Barbara Loden’s WANDA (1970) in 16mm with scholar Elena Gorfinkel

WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970, 102 min, 16mm)

Film scholar Dr. Elena Gorfinkel, Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, appears for a screening of an extremely rare 16mm Kodachrome original print of Barbara Loden’s masterpiece WANDA, subject of a new BFI Film Classics book.

In her new BFI Film Classics book, Elena Gorfinkel writes: “Barbara Loden’s WANDA is a single and singular film. Her only feature, the film is unlike any other, transcendent in its clarity of spirit, its harmony of form and idea. Loden herself summarised WANDA as a film about a woman who leaves her life as she knows it, ‘not knowing what she wants, but knowing what she doesn’t want.’ The titular character drifts across little-seen landscapes of deprivation in an unforgettable, grittily lensed America.”

Born in rural North Carolina in 1932, Loden fled to New York City at age 16, where she worked her way from model to comedienne to dramatic actor in the elite theatrical community of the Actors Studio. Throughout the 1960s, as she delivered a string of celebrated stage and screen performances (including a Tony-award-winning turn in Arthur Miller’s 1964 play After the Fall), Loden worked to develop the script that would become her first and only feature film as a director. Inspired by a newspaper article about Alma Malone, an Ohio woman convicted for her role in a failed bank robbery with a disturbed young man, Loden drew on her own upbringing and her acute sense of women’s economic and emotional desperation to create the titular character of Wanda Goronski, who Gorfinkel describes as “unmoor[ed] from motherhood, from family life, from law.” 

Shot documentary-style in 16mm in unglamorous locations across Pennsylvania, WANDA was released in 1971, but it would take decades for Loden’s harsh, bracingly realist, psychologically acute vision to gain recognition as one of the most remarkable works of American independent cinema. Gorfinkel’s new monographic study reflects on the film’s origins and contexts, its incomparable poetics, and its long path from obscurity to restoration and renown. 

For this presentation, Gorfinkel will appear in person to introduce a rare screening of the only known 16mm Kodachrome original print of the film, and to discuss her extensive research into Loden’s life and cinematic legacy.

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