Pioneer Women: The Educational Films of Barbara Loden & Joan Micklin Silver

After completing WANDA in 1970, Barbara Loden wrote scripts for several further films, including an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening. While she was unable to find funding for a second feature before her untimely death in 1980, she completed two short narrative films for the Learning Corporation of America in 1975, THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE and THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER. These compact works, made primarily for classroom exhibition, explore themes of loneliness, gendered labor, and adolescence with the same emotional and formal precision that defines her masterpiece. 

For THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE, Loden worked with screenwriter Joan Micklin Silver, herself a director whose LCA shorts paved the way for an extraordinary streak of features that began with her 1975 landmark HESTER STREET. Like Loden, Silver succeeded in infusing educational shorts like THE CASE OF THE ELEVATOR DUCK and THE FUR COAT CLUB with her unmistakable sensibility, marked by an ebullient sense of humor and a distinctive feeling for place. These four shorts, screened together in original 16mm prints, demonstrate how resourceful and inspired women filmmakers looked outside the restrictive boundaries of commercial cinema to craft ingenious and personal films in the 1970s.

Before the screening, film scholar Dr. Elena Gorfinkel will offer an introduction that explores Loden’s post-WANDA career, situating Loden and Silver’s short films within the contexts of non-theatrical and feminist filmmaking in the era.

Films Screened:

THE FRONTIER EXPERIENCE (Barbara Loden, 1975, 25 min, 16mm from Chicago Film Archives)

THE CASE OF THE ELEVATOR DUCK (Joan Micklin Silver, 1974, 17 min, 16mm from Chicago Film Archives)

THE FUR COAT CLUB (Joan Micklin Silver, 1973, 18 min, 16mm from AV Geeks)

THE BOY WHO LIKED DEER (Barbara Loden, 1974, 19 min, 16mm from Chicago Film Society)

About the speaker:

Elena Gorfinkel is a film scholar and critic based in London. She is the author/editor of five books, most recently Wanda (Bloomsbury/BFI Film Classics, 2025); and The Prop, with John David Rhodes (Fordham, 2025). Her research concerns marginal and independent cinemas, including adult, experimental, & underground film, particularly from the 1960s to the present.
She is Reader in Film Studies at King's College London. Prior to King's, she was Associate Professor of Art History & Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University.

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