbols already indicates, the institutional and social body dissolves the individual body into anonymity.

Thus, in the sequence, the two women we meet before Wanda will never be named, and the viewer is forced to infer, with the help of a few carefully distilled markers (such as age, activity, or the location of the person in the house), who they are or might be, and what connects them. Framed in close shots, their bodies are constantly occulted. The first, quasi-catatonic, is only seen in profile, her body riveted to her seat and her gaze to the window. If the close shot initially shows her absent from herself, the over-framing effect produced by her capture through the French window masks her body and literally dis/figures her. As for the second woman, worn out by short nights and thankless tasks, she is first seen from behind, to the point that the viewer is led to wonder if this is not Wanda herself. When she finally stands up, her fettered mother’s body, which only moves with the weight of her baby, is slightly reframed in still shots or in constrained movements within a limited space that shows her confinement.

These two women are thus defined only by the environment and the objects which surround them—the rosary and the child climbing onto her lap for the grandmother, the baby, and the domestic appliances (fridge, stove) for the mother—which is enough to exhaust their function and meaning in the film. The sequence thus disseminates a whole succession of signs subjected to the spectator’s vigilant eye. The word ‘HOLD’ [12] inscribed in capital letters on the fridge door instructs us to handle the broken door with care, while seeming to comment ironically on the family’s state of disrepair. The fridge, which risks spilling its contents at any moment (it must be held to be contained) or coming apart at any wrong movement, epitomizes this family on the verge of breaking up, whose members are isolated within the space they occupy, as in a series of fixed shots. Within this dislocated space, the polysemy of the word ‘hold’ seems to be diffracted so as to radiate the polyphony of the sequence. If it is impossible to come together (‘hold together’), then perhaps the only way out is to resist (‘hold’).

However, all escape is unthinkable here for these two women (the grandmother and Wanda’s sister), as it would imply a shift from an identity indexed only on their function within the collective to an individualised existence. Indeed, these women, reduced to a few succinct defining traits, are akin to archetypes (the mother, the widow, the housewife) who escape stereotyping only because they are shown through the raw light of Loden’s camera, as opposed to Hollywood glamour. In this respect, they are not unrelated to the type in which ‘the individual joins the general … [within an] artistic representation that intends to provide a knowledge about society’ (Amossy 1989: 113-114). Nevertheless, unlike the type ‘through which a whole human category is defined’ (Amossy 1989: 113), the point here is not so much to define the human than show its limits. The fiction reduces the women to their status as representatives of a class to better signify that they are not embodied entities with a singular life. To this end, the fiction glosses over their bodies: these women who are no/bodies logically have no body.

In this sequence indeed, the human dissolves within the group without being part of a community: if the individuals are chained in a collective that de-subjectifies them, it is that the subjects—and by this we mean the women—much like the bodies, are interchangeable. Thus, when we see Wanda’s sister for the first time, the camera captures her in a fixed shot, from behind, her back bent forward, as if folded into herself, sitting among the crumpled sheets of the bed. The viewer is hence led to believe this is Wanda herself before the following shots deny it. This confusion between the two bodies and identities seems to be a mere detail: it only lasts for a moment and will not be narrativised afterwards. However, this troubled reality highlights both the norm and its rejection: this dislocation of identity, this gap between this body-matrix and Wanda’s body shows, through this confrontation, what she no longer is.

It is thus not surprising to note that the introduction of Wanda, who only aspires to be some/body, manifests itself by breaking with the staging and the scenography proposed until then. A blind spot in a society which dis/considers her—that is, according to the Latin etymology of the word, refuses to look at her and take notice of her—Wanda seems to want to withdraw from the gaze of a world that has no use for her. This duplication of the body (we think we see one woman when it is another) makes Wanda’s body a shadow, an ectoplasm detached from this primary community, that of housewives and mothers defined by their function.

Yet, hidden behind the whiteness of the sheet/shroud, Wanda’s body, concealed at first, seems no less surplus. Her presence diverts the function of objects and places: she is too big for the couch, which is unfit for her, and triggers the hasty departure of the exasperated husband. Wanda is a centrifugal force: unable to fade into her role as a mother and wife, unable to aggregate to the core of the nuclear family (itself a symptom of white patriarchal society), she creates a vacuum around her. Yet, this vacuum is only temporary: a mere cog in the family and social machinery, Wanda is soon replaced.

