Wanda (Loden, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1 , 6.10pm
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here
when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This is screening as part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Southbank.
ICA introduction (from 2013 screening):
Barbara Loden will be known by many as the spouse and one-time muse
of director Elia Kazan, appearing in a string of small but vital roles
for his early ‘60s movies Wild River and Splendour In The Grass.
As her acting work slowly petered out, she took it upon herself to
rebel against the studio system by writing, directing and starring in a
16mm, independently shot drama that would exist entirely outside the
mainstream. Wanda explores the tragic life and
times of an itinerant Pennsylvanian wife and mother who decides to ditch
everything and hook up with an abusive petty criminal. This new
restoration by the UCLA Film and TV archive offers the chance to
discover Loden’s remarkable film anew, a harrowing masterpiece which
deserves a place among the classics of cinema.
Time Out review:
A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up
to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a
semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her
soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even
heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she
becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches
everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting
lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road,
being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its
refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's
good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing
else before her untimely death from cancer.
David Pirie
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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