Thus, the interchangeability of individuals, first sketched out metaphorically through the juxtaposition of shots showing Wanda and her sister, is literalised in the following sequence set in the courthouse. We indeed discover that another woman has already replaced her with her husband, her children, and even her in-laws. As her husband explains, the children need a mother, and the declaration of divorce will allow this substitute mother to marry and become a mother in turn. Confronted with the unabashed rhetoric of a husband sure of his rights and prerogatives, Wanda, who is late at the hearing [13], has trouble crossing the fence that separates the public from the courtroom which three male figures (the judge, the husband, and the clerk) have annexed. Indeed, in Wanda, only men are likely to form a community, and as shown by the trickle of voice that escapes from Wanda’s mouth in court (the judge makes her repeat her statement), on the rare occasions when women are asked to speak, their voices remain inaudible. As Elena Gorfinkel notes: ‘[w]hen placed alongside feminist consciousness-raising documentaries of the era in which women speak their oppression and their coming-into-knowledge, Wanda makes clear that such self-scripting is itself a privilege that not every woman can afford.’ (2019)

Throughout these pages, I have aimed to propose a rereading of Wanda in the light not only of the comments and reviews which accompanied its release, but also of the various paratexts (Loden’s filmography, writings, and statements by Kazan, Proferes, Higgins and Duras on the movie and the actress), which have punctuated the life of the actress-director. Through the ideology that pervades them, I have attempted to uncover the seeds of doxa according to which Barbara Loden would propose through Wanda a variation of herself, or even, according to Kazan, would reveal herself through her character. To turn Wanda into a film à clef indeed amounts to eclipsing not only the actress’ artistic composition, but also the aesthetic strategies that Loden’s mise-en-scène implies.

Kazan’s testimonies thus lead Loden’s work to the shores of imitation and mimesis, understood, in a Platonic conception of art, not as a space of creation, but as a copy and double of the real (double of Loden’s personality and the environment she belonged to within an identical reproduction of her experience). However, it is in this separation between paratext and text, but also in the zone of indeterminacy which unfolds between what Loden may have had in mind and what the viewer grasps in the image, that is situated, according to me, the pensiveness of the film itself. As Jacques Rancière reminds us:

Pensiveness thus refers to a condition that is indeterminately between the active and the passive. The indeterminacy problematizes the gap that I have tried to signal elsewhere between two ideas of the image: the common notion of the image as duplicate of a thing and the image conceived as artistic operation. (Rancière 2011: 107)

Indeed, in Wanda, when the camera moves between the faces and bodies absorbed by the background in the opening sequence, Barbara Loden presents us less with a real being than an ‘ordinary being, whose identity is unimportant, and who hides her thoughts in offering up her face,’ according to Rancière’s principle of ‘dis-appropriate similarity’ (2011: 116). This obliteration of the female body and subject is subsequently repeated through the fragmented and split bodies of the female workers in the textile factory (Labrouillère 2018: 121) or the diner’s waitress—whose face is entrenched from the image by the glass pane of her counter—handing ice cream to Wanda who has just been ejected from her one-night lover’s car. The repeated fragmentation of women’s bodies in Wanda installs at the heart of the image the alienating and disruptive force of an America perceived less as a patchwork than a space of unbinding where the very idea of federating around common aspirations remains unthinkable for a whole fringe of the population. Through seemingly innocuous shots and barely outlined gestures, Barbara Loden’s Wanda represents the mute communion of downtrodden women and brings to a climax the expression of the political through the intimate, likely to make us emancipated spect/actors.

Notes:

[1] Ruby Melton’s article, ‘Barbara Loden on Wanda: ‘An Environment that Is Overwhelmingly Ugly and Destructive,’ provides a useful reference on this issue, as does Fjoralba Miraka’s article, ‘Gender, Genre, and Class Politics in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970).’

[2] Translation mine.

[3] In the second part of Still Life, Anna Backman Rogers provides a shot-by-shot reading of Wanda which will provide vital material for future scholars (65-135). Like her, my research into the film made me realise the urgent need to do justice to women’s films by analysing them as closely as possible.

[4] Translation mine.

[5] For a detailed analysis of Wanda as a character not of action but of reaction, see Labrouillère 2018: 126-128.

[6] All statements in French which have not been published in English are translated by the author of the article.

[7] This indeed brings to mind the character of Gwen that Barbara Loden played in Splendor in the Grass (1961), the brazen young sister of the too-wise Warren Beatty, crushed by paternal domination.

[8] ‘She don’t care about anything. She is a lousy wife, she’s always bumming around, drinking. … she’s lying around on the couch, kids are dirty, there’s diapers on the floor.’

[9] Anna Backman Rogers also counters this fallacious association by entitling one of her chapters: ‘On Wanda, Who is not Barbara,’ pp. 36-39.

[10] Community https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community (last accessed 23 August 2021).

[11] ‘In this movie she plays a character we have in America, and who I suppose exists in France and everywhere, that we call floating, a wanderer. A woman who floats on the surface of society, drifting here or there, with the currents’ (Duras & Kazan 2016).

[12] The word ‘HOLD’ may also suggest ‘a possibly second-hand purchase’ as Backman Rogers notes (p. 68).

[13] It seems important to remind here that in 1970, women were not allowed to buy a car without the presence of a man, even if Wanda, who knows how to drive, evidently does not have the means to make a loan. It is only in 1974 that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passes in the US. Until then, banks required single, widowed, or divorced women to bring a man along to co-sign any credit application, regardless of their income.